Labour of love…

I do think that cooking is an art, a labour of love – something one would do with a whole lot of passion and patience…and once all is done, one would sit back and enjoy looking at the end result and feeling pleased when the fruit of one’s labour is well-received and appreciated. Unfortunately, I do not think I fall into that category as most of the time, I would not bother about the ingredients – just see what I have in the fridge or the pantry and do it chin-chai chin-chai (anyhow) as long as I get to eat in a jiffy.

Well, I still had some of the pastry left in the freezer from that near disaster that, fortunately, did not turn out too badly in the end. I did use a bit more to make some pies with just cheese and ham and they were pretty good and that day, I decided to use the rest to try and make some curry puffs. For the uninitiated, if you’ve never tried making shortcrust pastry, the steps and photos are here in this post that I shared a long time ago. For one thing, I do think that if you use chilled egg, diluted with a bit of cold water, the pastry would be more crumbly – I would prefer that…and cutting down just a little bit on the flour would help somewhat.

For the filling, I fried one Bombay onion, peeled and chopped till fine, in a bit of oil and then added one stalk of serai (lemon grass), bruised (which I removed after cooking) and two sprigs of curry leaves, removed from the stems and cut into fine strips. Then I put in the potatoes, peeled and cut into tiny cubes…and pre-boiled to shorten the cooking time and finally, I added a can of tuna curry. Seeing that one can was not quite enough and I did not want to open another can, I added a spoonful or two of curry powder to add to the fragrance and taste. This was what I got in the end…

I also boiled two eggs and cut them into wedges for use.

Having done that, I took a bit of the pastry and rolled it out and placed it in a small pie dish. I put in a bit of the filling and the egg on one half of the pastry…

…and then I folded it and pressed the edges together and twisted it diagonally to seal…

Of course this was my first time and I was not good at it (plus I had a nasty fall a week ago and sprained my wrist and it did hurt quite a bit!!!). In fact, I thought we had the plastic mould in the house (my cousin says her son calls it denture holder) and when I rummaged through the drawers, I found it…but it turned out to be an egg slicer!!! *face palm* That was why I had to do it manually and considering that I had not done it before, I would say that it turned out rather well…

However, I felt that was slow and tedious and I was running out of patience so I decided to just do the rest without using the pie dish and of course, they all came out in different sizes…

…though the shapes did remain quite consistent. In my hurry, I also did not bother to egg-wash the top nicely and that explains the rather unsightly patches of gold on them.

My girl tried one first and she said it was very nice – the pastry was good and the filling too. I took one myself to see…

…and yes, it was good. I would think it would be nicer with beef though as it had a bit of that taste that one would get in sardine rolls or puffs which I am not particularly fond of and thank goodness I did not use another can of the tuna.

Well, I can always make some more and when that happens, I do hope I would have enough self-control to do it all slowly and properly but anyway, despite all that has been said about them, I would think that, at least, mine did look a bit nicer than the ones sold at one of the bakeries here…

*Archive photo*

Right or not? LOL!