9 minute read
Lokshen Kugel
Samosa
Samosa is a deep-fried pastry snack stuffed with potato and peas or mixed vegetables in a triangle shape. It is very popular in all parts of India, and in Middle Eastern and Asian countries. It originated from the Middle East and was brought to India by the merchants. It’s usually served with mint, coriander, and a sweet tamarind sauce or chutney.
Preparation Time: 40 minutes Cooking Time: 40 minutes Serves: 4–5
Dough
Ingredients
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2 cups all-purpose flour (maida) • 1 tsp kalonji (black cumin) • ¼ tsp salt • 4 tbs oil • water to knead the dough, around 6 tbsp
Method
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4. Take a large bowl, add flour, kalonji/black cumin seeds, salt and mix well. Add oil to it and start mixing with your hand until the oil is well incorporated into the flour. After 3–4 minutes of mixing, add water little by little to form the dough. Cover the dough with a moist cloth and let it rest for 30–40 minutes.
Filling
Ingredients
500–550g potatoes 2 tbsp oil 1 tsp cumin seeds 1 tsp fennel seeds 2 tsp coriander seeds, crushed 1 green chilli, chopped ½ cup green peas or mixed vegetables 1 tsp coriander powder
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½ tsp garam masala • ½ tsp dried mango powder • ¼ tsp red chilli powder • ¾ tsp salt, or to taste • 1 litre cooking/sunflower oil for deep frying
Method
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6. Boil the potatoes until done and peel the skin when they are cold. Mash the potatoes in a bowl and keep them aside. Take a pan and heat on medium flame. Add 2 tablespoons of oil when the pan is hot, add the cumin seeds, crushed coriander seeds and fennel seeds. Add the green chilli after few seconds. Add the boiled potato and cooked peas to the pan and mix everything together. Add the rest of the spices (coriander powder, dry mango powder, garam masala, chilli powder, etc.), salt, and combine all together. Make small dough balls of the same size. Roll one dough ball into a circle or oval shape and then cut into two equal parts using a knife. Take one part and apply some water on the edge to form a nice glue. Make a cone by joining the edges together and now fill the cone with potato and peas filling. Keep some space to seal the cone and make a triangle shape. Add cooking/sunflower oil into the pan for deep frying. Remember to keep the oil at a low heat to make the samosa crispy. Keep the fried samosa on kitchen towel to remove excess oil.
About Rajiv
“My name is Rajiv Prasad and I work as an IT Engineer in Belfast. I was born and brought up in the northeastern part of India. After completing my post-graduate education in computer science, I worked in different cities of India for two or three years. Travelling is my hobby and I wanted to travel the world for either a new job opportunity or for holidays. I have travelled to twenty-one states of India from north to south, east to west.”
In 2008, I got the opportunity to visit Tokyo, Japan for work. I was so excited as it was my first international trip. I went back to India and again got a new opportunity to work in Singapore with a different company. I visited Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia between 2010 and 2014.
I finally got another job opportunity in Belfast in 2014 and moved here with my family. Initially, it felt lonely and boring; it was new weather for us and we didn’t have many friends here. Slowly, we started making new friends and got together with them at the weekends, cooking food and playing games. After a few months of staying here, we decided to make Belfast our new home and we settled here.
I also love to take part in cultural events and raise funds for charity. A few of the events where I have participated are Belfast Rath Yatra, Jaipur Literature Festival, Durga Puja, Diwali, and The Big Lunch. During the COVID lockdown I ran a number of online Zoom events for festivals and cultural events with my technical skills.
The best part of Belfast is its size. We save lots of travel time, whether you want to go for work or shopping. The cost of living is also very low compared to other cities. Local people are very welcoming, helpful and friendly. The hospitality in every sector is awesome. There are employees from forty nationalities working at my Belfast workplace. This shows how multicultural Belfast is.
I really enjoyed the programme with PRONI. It was nice to meet people from different cultures and countries, and to learn about what PRONI does through their hard work to archive the records for Northern Ireland.
>> Cooking playlist
My favourite songs are from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, from Bollywood movies. It’s very hard to select five songs for a playlist and there are many songs by Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, and A.R Rehman which are on my all-time favourite list.
‘Kal Ho Naa Ho’ (from the movie Kal Ho Naa Ho) ‘Sauda Khara Khara’ (from the movie Good News) ‘Aisa Sama Na Hota’ by Lata Mangeshkar ‘Jiya Jale’ by Lata Mangeshkar (from the movie Dil Se) ‘Bahon Ke Darmiyan’ by Alka Yagnik, Hariharan
Moqueca de camarão
BRAZIL | LAURA AGUIAR
This is one of my favourite Brazilian dishes: moqueca de camarão (shrimp coconut stew). Brazilian cuisine is very varied and has been mostly influenced by our Portuguese colonisers, Italian immigrants, and African slaves.
Moqueca is a non-spicy curry dish and there are different types. It’s made with seafood, tomatoes, garlic, onion, coconut milk, dendê palm oil, and coriander, and is usually accompanied by rice and farofa (cassava root flour). The one I make is with shrimp and on the day I made it, the sun was shining so nicely that it made me feel much closer to home. You can make it vegan by replacing the seafood with other veggies.
Cooking Time: 40–50 minutes Serves: 8
Ingredients
½ kg shrimp 1 lime 2 onions, chopped 3 garlic cloves 1 red pepper 1 green pepper 4 tomatoes, chopped • 4 tbsp olive oil • coriander • parsley • paprika powder (I used a little bit of this to replace dendê oil as I couldn’t find it in Belfast) • salt and black pepper • 300ml (1 can) coconut milk
Method
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5. Coat the shrimp with lime juice, salt, and pepper, and let it sit in a bowl. In a large covered pan, coat the bottom of pan with about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and heat on medium. Add the chopped onion and garlic and cook a few minutes until softened. Add the peppers, tomatoes, and coconut milk. Stir everything until it starts to boil and then add the shrimp and the paprika powder. Bring soup to a simmer, reduce the heat, cover, and let simmer for 15 minutes until the shrimp are cooked. Taste and adjust seasonings (salt, coriander, parsley, and black pepper). Serve it with cooked basmati rice.
About Laura
My ‘Irish’ journey began in 2001 when I left Brazil for the first time at the tender age of fifteen to visit my aunt and her family in Rathmullan, County Donegal.
I spent the summer there improving my English and helping look after my cousin, Kate, who was three at the time. Five years later, while doing a BA in Journalism and working as a journalist in my hometown of Belo Horizonte (southeast of the country), I decided to take a sixmonth break to return to Donegal to continue improving my English and also to realise my dream of backpacking around Europe. After that, I knew that I wanted to live and settle in Ireland—north, south, east, west, it didn’t matter, I had to return.
I left Brazil for good in 2008, first going to Galway city for a year to undertake a preparatory course to sit the the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) and then to Stockholm, in Sweden, for two years to do a master’s in Media and Communication Studies. A practice-based PhD in Film Studies brought me back to the island of Ireland, this time to Belfast, in 2011. The PhD gave me the opportunity to not only enhance my research and teaching skills, but also to discover a passion for archives and make a documentary film called We Were There. The film was about the women’s experiences of the Maze/ Long Kesh Prison, and it was screened across the world at festivals, universities, schools, and community groups.
After a four-year stint working as a postdoctoral researcher in Cork city, I decided to ‘payback’ all the love and welcoming I have received in Rathmullan, my ‘Irish hometown’, by founding and setting up the Rathmullan Film Festival with the local community. I run this participatory, notfor-profit festival remotely on a pro-bono basis and 2021 was our fourth year. It’s wonderful to see locals getting involved in filmmaking and the festival going from strength to strength each year.
In 2018, I returned to Belfast to work on the wonderful Making the Future project. The project has enabled me to work with individuals and groups in engagement programmes like Our Food, Our Place and I feel very blessed to engage with so many interesting people and stories and capture them in creative ways for PRONI’s archives.
I think that’s me settled in the North now!
>> Cooking playlist
Brazil has a HUGE musical diversity and there are some genres that I really like and others that I don’t. So my top five are songs from artists of the genres that I really like. Chico Buarque is one of our most famous singers and a lot of his songs are about the Brazilian dictatorship period (1964-85). Vai Passar is a lively samba song. Falamansa plays forró music, a genre from the Northeast of Brazil which I love, though I am not a good dancer. Elis Regina had a wonderful voice and she was one of our main representatives of the MPB genre (a.k.a Brazilian popular music). My hometown has a band called Skank and their songs are a mixture between alternative rock, ska, and reggae genres. Tanto is their Portuguese version of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Want You’. The band Nação Zumbi emerged from the manguebeat movement of the ‘90s in Recife (Northeast of Brazil). This genre mixes regional rhythms of the Northeast including maracatu, frevo, forró, rock, and electronic music. Some of you may find their songs a bit too noisy, but I love them!
‘Vai Passar’ by Chico Buarque ‘Xote dos Milagres’ by Falamansa ‘Como Nossos Pais’ by Elis Regina Any song from the band Skank ‘Samba Makossa’ by Nação Zumbi
