Samosa Pie

Rob and I love samosas -- those crispy tetrahedrons of pastry filled with potatoes, onions, peas, and spices. We've become quite handy at forming the individual samosas, but I was still looking for a less time-consuming way to get my fix. I remember making hamburger pie as a kid and figured that a samosa pie had to be pretty darn tasty.

I typically use the samosa recipe in Manju Singh's The Spice Box: A Vegetarian Indian Cookbook and wanted to use that for the filling, but I wasn't sure about the baking time for pie and those other important details. I asked the interwebs if such a creation had been attempted before, and I found this blog entry at the cooks and the curious. I used their crust recipe and cooking times, a double dose of samosa filling for the pie, and it turned out fabulously! I think it might have been the best pie crust I ever made. We are stuffed and happy.

Our first Christmas

It started with Pumpkin breaking into Zellie's food, even though we gave him an extra big breakfast...

I got a new game! We'll both play it, but I think I like it more. We both love regular Blokus and have wanted to try Blokus Trigon since we saw it being played at a Mensa games party.

And Pumpkin got a self-help book, even though cats don't need any help. He is such a tolerant kitty to let us put ribbons on him!

It was a great first Christmas! And it's even starting to snow in Virginia. The weather prognosticators are consistently bi-polar on how much we get, ranging from "a dusting" to "snowmageddon part 2"! I'm hoping for somewhere in-between.

The Snowflake Tree

My friends Kris and Kevin in Maryland have enough Christmas trees in their house to rival Macy's. My favorite is the snowflake tree.

Someone at Safeway has a sense of humor.

That's just too good to be unintentional.

Oh Solstice Tree...

I admit, not the best picture ever. But it's a pretty tree! I think lit Christmas trees are about as difficult to photograph as black cats.

We did have to move it out of the window because it was blocking all of our light. But it can still be seen from outside, so I can see it when I'm coming home from work. At this time of year, it's fully dark here by about 5.

I was interested in the effect of being both farther south and east of where I used to live, and it turns out that we get 20-25 more minutes of sunlight in the winter than our friends in Michigan, but we get it earlier in the day since we're farther east in the time zone -- so we'd have to get up awfully early to take advantage of it. Darn you, standardized time!

Tinsel Trifecta part 1...

Rob and I have the good fortune to have three Fancy Parties to attend this year. I'm a contractor, so two of them are mine -- one at the home office in Detroit and one with my clients here in the DC area.

First up in the Tinsel Trifecta was my home office party. Rob was a trooper and flew with me to Detroit very early on Friday morning since I had important tedium to attend to before the festivities, and he flew back Saturday afternoon. I stayed until Monday for still more meetings.

Unfortunately Detroit had hardly any snow for us, but it's always good to visit the Great Lakes State and see old friends! And also to have cheap breakfast at a coney island in Dearborn. There aren't any $4.79 breakfasts to be had in Northern Virginia, unless it's just toast and juice.