Samosa, Pumpkin & Raita Salad

Usually when you're eating some cocktail samosas, you would eat them as is, maybe with a bit of chutney or raita on the side. But I want to show you how versatile they can be by putting them in this delicious vegetarian salad. So this is a samosa and pumpkin salad. First, we need to roast off our pumpkin. Now I've got a butternut pumpkin here. I've left the skin on because there's loads of flavour in the skin and just cut them into roughly the same size chunks. So we're looking at about a three centimetre chunk. We're going to add some extra virgin olive oil. It's a bit of a drizzle over them. And a pinch of salt. And if you like, some pepper. Okay, now get your hands in there and just give them a toss so it's evenly coated. Now for pumpkin of this size, it's going to take about 20 minutes or until it's tender. But just before they're cooked, I'm going to add my samosas. It just saves getting another tray. So in they go for the first cook. All right, while the pumpkin is cooking, let's make our dressing, which is a raita-style dressing. So in a jug of a blender, I'm going to add some cucumber along with some cumin. And I want this to be really zingy, so I'm going to add some lemon juice. You could also add the zest if you like. So just half a lemon is plenty. And we'll just squeeze that directly into the jug. And lots of herbs for this. I really want it to taste like the coriander and mint. Have a look at this mint. Look at these big leaves. Beautiful. I will actually use some of these leaves for the salad too, just to bulk it out. So almost using it as a lettuce leaf. So we'll do one and a half stalks. And then for the coriander, we're going to leave a little bit for our salad, about that much. And then the rest of it can go in. Stalks and all for this. So we'll just break that up. Now, I don't want this to be too runny. I just want it to be able to drizzle. And so the trick to doing that is not adding all your yogurt at this stage when you're blending the herbs and the cucumber. So what I like to do is add a tablespoon now. We're going to blend it. And then I'm going to fold it through the rest of that yogurt. So the lid can go on. Oh, salt too. Don't forget the salt. So a good pinch of salt can go in there. And we'll just give that a blend just so we can chop up all those herbs. OK, this is looking good. I love that vibrant green colour. And do you see how liquidy it is? That's how it should be. So we're going to slowly incorporate that into our Greek style yogurt. So we'll pop that in there. And we're just going to fold a little bit at a time into this. And you'll see how you'll still get that lovely consistency. I love this. This in itself is a fantastic dipping sauce for the cocktail samosas. All right, let's pop that to the side and get on with the other ingredients that are going to go into the salad. So some onion. I'm going to be quite heavy-handed with the onion for this salad. So I've got about a half of a Spanish onion and we're just going to cut it as thin as possible. If you want it to be really thin, you could use a mandolin, but I've got a sharp knife here. I love the colour of this. I'm also going to add just a pinch of salt to them just to break down the onions and make sure that they're not too intense. Next, some tomato. I'm just going to cut that into wedges. You can use any type of vegetables that you love for this salad, as long as you've got that main base of the pumpkin. And then we've also got the rest of the cucumber. So half of it went into the raita and the rest is going to go into the salad and some chickpeas and of course the rest of the herbs. So I'm just going to finish picking these and we'll wait for that pumpkin to be almost cooked before we pull it out and add our gorgeous little cocktail samosas. Right, that pumpkin is almost cooked. It just needs another 13 to 15 minutes, which is the perfect amount of time for our cocktail samosas to cook. So these are a premium quality samosa and I love the size of them. They're the perfect size for this salad. See how they're the same size as the pumpkin? Just right. So I'm just going to dot them in and around. Just like so. Fantastic. All right, back into the oven and once they're cooked, we can assemble. The pumpkin and samosas have come out of the oven. I'll just let them cool slightly and now for the fun part, which is plating up. So I want this to look really organic. So we're just going to pop the samosas on the plate and then we're going to get the rest of the ingredients for the salad and we're just going to just sort of nestle it around all of the other ingredients. I prefer to assemble the salad as opposed to mix everything together because this is more of a composed salad. So a few more bits and bobs here. One more can go there. And then for the rest of the salad, I've placed it into the bowl. So all of our herbs are in there. The tomato, our onion, cucumber goes in and our chickpeas. And then we'll just give that a bit of a toss. And this is just that pop of colour, a rainbow salad, as they like to call it. And then we'll just scatter this around, our samosas and our pumpkin. A few more of those chickpeas. Like I said, I want to be heavy handed with the onions on this one. A few more of those chickpeas. And then our sauce, see how it's held its shape. It's lovely and thick. And then we're just going to drizzle that over the top. A lovely, warm salad. Lots of gorgeous, fresh flavours there. Samosas, they're not just for a snack or a party. You can see that you can make it into a meal in itself. A gorgeous vegetarian dish.