Curry Beef Pastries

I finally baked! Well actually I baked chocolate chip cookies last weekend to get my oven ready for the holidays. And I was inspired again this weekend to venture into something different, a world of pastries. It is not that impressive since I purchased the pastry from Pillsbury - but I had to make the filling that goes inside of it!

Here are some general tips for making the filling that I found from reading different recipes. It starts out with a basic 1 pound of ground beef, 1/2 onion chopped, salt and pepper to taste, and 2 tablespoons of curry. Simple enough. I actually used an entire small onion because I like to have different filling texture in my mouth. Plus I love the taste of curry, so I added in an extra tablespoon of curry along with dashes of garlic powder and pepper.

Lastly, and here is the secret, adding a binding ingredient such as mashed potatoes or bread crumbs to the filling makes a world of a difference. We mashed two small potatoes and cooked it with the beef mixture. It was fantastic! This prevented the beef from becoming too crumbly. Others have used added yogurt but I wanted to keep it similar to the Indian samosa.

And here is a picture of the making of the beef pastry. Spoon in 2 tablespoons of the filling on one side of the dough. I cut the pastry dough into squares and folded them into triangles. Don't worry about overstuffing the pastries since it is always better to have more meat inside than less. I used a fork to help seal the edges and give it a nice look.

And here they are, all finished and ready to be frozen in my freezer! We cooked some right away at 375 degrees for 25 minutes, which was not necessary (almost got a little burnt). But watch your oven carefully since it just needs to be reheated. You may want to brush the pastries with an eggwash before putting them in an oven, for a nice pretty golden color.

Enjoy! I can't wait to enjoy my pastries in the upcoming days!