Indian vegetable strudel

• By Mark Camilleri

For 6 people, you will need:

500g of filo pastry, four tablespoonfuls of vegetable oil, four tablespoonfuls of melted butter, two cloves of garlic (crushed), a medium-sized piece of ginger (crushed), a green chilli (finely chopped), four red onions (finely chopped), one red and one yellow bell-peppers (deseeded and sliced), 200g of asparagus (cut in half), 500g of sweet potatoes (roughly diced), 250g of button mushrooms (finely sliced), 200g of cauliflower (broken into florets), three tomatoes (peeled, deseeded and diced), eight teaspoonfuls of ground cumin, four teaspoonfuls each of garam masala, ground tumeric and ground coriander, two teaspoonfuls each of ground pepper corns and ground cloves.

Blanch the cauliflower, then the sweet potatoes, refresh them with cold water and set them aside. Make a paste by crushing the garlic, ginger and green chilli, using a blender. Heat a pan, adding the vegetable oil, then the red onion, and cooking it until it is soft and golden. Now add the ginger-garlic paste and carry on cooking until the aromas are released. At this point, add the tomatoes and leave the pan to simmer, stirring so that it doesn’t stick, until the mixture has turned nicely golden. Add all the remaining spices and cook for a couple of minutes more. Now lift the mixture out of the pan and into a container. Put a dash of oil into the same pan and fry the mixed peppers until they have softened. Add the cauliflower, sweet potato and asparagus, then the mushrooms. Put the contents of the container back into the pan and cook for another couple of minutes, mixing everything together for an intense flavour. Remove the pan from the heat and set it aside. Now you can either make a large strudel, or individual ones for your guests. To make a single one, place the large sheet of filo pastry on your work-surface, and put the vegetable mixture in the centre. Brush the edges with melted butter and fold the pastry into a cylinder-shape. To make individual strudels, use the same process on a smaller scale. Place the strudel on a baking-tray, with the folded-over bit at the bottom. Brush it with melted butter and sprinkle it with poppy seeds or sesame seeds. Preheat the oven to gas mark 5/180C and bake the strudel for 20 minutes or until the pastry is golden and crisp.