NEVER ENOUGH GARLIC

What do you do with leftover dough and veggies? Make Root Pockets! These tiny, savoury bundles of flavour are perfect as appetizers, snacks, lunch, or an accompaniment to dinner - they hold up great in a lunchbox too. 

Food waste is a serious issue, and it's more likely to happen when we buy groceries for specific recipes with ingredients we rarely use. Then these veggies just sit in the fridge, forgotten. 

That's exactly what we found in our fridge the other day. A couple of leftover beets? Check. A few carrots and a bunch of baby potatoes? Check. A lone capsicum and a ball of dough that never got made into that extra pizza? Yep. Transforming these ingredients into delicious and healthy goodies are great for both us (now we have tomorrow's lunch) and the environment. 

The Dough:

We used 1 quarter leftover pizza dough from our Vegan Pizza with Chorizo and Shiitake Mushrooms. If you are making the dough for the Root Pockets, just divide all the ingredients in four. 

Ingredients for the Filling:

• 2 beetroots
• 10  baby potatoes
• 3 carrots
  
• 1 red capsicum
• 1 red onion
• 5 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 tsp. paprika
• 1 tsp. curry powder
• 1 tsp. chilli flakes
• 1 tsp. salt
• 0.5 tsp. pepper
• A few curry leaves, dried or fresh
• 2 tbsp. sesame seeds
• 2 tbsp. olive oil

For "eggwash":

• 2 tbsp. flour
• 4 tbsp. water
• Pinch of salt

Instructions:

Part 1

1. Finely chop the onion and the capsicum. Peel and chop the potatoes, beetroots, and carrots in small cubes. 
2. Heat up the olive oil in a large frying pan/skillet, and sautee the onion until golden brown. 
3. Add the root vegetables, capsicum, garlic, and spices, and stir until mixed well.
4. Chop the curry leaves, or crush if using dried leaves. Add to the pan and mix in.
5. Let the veggie mixture cook on medium heat for approx. 30 minutes until the potatoes are almost done. (You should be able to poke them with a fork, but they should still be slightly too firm to eat). Stir frequently so that it doesn't burn.

Part 2

1. Preheat your oven to 200°C (390°F).
2. While the oven heats, roll out your pizza dough on a lightly floured work surface until approx. 3 mm (0.125/1 eighth inches) thin.
3. Using a circular cookie cutter or a clean coffee mug (like we did), cut out as many circles of dough as possible. 
4. Gently flatten each circle a little and place 1-2 tsp. of the filling (depending on the size of your circles) in the centre of each circle. 
5. Close the pockets by carefully folding the circles in half in a half-moon shape and pinching shut the dough around the edges. Lightly press down along the edges of your half-moon pockets with a fork to make a pattern. 
6. Keep re-rolling whatever dough you have left, and cut out more circles until there is no dough left. Repeat steps 4 & 5 of Part 2. 
7. Place all the Root Pockets on an oven tray lined with baking paper. We got 20 pockets out of ours, but you may have more or less depending on the size of your dough circles.
8. Combine the flour, water, and salt for the eggwash, and brush the pockets with the mixture. 
9. Drizzle with the sesame, and bake for approx. 30 minutes or until golden brown. 

Enjoy!