Pastry solution

When you have to adapt your favourite foods to accommodate an intolerance, it's great to be able to find ready made placements in your local supermarket. I always assumed that ready made pastry contained butter or some form of dairy, so life was much easier when I found that most of the products contained no butter at all. The fact they contain lots of hydrogenated fat is not so good health wise, but sometimes you just have to ignore that when you fancy a mighty fine pie.
In India, however, I've not managed to find any pre made shortcrust or puff pastry. Filo can be found in some imported stores for a phenomenal price and who wants to defrost a whole box as once? Home made is the only option and for this you need 1) none dairy "butter" which I've not found here and has to be snuck in suitcases (it's heavy too!) and 2) a delicate hand, which I do not! And as for trying to make it with oil, well that was just a complete disaster. Plus it really is too hot in the kitchen to spend too long mixing and kneading a sticky ball of goo.

The solution came one day in the form of my lovely friend Mandy - vegetable suet. It provides the right fat base to work in to flour with a good dollop of cold water to form a firm, kneadable pastry. I've still not found it in the shops here, but it's fits quite comfortably in a spare suitcase corner!
All you have to do is mix 100g of self raising flour with 50g of suet, add a little salt and pepper. Stir in 2-3 tablespoons of cold water (more if you're using wholemeal flour as it absorbs more water) to form a firm but flexible dough. Knead until the texture of the suet has been broken down into the flour and you have a smooth dough. This makes enough for 4 individual tart tins or the top of one bigger pie. You don't need to chill it as it doesn't seem to shrink in the same way normal pastry does, but equally it doesn't do any harm. You can then cook it as per whatever recipe you are doing. If you want a sweet pastry, you can add 25g of caster sugar before the water.
Unfortunately, this is not an option for those who are gluten intolerant as the suet contains wheat. And if fat is something you are trying to avoid, then you should definitely think twice as despite the 25% fat claim there's still over 60g of fat in every 100g - yikes! But then again, if you're avoiding fat, pastry really is not the way to go.