Fatima Rajbhai Kudrati recalls her mother reading out letters her family received from her grandmother in Kenya written in Gujarati. She would recount events about her life there and often included a recipe from the homeland.
Years later her mother insisted Rajbhai Kudrati learn how to make the samosas her grandmother used to make and eventually, her sister-in-law, who had learned how to make them from Rajbhai Kudrati’s mom, taught her the process.
“I fell in love,” declares the Aurora resident of both the dish and its making, which she likens to origami.
After living in Tanzania with her husband as an adult for several years, she moved back to Canada and made the samosas with that East African approach for special occasions like birthday parties and work events. And they were always a hit.
Family and friends were eventually able to convince her to turn it into a business. So she decided to give it a try while keeping her day job as a social worker working with veterans. And on Dec. 8 four years ago, she announced on social media that Fatima's Samosas was in business.
Her timing, it turned out, was perfect. People were preparing for the holidays and the orders quickly came in.
“I was very slow when we first started,” she explains. “We figured things out. Slowly and surely we found different avenues.”
In the early days she rented a kitchen, but that added to the costs. So Rajbhai Kudrati created a certified commercial kitchen in her Aurora home to keep costs down.
She still sells her products online but also introduced the samosas and other products to the community, bringing them to an Aurora Indian grocer and farmers market and she draws customers from the area, including Bradford, Stouffville, Newmarket, Richmond Hill as well as Aurora, largely through word of mouth and repeat customers.
This past spring, she brought her products to Aurora’s street festival and it was all hands on deck. Her husband, who has supported the business throughout, and her two boys, 7 and 11, encourage her and help out.
“You realize at those moments how important these people are in your life,” she says. “My brother, my sisters-in-law, my nieces, my nephews, everybody was there.”
Rajbhai Kudrati, who also takes catering orders for special events like weddings, can find herself making 500 to 600 samosas in a week during busy times.
She offers beef, chicken and vegetarian samosa orders — all made with natural ingredients with no preservatives and all homemade.
“They’re all family recipes that have been passed down,” she says.
The beef and the chicken are minced for the samosas and made with onions and cilantro, mixed in with spices
Instead of using the conventional chick peas, the vegetarian samosas are loaded with potatoes, peas, carrots, cilantro and onions.
She makes other East African dishes, which she also sells. That includes mandazi, which she describes as an East African doughnut, which she makes in a triangular shape to conform to her theme of "golden triangles of goodness."
“It’s accompanied by a curry, barazi, it’s basically a pigeon pea curry in coconut sauce,” she says. “That is really popular, especially among the East Africans.”
Also following the triangle theme are chicken pastries, and then there’s also masala potatoes and homemade chutneys.
Rajbhai Kudrati says she’s thankful for the community, which has embraced her initiative and supported it since the day she started it.
“The amount of love that I’ve received from the community… that love trumps any negativity,” she says. “I couldn’t be more thankful.”
