This BAKED Bread Pakora with a delicious and flavorful vegetable filling will soon become your favorite rainy day snack.

My mother was (still is) the sneakiest sneak you can ever imagine. All my life, or for the better part of it, while she was in control of what I ate, the woman snuck in every vegetable you could possibly hate, nay, despise into foods where you’d least suspect it to be. Or when she was feeling particularly spiteful, she’d mince them into foods where it’d be right there in plain sight, yet impossible to pick out.

My brother and I learnt long ago to always ask ‘What’s in this’ before eating anything she presented to us. Which never did us any good, because we almost never got a straight answer. The woman cannot lie (for real!), so she found extremely devious ways to bend the truth.

Today, 31 and running my own home, I now see where she was coming from. My husband has no clue the things I sneak oatmeal and flax into, and I do so purely out of love.

This BAKED Bread Pakora was inspired largely by my mother’s loving duplicitousness and dedicated to the ways in which she continues to watch out for us in every way possible.

Pakoras are traditionally deep-fried, but if you’ve hung around this blog long enough, you’d know the beef I have with deep frying in my home. My hatred of the way the essence of hot oil clings to everything that it touches, wafts over with air and makes even a harmless cabinet door a voracious dust magnet, easily trumps my lifelong love of deep-fried foods. And I do love them, I do.

In fact, one of the main reasons (and I kid you not!) we bought our house earlier this year is because there’s a Five Guys right outside the community entrance and their fried-in-peanut-frickin-oil-french -fries is basically my PMS cure.

The primary ingredient for the stuffing for this Baked Bread Pakora is absolutely delicious Idaho Potatoes, BUT- here’s where you can get away with literally anything- you can sneak in a bunch of other vegetables inside. The potato is SO good that it diverts the eater from all the other things in there. If they ask what’s inside, you calmly, and with your best poker face that would make my mother so proud, say: ‘a potato filling’.

It’s true, so technically, you’re not lying… technically! – a defense my mother deployed constantly.

And then you wrap it inside a slice of bread (edges cut off, if you prefer), dip it in a golden chickpea flour batter and bake! Should you not share the aversion I have with deep-frying, I’d suggest you take the traditional route frying till golden brown and crisp. If you’re like me however, you’re gonna go bonkers over how crisp this is.

The small trade-off being that it’s at its absolute crispness a few minutes out of the oven. The longer it sits outside, the softer it gets. But fret not, you can always re-crisp it in the oven at 350F in 5-10 minutes.

Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Idaho Potato Commission. All opinions are my own.