mutteringhousewife

Adventures in cooking, travel and whatever else I feel like musing on

Tag: vegetarian

Better Corn Fritters

I’ve made some Thermomix inspired improvements to the humble corn fritters that form about a monthly addition to the diet of my children. The original recipe that I seem to recall blogging about some time ago is basically a savoury pikelet with some corn added. See how far we’ve come.

I start off with buckwheat.

20130730-174319.jpg
My source for this is The Source in Balmain, now that I’m getting less scared of parking in that fashionable suburb. You can buy buckwheat flour if you don’t have the means of grinding it, or The Source will actually grind it for you. I put a cup in the Thermomix and zap at high speed for about a minute. Add a four hundred and ten gram tin of corn (that’s an odd weight, doesn’t it sound converted from a pound? Close, but no cigar). And an egg.

20130730-174734.jpg
I also put in a container of cheese that I’d Thermomixed for pizza, a mix of cheddar, mozzarella and Parmesan. I’m really going to have to do some kind of analysis on how much cheaper is it to do your own processing of things like pizza cheese, or making yoghurt. I’m getting the feeling I’m saving quite a few bucks. And those of you out there trying to justify buying one might appreciate it.

20130730-175351.jpg
Also four teaspoons of baking powder. Then enough buttermilk to make a thick batter. You mix it in the Thermomix on reverse speed two and pour the buttermilk through the lid, peeking to see what consistency you’re up to. Leave it for a bit while you go and compose a riveting email to your husband about superannuation.

Heat some fat in a frying pan, I’m using some chicken fat I saved from our last chicken roast. Gosh I’m getting frugal. Put soup spoons of batter in the pan, turning when some bubbles start appearing
on the surface. You want them all golden.

20130730-180308.jpg
They’ve got a richer, nuttier flavour than the pikelet version. It doesn’t taste wholemeal at all. The baking powder and buttermilk makes it fluffy. Don’t tell the Moose it has cheese in it, he thinks he doesn’t like melted cheese. Rubbish, of course, everyone likes melted cheese.

Thermomix Vegetable Patties

I think I overdid it this time. Note to self, just because you have Thermomix doesn’t mean you have to pulverise everything. Here’s how it happened.

I was having coffee with a neighbour and some friends and we were solving all of the admittedly very first world problems of the high school our sons attend. Talk turned to the oversupply of the school cookbook, and my Thermophile friend made the excellent suggestion that she and I should start converting the really excellent and diverse recipes in it to The Thermomix Way. By the time we’d wrapped up I was starving, so after I’d dragged myself across the road home I was looking for a quick and hearty lunch. No bread. No leftovers. Not even frozen leftovers. So I opened the school cookbook and came across a recipe that was a cinch for the Thermomix and I even had all the ingredients, vegetable patties.

I put a medium sized onion into the machine and it made a rather startled sound when I tried to zap it, another note to self – cut them in half first. Added in a slice of butter and sautéed the onion at 100 degrees for three minutes on speed two. I then added in a chopped large carrot, a zucchini and a half and an extremely dried up bread roll I had left over from last weekend’

20130406-140715.jpg
And zapped them too. Then I added a tin of rinsed chickpeas, a teaspoon of Moroccan spice mix and an egg and gave it a gentle mix on speed two for a couple of seconds. Then I cooked it at 100 degrees for five minutes on speed three, and that’s where I went wrong. I should have had it on speed two or one and put in in reverse (the blunt sides of blades then do the stirring) meaning the chickpeas wouldn’t have been mashed in too. It could do with some texture.

The idea then is that you refrigerate it and it solidifies quite a bit, then you form them into balls and pan fry them in butter. I was really hungry, so I just ate the stuff with a spoon. It was delicious and satisfying. I’ve just had some more for lunch today and it even improves with age. I am eating a lot of vegetables this way, but I’m worried I’m losing the ability to chew. This stuff is also not terribly visually appealing in this form, but would be better as patties.

20130406-141345.jpg
I won’t tell you what the Moose said it looked like, but I’m sure you can guess. The photo in the school cookbook was worse because the patties had bits of corn through them which for those of us who have had offspring leads to a very unappetising train of thought. Maybe presentation is something to which I should give more consideration.