Thursday (Vegetarian) Dinner

A shout out to our vegetarian readers: tonight Melissa made a great dinner of corn fritters with fresh salsa and field green salad. She might have cheated a bit by adding some chicken stock (after all, we are not vegetarians), but it can just as well be done without that one ingredient.

The salsa topping the fritters was light, clean and refreshing with red onion, tomato, red bell pepper/capsicum, cucumber, lemon juice, cilantro, sea salt and a bit of habanero, serrano and jalapeno peppers left over from last Saturday's spicy creme brulee. The field green salad was seasoned with just olive oil and sea salt, so no heavy dressing detracted from the light flavors in the rest of the dish.

The key here is to use a flavorful olive oil. After experiencing the amazing quality of boutique olive oils in New Zealand and the US, we have sought out reasonably priced oils that retain some of the fruit and spice that come through in really high quality oils. So far the winner has to be the Red Island oils from Australia. At about $10 for a half-litre bottle and a whole lot of flavor, the price is right. Has anyone else had any good olive oils recently?

We are never disappointed with a good New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and the 2007 Oyster Bay nicely highlighted the fresh citrus and pepper in the salsa.

We watched a great documentary on E.O. Wilson's life-long study on ant social behavior while we ate. I guess we're just scientists to the core...

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Melissa's Recipes

Corn Fritters

I didn’t initially publish this recipe because I think it still needs a bit of work -- but given the demand for the recipe, I’ll record it now and welcome suggestions.

~1/4 of a large red onion diced
2 eggs
1 can of corn whole kernels (creamed sweet corn won’t work!)
1-2 tsp of cilantro pesto (yes it did go a fair way but that was the last of it)
~1/4 cup of flour
liberal amounts of ground pepper
½ tsp of chicken stock paste (vegetable substitute or simple salt would do here)
dash of dried garlic powder
Cooking spray

Mix everything in large mixing bowl and then cook in fry pan like pancakes.

All in all the taste of the fritters was excellent; however the texture needed a little work…

So the obvious improvements to the fritters would be to use corn sliced fresh off the cob and pan fry a little crushed garlic to add to the fritter batter – fresh is always best, though with quick after-work food I think we can accept a few shortcuts. I think to get a lighter batter, next time I’d also only use one egg and reduce the flour to ~2tbsps. Thirdly while cooking spray makes the fritters very low in fat, I think the outside crust looses a little crispness, so using liberal amounts sizzling hot olive oil would also improve this.