fritter heaven

What comes to mind when you think of kiwi food? While there’s the archetypal lamb roast and pavlova*, it's not something you’ll find in every café. When it comes to a certainty on every urban menu, the gong has to go to fritters.

Corn fritters seem to appear on almost every New Zealand breakfast menu for over a decade. Despite the fact canned corn never goes out of season, the more adventurous establishment will branch out to zucchini or other fresh vegetables in summer. They are cheap, easy to make and team well with relishes, chutneys and a host of side dishes.

In the past I’ve just haphazardly thrown some flour, egg and soy milk into a bowl and beat til it formed a batter. Following on my promise of making some earmarked treasures from my old Annabel Langbein cookbook The Best of Annabel Langbein, I gave her soda water fritter batter a go. The first time round I followed it to the letter. Certainly the creaminess of milk (or soy) is not missed but I still found it quite a cakey batter. I’ve had a few goes at making my own variations; it’s a work in progress so feel free to direct me to your favourite recipe.

Basic Fritter batter
These rose nicely and were a little lighter than the original recipe.

1/2 cup unbleached plain flour
1/2 cup cornflour
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup soda or sparkling mineral water

Sift the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Stir in the eggs and soda water and mix til your have a smooth batter.

If your batter is not smooth you can always force it through a sieve.

Allow to sit for half an hour before cooking.

Carrot fritters
Per cup of batter

1 carrot, grated
1 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/2 tsp cumin seeds

Grate the carrots.

Toast the seeds in a hot pan and then grind to a powder.

Add all ingredients to the batter, ideally while it’s resting to infuse the spices.

To cook the fritters

Add a neutral vegetable oil to a heavy bottom pan and bring up to a medium heat. Cook fritters in batches, place spoonfuls of the batter in pan, encouraging a roundish shape. Allow small bubbles to appear in the batter before turning (about 2-3 minutes each side). Cook til golden on each side.

Recipe Update (Nov 2011)

Less batter, more carrots = excellent outcome. Here's my latest version.

For the fritters - basically halve the flour

1/4 cup unbleached plain flour
1/4 cup cornflour
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/4 - 1/2 cup soda or sparkling mineral water

For the spicy carroty part

3 carrot, grated
1 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/2 tsp cumin seeds

Follow the previous method.



Spiced carrot fritters – deluxe version

Top warm carrot fritters with good quality mayonnaise mixed with a spoonful of harissa paste and a squeeze of lemon. Adjust to taste; the spices should be noticeable in the mayo without burning your mouth.

Finish off with some strips of the queen of Kiwi delights, smoked eel.

I promise you this is a seriously good combination!




Notes

Not so cheap but marvellously cheerful is the other national dish whitebait fritters. Don’t confuse the batter recipes; whitebait only requires the lightest of licks of egg to keep them together.

I sometimes make a double batch of the basic batter and divide in two for a different set of flavoured fritters for lunch and then breakfast the next day.

Fritters make handy vegetarian meals and also a clever way to hide vegetables for fussy kids.

Some combos of my favourite fritter combos include:
Corn and caramelised onions
Zucchini (drain grated zucchini in a sieve first) and mint
Corn fritters served with a dollop of guacamole



* wash you mouths out my dissenting Aussie friends, New Zealand definitely is the home of the pav!

tabbouleh with quinoa

In celebration of the return of my kitchen mojo I finally got around to concocting a gluten-free version of this Middle Eastern classic. Tabbouleh is a salad best eaten freshly made, with green herbs straight from the garden. It really zings!


Tabbouleh with quinoa

2 cups cooked quinoa*
2 tablespoon finely chopped parsley
2 tablespoon finely chopped mint
1 spring onion, finely chopped
1 Lebanese cucumber, finely diced
2 tomatoes, finely diced
1 clove of garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon olive oil
juice of 1-2 lemons
a pinch of salt, pepper and Zataar (optional) – to taste

Combine ingredients and then adjust flavours to taste. I prefer a tabouleh a little heavy on the lemon juice and light on the spring onion.

Makes a great salad or side dish that ticks all the good health boxes – vegan, gluten-free and a total detox dish.



*To cook quinoa
Rinse 1 cup of quinoa well in a fine seize and bring to the boil with 1.5 cups of water and a pinch of salt. Simmer covered for 12 minutes, then leave to steam off the heat with the lid firmly on for 5 minutes.

Cool before using in salads.

the return of the mojo

The last few months have been a bit of a blur. There’s been lot of comings and goings, short trips to NZ/interstate (the former being like an interstate trip except you have to check in hours earlier and there’s duty-free goodies) and some shuffling around at home.

The Significant Eater is away for large chunks of the time now and though I’ve always been an advocate of the pleasures of cooking for one, my repertoire has been stuck on repeat. My high rotation menu of stir-fries, frittatas, curries, pasta/noodles and variations on vegetables with rice, reminds me of a week I spent in the Daintree with only the resort restaurant to eat at. The limited menu was on a three day cycle, making the second half of the stay very boring.

My mojo’s not been helped by the garden being between seasons. The parsley and coriander are on the way out and there’s just silverbeet for fresh greens, wholesome but not exactly inspiring. I can’t face another leaf of the super bitter radicchio. Waiting to fruit are tomatoes (grosse lisse, tommy toes and sugar lump), strawberries and grapes.

If the locusts don’t get them first.

Previously I’ve relished solo time, giving me the opportunity to beta test weird and wild concoctions (aka “imagination meals”) without having to explain the experiment to someone else. But the problem with loosing your mojo is that there is no desire to go beyond the known. End of the year fatigue has kidnapped my imagination and a whole raft of glossy cookbooks won’t get it back.

Fortunately in the past week the season seems to have begun to shift. The market haul yielded local strawberries, organic mangoes and a half decent avocado. Winters drabness is finally giving way to the stars of the fruit family that excite the senses.



Also on the up are my herbs in pots – Vietnamese mint, regular mint, rosemary tarragon. The latter I’ve had for a couple of years but am always at a loss as to how to use. Aniseed is not my favourite flavour, especially in savoury cooking. It’s refreshing to chew on a leaf but I’m yet to fall in love with the herb. Any tarragon tips?

With the whiff of promise breezing in I’ve finally been inspired to tackle two cooking projects I’ve had earmarked for an age. This weekend saw a second batch of savoury fritters, in an ongoing attempt to tweak Annabel Langbein's soda water batter and while listening to Tony Chiodo being interviewed on Eat It on Sunday I put on a pot of quinoa. I’d intended to make one of his salads but instead found some parsley still suitable for consumption and finally made a quinoa tabbouleh.

Double win!

Where’s your kitchen mojo at this spring/autumn?

Sneak preview - recipes later this week.

Crookssource updates

The copyright saga continues between the editor of Crooks Source Cooks Source and the blogger/academic whose work the publication stole without permission.

If you are curious to read the Monica's original emails the provoked the "my bad" response from Judith Griggs, scroll down to the updates on my post for the links and latest news.

Update 20/11/10 The Cooks Source site appears to have been sold, leased or hacked as it's now redirected to a web wrangling business.

The Boston Globe article (published three days ago) mentioned that Cooks Source had recently published the following statement.

"The bad news is that this is probably the final straw for Cooks Source," says the unsigned note posted on Cooks Source website. "We have never been a great money-maker even with all the good we do for businesses. Having a black mark wont help ... and now, our black mark will become our shroud. ... This will end us."
... "I really wish she (Monica Gaudio) had given me a chance to respond to her before blasting me. She really never gave me a chance."

As previous links show, Gaudio had indeed, quietly and respectfully via email, made reasonable requests and it was Griggs arrogant response that most likely set the ball in motion.

Weeks later, Griggs is still crying that she is the victim in all this. When will she learn the irony of "her bad"?

flowers and seeds

The rain! The heat! The insects!

Two weeks ago the garden looked a little out of control, yet I couldn't bring myself to rip out last seasons vegetables just yet. A fortnight on, the tiny veggie box is a monumental mess.

It's too wet to do much about it though.

The budding botanist in me is just a little in love with nature's cycle of bloom and decay.


The wonderful umbels. Can you see why I am deeply rooted in the old botanical order and have difficulty calling the Umbeliferae family Apiaceae?


Attempting to collect some seeds this year.



The belle of the ball. It was worth sacrificing a few spring onions, just to admire this magnificent Allium flower. Hopefully there'll be seeds to gather before the plague of locusts descend.

How does your Antipodean garden grow this spring?

pass it on

Food waste is a crime and I am guilty as charged m’lud.

While lamenting my cooking mojo, contents of my fridge lie in risk of rotting. With a busy week ahead, featuring too many late nights’s home from work, I excavated the nether regions of my pantry to unearth some dried beans. While I was there I threw out the sad culprits who’d more than hit their use by date. In my defence the offending items were ones that I’d inherited when the Significant Eater first moved in many years ago.

Cooking beans is easy. Soak overnight. Drain, rinse and boil the next morning. It seemed to have upset people when I wrote previously that I could cook up a batch of beans before going to work. I do like a leisurely start to the day and am happy to sacrifice sleep for the pleasure of sipping a hot beverage while reading the digital news, wrangling the cat and organising my day.

It’s a Virgo thing.

The aforementioned planning involved making a batch of chilli beans – take a big dollop of homemade harissa, onion and assorted end of the week vegetables (pumpkin, parsnip and a lanky carrot, finely grated), simmer with tomato paste and vegetable stock. Throw on the heat diffuser mat and ignore for an hour or two.

But there was a problem. I’m home alone at the moment and not fond of leftovers. In fact I’ll do anything to avoid eating the same food two nights in a row (with the exception of the gingery tomato-y tofu dish, I think the sugary content makes it highly addictive). So night one was augmented with not-feta and night two, a handful of marinated olives.

There was no way there’d be a night three. A man-size serve remained. But throwing it out seemed criminal. In desperation, I texted my neighbour. Her adult son became vegan this year and lives a few blocks away, was he coming to dinner tonight? It turned out he wasn’t but her husband loves hot food (she doesn’t) and would be very happy for a chilli hit.

Problem solved.

One of the unexpected pleasures of passing it on is the boomerang effect. On my doorstep this morning was the plastic container with a note of thanks scribbled on some butchers paper, inside was nestled four of the cutest eggs.

Perhaps my cooking mojo just needs a little bit of neighbourhood recycling to kick it back to life?

Frittata anyone?

Starring

Summer Beans
Chilli Beans – soaked plus a twist of smoky paprika
Chili Beans – the breakfast leftover version

Co-starring
Tofu and
Eggplant in a Gingery Tomato Sauce

Crew – the Mighty Fridge Fixings

Stripped Back Harissa Paste
Marinated Olives

eat smart: StreetSmart

Sorry if elements of this post looks familiar, it just means you were on my other blog recently.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Sydney and as I wandered through the city, I came across a group of rowdy high school or uni students taking a video of themselves singing and dancing in a side street. The street provided a natural ampitheatre, blocked off from traffic, sub-tropical flora to provide shade on a hot day. A couple of pricey looking restaurants overlooked the public seating area. An oasis in a busy city.

Then I noticed someone else.

Was he performance art too?



No, just a homeless man trying to have a kip in the shade, while the fat cats chowed down on lunch pretending to not see him.

The homeless are someone's father/mother/brother/sister/child/classmate/friend. StreetSmart makes a difference by supporting grassroots organisations working in their local areas.

Check out the StreetSmart site to find a participating restaurant. The Melbourne line-up has changed a bit this year but covers eateries that cater to a variety of tastes and budgets.

StreetSmart is on now until 24th December. Please eat generously.


What I wrote about StreetSmart 2009.

crookssource - downfall edition

What a wild few days it has been in the world of blogging. Copyright and the issue of "public domain" has been front page news. If you've been in a monastry this week you may have missed the Cooks Source debacle, where an editor lifted Monica Gaudio's old blog post and when caught out by the author responded, "It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things" and suggested, "We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me!"

The email that's spawned a thousand tweets, facebook hijackings, blogposts and mainstream media responses has now entered the viral hall of fame with it's own Downfall take off.




Social media never sleeps. The spinoffs are endless including a facebook page dedicated to collating all the other articles editor Judith Griggs has reprinted without permission. Are there any local bloggers part of this burgeoning alumni?


UPDATE: Looking for the perfect Christmas gift for a blogger? There's now the "But honestly Monica..." range of aprons, mugs, t-shirts.... LOL.

15 November 2010: The Hampshire Daily Gazette published a sympathetic interview with Griggs. Sure she's genuinely sorry but that appears to be more about the effect of the fallout. She's still claims that some aspects of copyright is a "gray area". She blames one of her contributers for another potential copyright infringement and as to the alleged 160 cases of misappropriated articles,"Griggs said she believes that number is inflated and, without having seen the list, could not respond."

18 November 2010: At the request of numerous readers Monica has reluctantly published her emails to the editor of Cooks Source. The implication was she had written something inflammatory to Griggs. Take a look for yourself.

Personally, I was a tad disappointed to see not a single "my bad" on Monica's side of the correspondence.

Update 20/11/10 The Cooks Source site appears to have been sold, leased or hacked as it's now redirected to a web wrangling business.

The Boston Globe article (published three days ago) mentioned that Cooks Source had recently published the following statement.

"The bad news is that this is probably the final straw for Cooks Source," says the unsigned note posted on Cooks Source website. "We have never been a great money-maker even with all the good we do for businesses. Having a black mark wont help ... and now, our black mark will become our shroud. ... This will end us."
... "I really wish she (Monica Gaudio) had given me a chance to respond to her before blasting me. She really never gave me a chance."

As previous links show, Gaudio had indeed, quietly and respectfully via email, made reasonable requests and it was Griggs arrogant response that most likely set the ball in motion.

Weeks later, Griggs is still crying that she is the victim in all this. When will she learn the irony of "her bad"?

hiatus

I had a dream last night that I hadn't cooked for so long that I didn't realise the kitchen had been renovated in my absence.

In my waking life I am cooking frequently and there has been no secret remodeling of my kitchen while I sleep (I checked just in case the fairies had snuck in overnight) but perhaps it is my repertoire that needs a makeover?

While I contemplate my mojo, feast your eyes on one of the pretty fruit trees (species anyone?) in Lucy’s country garden, that I had the pleasure to visit on my day off.




Pretty, aint it.

what the?

Please read What the? Part 2 to see what happened next!

But first, let's go back to the beginning of the story.

Hey I've got a great idea. How about I publish a magazine with a heap of cool content that I don't have to pay for, nor will I bother to ask permission to reprint it. Pure genius!

This little beauty just flapped its way into my inbox. I must admit I only open 1/4 of PR-looking emails.

FYI

XXX* magazine is Melbourne’s newest food and drink title - with a significant difference. It is the first to showcase independent local blogs and articles with a definitive focus on the city’s food culture. Effectively a printed portal, it features snippets of interesting, online material, with full reference and credit always given to the authors. And for the first time, using new smartphone technology, 2D codes printed in XXX provide a direct link to the original online article. A very similar premise to how a blogger might make reference to an external article they want to share - placing a link in their own blog and directing readers on. A product of Melbourne’s world-class food and drink industry, and the insightful contributions of the city’s bloggers and online authors, its debut will mark a progressive shift in contemporary publishing.

Never before have online authors been given such prominence in the print medium. Building on the passion of food enthusiasts, XXX’s publishers are undertaking this new initiative, hoping to promote what they believe is an outstanding standard of local blogging, and further establishing it as valid and valuable - as much so as traditional food writing. Moreover, with hundreds of articles posted online all the time, it can be hard for some people to come across information, news or reviews that they might enjoy and find helpful – especially those unfamiliar with the online forum, or still getting used to it. XXX makes it easier to sort through the vast catalogue of food stories by presenting those the editors find interesting and relevant, in a physical, familiar format.

Launching this December with a ‘Holiday Edition’, 20,000 audited copies will be circulated throughout more than 1,500 cafes, bars, restaurants and stores in the CBD and inner city suburbs. ‘Regular’ fortnightly editions will follow from January 2011. As a result, XXX’s featured bloggers will probably notice a marked increase in traffic to their sites, expanding the potential for those already advertising to capitalise on their work, and creating opportunities for those that yet don’t (through options like Google AdSense, Nuffnang and Foodbuzz).

In the interests of integrity, XXX doesn’t commission writers or works. Content isn’t product driven or based on any commercial directives. Instead it’s made up of positive, in-depth pieces with attractive photography, written by passionate and knowledgeable local ‘authorities’. XXX’s editors then scour the web, working to select and compile pieces relevant to particular topics and editions, covering subjects like restaurant reviews and recipes. Additionally, topics such as cafés, markets, new books, films, products, farming, events, health issues, legislation, and anything else food and drink related will be included. Put simply, the magazine is a reflection of food and drink culture, via the words and opinions of those that participate in Melbourne’s online publishing. It’s an independent and free publication, funded only through advertising.

XXX’s editorial policy ensures any authors who choose not to be included, for whatever reason, are respected, and won’t be featured. However, the publishers aim to benefit all facets of the food industry, including the independent writers. The hope is Melbourne’s online food community members are excited to be a part of it, support the idea, and simply continue to do what they love doing – taste, sip, snap, talk and write about food culture.

Sincerely
(etc etc)

* Name deleted

Can someone set me straight. It's a new publisher who wants to swipe our blog content, without seeking permission? An opt out not opt in kinda thing? And we should be flattered because " As a result, XXX’s featured bloggers will probably notice a marked increase in traffic to their sites".

Copyright issues anyone?

Update: the publisher assures me that they seek only to link to a blog post not the content. So it seems the punter will be flashing their smart phone at the code in the freebie if they see a reference to something they like the sound of? Interesting.