Tag Archives: vegetarian recipes

Curried Corn Fritters

Posted on by

Curry Corn Fritter
Last week I posted a recipe for Curried Cream Corn and today I want to share with you what to do with the leftovers! In our house, we still have leftovers on a regular basis. With just two adults and one three year old who eats like a bird, we don’t usually use up side dishes in one meal. I transform a side dish into probably four different things by the time the week is over. I might start off with simple roasted corn at the beginning of the week and by the time it’s gone, it’s become part of a chicken wrap, a hash, an omelette, a souffle or perhaps just made into baby food.

With this curried cream corn, however, the flavors stack up perfectly to become a tasty little fritter. This is another recipe where I just eyeballed the amounts, but I think it’s pretty fool proof and I do have amount approximations for you to follow. Serve these fritters with a bit of sour cream and a side salad for a light(ish) Meatless Monday!

Curry Corn Fritters

Curried Corn Fritters

  • Servings: about 12 fritters
  • Print

2 cup of leftover curried cream corn
1 cup flour
1 egg
chopped chives
1/2 tsp kosher salt and fresh ground pepper
ooo, jalapenoes would be good!

In a large bowl, combine your creamed corn, flour, salt and pepper, egg and chives (and whatever else you think sounds good!) and whisk to combine. You may need more flour depending on how much liquid your curried cream corn still had remaining. You may have cooked off more than I did, so depending on how liquidy it is, add a bit more flour so that your mixture resembles thick cake batter. If it is dry, thin it out with a little milk.

Heat olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium high heat until it shimmers and drop the fritter batter by tablespoons and let them fry about 2 minutes per side, or until dark brown on both sides. Remove and let them drain on a paper-towel lined baking sheet and keep them warm in a 200 degree oven until you’re ready to serve.

Advertisement

Green Beans with Toasted Pecans and Blue Cheese

Posted on by

Green Beans with Toasted Pecans and Blue Cheese
I’m on a quest to serve up vegetables in a different way each week.  It’s not a New Year’s resolution or anything like that, but just a general promise to be more dedicated to making vegetables enticing.  So often I just rummage through my fridge or freezer and half heartedly throw a vegetable alongside whatever we’re having for dinner.  And I cook them the same way every time.  So every trip I make to the grocery store, now, I grab a would-be-boring vegetable and resolve to make it more interesting than my standard roast-everything method.

Last week I did this with green beans.  I usually boil them in salted water until they are tender (not squeaky!) and then brown a little butter and toss them.  It’s fine.  It’s just what I always do!  So this time, I boiled my green beans, set them aside and then tossed in some toasted pecans and blue cheese crumbles and a few dried cranberries and got everything all nice and warm and it was totally delicious. In fact, it was more exciting than the main course!  The best part – it was quick and easy and shocked us out of the same ol’ routine.  Not bad for a green bean.

Green Beans with Blue Cheese and Toasted Pecans

Green Beans with Pecans and Blue Cheese

  • Servings: 4-6 as a side
  • Print

  • 1 lb fresh green beans
  • 1 cup toasted pecans, roughly chopped
  • 1/4 cup blue cheese crumbles
  • 1/4 cup dried cranberries
  • salt and pepper to taste

In a large pot of adequately salted (that’s about 1/8 cup salt per stock pot.  Or more.  Tastes like the ocean, at least) boil green beans until tender.  Your teeth should not squeak when you chew them! Strain the green beans and set aside.  In a large skillet, toast the pecans until fragrant, and then toss in the green beans, blue cheese, cranberries and a dash of salt and pepper. Add a splash of olive oil if they seem too dry, but depending on your blue cheese, you may get enough oil from it to coat the beans nicely.  Don’t let your cheese burn!

Classic Bruschetta

Posted on by

bruschetta
It’s nice to know an Italian.  They have the goods on traditional recipes and the right way to process a bumper crop of tomatoes.  I have such a friend, Jennifer, and this year, fortune smiled on her plants and she started to get WAY more than she could use and process on her own.  So she asked if I wanted some. (huzzah)  Since that same fortune didn’t happen to fall on my plants this year and my crop looked more like a handful of marbles, I enthusiastically said YES (plus, what crazy person turns down garden tomatoes?!)  I was so happy we could finally make our homemade BLTs before the last whiff of summer is completely gone.  I made a wonderful, basic tomato sauce (recipe coming soon) and canned it for the winter and with the rest of the tomatoes she brought, I saved two for our BLTs and the rest I asked her for her favorite bruschetta recipe.

She told me that there wasn’t really a recipe, but that this was how her granddad always made it and those kind of recipes are my favorite, anyway.  In the spirit of handing down family recipes, I’m not going to list quantities. I’ll basically give it to you like she gave it to me – the taste and adjust method!  If you have any tomatoes still coming off the vine (as many of us in this region do) then I hope you enjoy this recipe! If your crop is done, then look for the ripest plum tomatoes you can find in the grocery store.  We served this with Matt’s plain country bread, and honestly, it was the best meal I’d had in weeks.  Sometimes, nothing beats pure and simple.  Thank you, Jen, for sharing your tomatoes and your recipe with us – we benefited greatly from both!

bruschetta 3

Classic Bruschetta
makes a good amount

Dice up a few, ripe, plum tomatoes.  Add in minced garlic, a nice pour of good olive oil and add in a handful of shredded fresh basil.  Mix to combine and then add in a generous grating of fresh Parmesan cheese and adjust the seasoning to your liking with salt and garlic powder.  Serve on toasted baguette or just about anywhere you can think to use it!

Vegetable Puff Pastry Pizza

Posted on by

Vegetable Pizza on Puff Pastry
This was lunch for me and Olive, today.  I LOVED it.  We had a random selection of leftover veg in the fridge and my mind always goes the leftover route of omelet or fritatta, but not today.  We had puff pastry in the fridge and a tiny bit of leftover Romesco sauce and so I knew I had a pizza in there, somewhere.  The flavors were amazing and the whole thing took 20 minutes to make (minus the time it took to let the puff pastry thaw out.)  Super winner in my book.

Olive took two bites of one tiny square and declared herself done, not hungry, anymore.  Okay!  I have to roll with things like that.  Inside my head, I think, “What could I offer her that I know she’d eat? Crackers?  Pasta?  Something without kale and asparagus on it?”  But no.  I can not get into that habit or I’ll have the toughest time getting out of it.  In the last few months, I’ve seen Olive eat potatoes of all colors (those purple things on the pizza are potatoes), tomatoes, asparagus, kale, carrots and cheese.  So in my head, I knew that this wasn’t a challenging meal for her.  She’s had a tough week with food, though, and I knew before I even made it that it would probably tank.  I asked her later how she liked lunch and she said, “It was good! I tried two bites!”  So there you go.  To her it wasn’t a failure.  To me it was because she didn’t inhale it like she would’ve a pizza with just pepperoni and cheese.  Quantity doesn’t always mean quality.  I have to remember that exposure and consistency are the major keys to training up good eaters.  Mere exposure is helpful because then you don’t have the kid that cries at the sight of vegetables on their plate and familiarity breeds comfort, eventually.  Eventually.  Eventually is the result of patience and to be honest, it’s not my strongest attribute.  But I’m learning and I’m trying and I will tell myself on days when my little half-pint only eats four bites all day that she will be okay.  She’ll learn.  Eventually.

unbaked Veggie Pizza
Here’s the pizza raw so you can see better what I found in my fridge to add:  kale rubbed with a bit of olive oil, leftover roasted root vegetables, leftover grilled asparagus and half a tomato.  The sauce was our leftover Romesco sauce and I put all this on top of one sheet of frozen puff pastry.  Puff pastry is flawless.  Super fancy-seeming lunch in 20 minutes.  I’ll take it!

Veggie Pizza

 

Vegetable Puff Pastry Pizza
serves two as a main or 4 as an appetizer

One sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed
2 TBS tomato sauce or Romesco sauce
Any toppings you like.  I used:
1/2 cup chopped kale
1/2 cup chopped (already cooked) asparagus
Half a tomato, cut into wedges
1/2 cup (already roasted) potatoes and carrots
1/2 cup shredded Italian blend cheese

On a rimmed baking sheet, spray with oil and lay out your puff pastry to thaw.  When thawed enough to unfold, spread it out and roll it out bigger on each side to be about 1″ longer all the way around.  Spread your sauce and then sprinkle the cheese to cover it well.  Arrange your vegetables and coat the kale in a little bit of olive oil and rub it into the leaves to soften them up.  Bake in a 400F oven for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

Leftover Veggie Pizza