These make a nice change from a traditional beef hamburger and as the Woman’s Day hint says ‘fritters can be served in hamburger buns, as a vegetable accompaniment or with a salad’. I’d also suggest serving them between two pieces of toast.
Not everyone in my family likes peas, so I won’t be making this for them, but for those who do it’s certainly a different way to eat them. Not sure I like the idea of the sultanas though, think I’d substitute capsicum or tomato to make it more savoury.
This is a great way to jazz up plain old mashed potato. If you want a gluten free option, leave off the breadcrumbs and just top with either more mozzarella or other cheese.
This creamy chicken salad has a light curry flavour and is especially good made with a barbecued chicken. I’m not sure that I’d serve it on a fruit platter, as we’re not all that keen on fruit with meat. I’d serve it in a salad bowl with a green salad accompaniment and maybe throw in a handful of toasted almonds, but however you serve it it makes a change from plain old cold chicken.
Substituting brown or white rice for bulgur (a wheat product) is a really good way to make this salad gluten free, without losing all the other great flavours of the Middle East.
You can tell this is an old recipe as it gives directions to soak the chickpeas overnight. Of course you can still do that, but it’s much easier now to just buy tinned chickpeas. It makes the recipe a lot quicker and easier to make as you can cut out the first couple of steps and go straight to frying the onions, garlic and pepper.
It used to be quite hard to find recipes that catered easily for vegetarian guests, luckily that’s no longer the case. Years ago I remember searching for an interesting dish to serve my son’s girlfriend for a Christmas lunch dominated by roast pork and turkey. The answer I finally came up with was a stuffed eggplant, don’t think it was quite as spicy as this recipe though. Fortunately she seemed to enjoy it.
When I was growing up cabbage was sliced and boiled and came out quite tasteless. As a result I’m always looking for new ways to cook it, to make it more interesting. The obvious way is to add butter and while that tastes great, dietary wise it’s not such a good idea for some of us. So finding this cutting has been inspiring, there’s some great ideas on it.
The Portugese are fond of potatoes and cabbage, but they’re served separately, which is how I usually serve them. Potato and onion gratin is quite common, but this is the first time I’ve seen cabbage added into the mix. I think it would go well with a steak or roast meat.
Instead of making the pastry case as described in this recipe you could make it as a regular pie or flan. You could even make it without pastry at all by just lightly greasing a pie plate and covering it with fine, dried breadcrumbs before adding the filling. Whichever way you make it the Mediterranean flavors make it a great lunch dish.
