Saturday, January 8, 2011

Savory Southern Snack: Hush Puppies

I've made them before but that was before this blog existed. So last weekend on 31st December 2010, when all of Holland was frying our traditional 'oil balls', I was in for a more savory Souther snack: Hush Puppies.


Now as you may know, I don't really use traditional recipes or measure anything. I just cook by my gut-feeling. But if I were to give measurements, I would say this is the recipe to stick to:

1 cup white flour
1 cup cornmeal (or polenta)
2 eggs, beaten
1 onion, diced
Some salt, pepper, paprika (powder), onion powder and garlic powder
A bottle of sunflower oil for frying

Heat the sunflower oil in a small pot. Be careful if you are not using a deep frying pan. Mix all ingredients in a bowl. Once oil is hot enough (you can test this by dropping a small piece of bread into the oil; if the oil starts bubbling it is ready) spoon little drops of the batter into the oil. You can use a tablespoon for larger hush puppies or a teaspoon for smaller drops.



When the hush puppies are golden brown, remove them from the pot with a spoon and let rest on a plate with kitchen towel to absorb the grease. Sprinkle a bit of salt and pepper.


Best served when hot.



A Very Yummy Thanksgiving

I know, I know. Thanksgiving was in November, not January. On Thanksgiving I cooked myself a lovely meal, but I just never got around to writing it down in this blog. Hence, I hereby present: The belated very yummy Thanksgiving meal and blog!

In anticipation of Thanksgiving I assigned my students (the cute 12 year olds) the task to write a report on the American celebration. As their English is still insufficient, most of them had directly copied the information from Wikipedia (which I was fine with, by the way, I did not expect them to be able to write a full report after three months of English), but some reports were very interesting (bits about pilgrims, turkey and even Black Friday) and full of nice imagery of the holiday.

For my own Thanksgiving dinner I prepared turkey breast with cranberry sauce, caramelised onions, chestnut and orange stuffing and mashed potatoes.






It was very yummy indeed!

Happy Thanksgiving!