Kabocha squash fritters

Happy New Year dear Hoggers!

I wish you all a successful year 2014, and hope that we can continue sharing and discussing vegetarian cooking here! I'm very grateful for the last year, which was also the first year of this blog, and was happy to see so many people reading this blog and commenting on my recipes. So I'm highly motivated to keep posting my recipe experiments in this new year as well and of course keen on improving my vegetarian home cooking. I hope to see you along the way!

If you have read my blog before, you might know that I absolutely love veggie burgers. I have decided to start the year off with a new veggie burger recipe. I used orange kabocha squash as the main ingredient of these fritters and served them with homemade seed rolls and hand-cut chunky oven chips. Kabocha is a sweet winter squash and well worth trying.

Ingredients

1 small kabocha squash

1 large onion

1 cloveless garlic (or 2-3 cloves of regular garlic)

1 cup dry soya mince

1tsp vegetable stock powder

Little fresh thyme

Little fresh parsley

2tsp nettle salt (or herb salt)

1tsp black pepper

3 eggs

2-4tbsp rye flour

Vegetable oil for frying

Method

This is how you can make these easy squash fritters. First of all soak the cup of soya mince in 1,5dl water with added 1tsp vegetable stock powder so that the soya gets hydrated. You can also add a dash of olive oil. After the soaking remove any excess water.

Quarter the squash and remove the seeds, but there's no need to peel the squash. Grate the squash pieces with a cheese grater.

Chop the onion and the garlic very finely and mix them with the soya and grated squash. Season the mix with the fresh herbs, salt and pepper, and also stir the flour in.

Then also add the eggs and mix it all into an even and fairly firm paste. Add only 2 eggs if the squash is quite small, and you can add more flour if needed. The mixture needs to be firm enough to stick together when shallow-fried in oil.

Heat a generous amount of vegetable oil in a pan on a medium heat. Shape small fritters from the mixture by basically just dropping a suitable amount of it straight into the pan and then shaping it a little bit into a round form. Then fry the fritters on both sides until slightly crispy and golden brown on the surface and fully cooked throughout. This takes 5-10 minutes per side depending on the heat of the pan. When you have removed the fritters from the pan, remove the excess oil with kitchen roll.

Serve them warm as suggested above or combine with any tasty bun and salad or cheese and enjoy with beer or cider. These fritters can also be fried and re-heated quickly whenever needed.

Stay hungry this year also!

Your VegHog