Sunday, June 28, 2009

Ghetto eats, Pacific NW style.

Sunday night, I try to knock out a few dinners so life will be a little easier during the week. It's been a while since I foodblogged...er, non-bento foodblogging anyway...so I'm sharing with you a super simple kiddo favorite. Well, it's a Little Man favorite anyhow. Unless it starts with chicken and ends with nugget, it's not even very high up on Baby A's list. One day she'll discover that all those chicken nuggets she thought she was eating were really soy tricken nuggets and she'll become a vegan and cooking for her will be even more of a pain in the ass, but whatever. I'm prepared for that.
Hello lovers, my Salmon Croquettes.
As far as I can tell, croquette is a fancy name for patty that you get to use if you toss some potatos in the patty. Or maybe it really just means patty and I should rename these my Pretentious Salmon Patties. Ingredients (it's a short list): Salmon Potato Onion Garlic Eggs Garlic salt Pepper Soy sauce Parsley White corn meal Canola oil Start with the salmon. This is very important - use the foil packs. I made the mistake of buying the cans once, and by the time you're done picking out all the little soft, cooked bones and peeling off the skin, you might as well have paddled up the Columbia in a kayak, snatched the salmon out of the water with your bare hands and cleaned the fish with tools you stole from those Geico guys. Boil the whole potato until it's nice and soft. Set aside to cool. For a while. Unless you'd prefer to live life without fingerprints. If you're plotting the perfect crime, feel free to break right into that spud. Toss two packs of salmon in a bowl and break it up with a fork. Peel off the skin at one end of the potato and mush about 1/4 to 1/3 of the potato over the salmon in little clumps. Mince some onion (maybe 1/4 cup) and some garlic (coupla cloves) and throw them in the bowl. Crack 1 1/2 to 2 eggs in. Sprinkle in as much garlic salt, pepper and dried parsley as you like along with about 1 tbsp of soy sauce. Mix, cover the bowl and stick it in the fridge for a while to firm up.
What did you do to my chicken nuggets?
After a while, start up some canola oil over mediumish heat. Form little lemon sized balls, coat them with white corn meal and then smush them down into patties...wait, croquettes, dahling and recoat with white corn meal. Set down in the oil, fry until the sides start to brown and flip.
Fry in a roiling sea of fatty azz oil.
And, just for good measure, I threw together a bento to take to work. I miss the bento. I've been pining over From Japan, With Love, coveting all the super cute stuff that I have no use for right now anyway.

2 comments:

Safiya said...

My younger sister and I are in love with your bento boxes! Since seeing them she always looks a little disappointed with the lunch boxes by mum prepares for her. We have both vowed to make bento boxes for our future children!

Jennifer said...

Thankee! A horrible stomach bug sidelined me this week, but I fully intend to get back into it for little man's second week back to school!