Southern Vegetable Goodness!!

Tonight's dinner started as I was thinking about those hoecakes.... I was sitting in traffic pondering their crunchy goodness and realized how much they made me think of fritters. There are so many varieties of vegetable fritters out there, so I decided to try to create some based loosely on the hoecake recipe. The resulting fritters are crunchy fried vegan morsels which are not at all healthy! They are pretty tasty though. I decided to "do penance" for the little greaseballs by having a very healthy assortment of vegetables (still in a very southern style) to fill the plate. In the end tonight's menu was:

• Southern-Style vegetable Fritters
• cucumber salad
• roasted tomatoes
• pickled beets with onions
• simple garlicky greens

The Cucumber Salad was the first "recipe" that I remember successfully following as a child. I told my father I would make part of dinner. This is what I made: thinly sliced cucumbers (my favorite little ones are still in season!!) and onions in a weak vinegar brine with salt, pepper, sweetener and dill. Although simple, its still light and refreshing....Yum!

Since my husband doesn't care for dill we had Pickled Beets just for him. He likes them with some sliced onions, basil, oregano, salt, pepper and a mixture of two vinegars (balsamic and red wine) and olive oil.

The Roasted Tomatoes were out of this world. I combined sliced tomatoes with balsamic vingar. olive oil, basil, LOTS of garlic and salt and pepper. Then I roasted everything for about two hours at 300 degrees. Besides some very occasional stirring, the hardest part was chopping the tomatoes. Over the course of two hours the garlic mellowed, the vinegar reduced and sweetened and the basil intensified, leaving a side dish that is more tempting than candy!

The Garlicky Greens were a sauteed combination of baby napa cabbage and spinach sauteed with garlic, salt and pepper. It was really simple, healthy and tasty.

Finally the intended piece du resistance...

Southern Vegetable Fritters

Ingredients:

1/4 cup silken tofu

1 cup unsweetend soy milk

splash vinegar (white, rice or white wine)

1-2 TBS Texas Pete hot sauce

1 TBS nutritional yeast

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1/4 cup orange pepper, finally chopped

1/4 cup corn kernals

small handfull chives, finely chopped

1/8 cup sun dried tomatoes (roasted in oil), chopped

Salt and pepper, to taste

1 tsp baking powder

1 cup cornmeal

peanut oil, for frying

Method:

• Add vinegar to soy milk and let sit aside for a few minutes.
• Using a handmixer, fork or potato masher mash tofu. Combine tofu and surdled soy milk, mixing well to remove all lumps.
• Stir in hot sauce, Nutritional yeast and garlic powder.
• Stir in all vegetables. Add salt and pepper.
• Sift baking powder (or mix with a fork) into cornmeal and then fold this mixture into soy/ vegetable mixture. The resulting combo will be fairly stiff.
• Drop by tablespoon into hot peanut oil to fry.

Notes: You could probably use any comination of vegetables that you prefer. I personally would have liked these spicier in the future and will go heavier on the hot sauce.

In the end the only thing that was missing was some form of okra and we would have had a true southern vegetable review....