Plantain Chronicles II

Educating ones self is a continuous process. Today's recipe is a modification of the recipe in the first Plantain Chronicles. The difference is using panko crumbs to coat the plantain balls.

Panko crumbs is something I always felt was posh and never found in my local grocer here in Doha. Today I decided it was high time I made mine. 

Panko Crumbs

Ingredients:

4 slices of day old white bread, crust removed and cut into small squares

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200 oC. Blend the crumbs in a blender using the pulse function until all the bread has been shredded. Avoid making fine crumbs.

Place the crumbs in a flat oven tray and toast for about 4 minutes. Shake the tray after 2 minutes to make sure all sides of the crumbs are toasted. 

Plantain Balls with Panko Crust

Ingredients:

1 very ripe Plantains

1 tbs crushed chill

1 Knorr Cube

3 tbs of plain flour

3 tbs of fine breadcrumbs
1 cup of flour, for coating
2 eggs, beaten, for coating
1 cup of Panko crumbs, for coating
½ cup of grated Parmesan 

stuffing of your choice e.g. boiled egg, cheese, prawns

Method:

Mash the plantain until there are no lumps and mix in the chill and knorr. Add the flour and breadcrumbs and combine thoroughly. What you want in a thick dough that would hold so you may need to add more flour. Using the boiled egg as the stuffing, fold the plantain dough around the egg, cover the whole egg. For other types of stuffing mentioned, flatten a table spoon of plantain dough in your palm, place stuffing prawn in the centre and fold into a ball.

Place one stuffed plantain ball in a bowl of flour and coat it thoroughly with flour, dust off the excess. Return the flour coated ball in to the a bowl containing beaten eggs and then lastly coat with the panko crumbs combined with the Parmesan.

Repeat this for the rest of the stuffed balls. Deep fry them until they are golden brown and crunchy. Enjoy with sauce of your choice.

The Plantain Chronicles!

I have always loved plantains but the current love I have for them has taken me by surprise. The past few days, I have found myself in the kitchen in the middle of the night creating recipes using plantains as the main ingredients. I blame 9jafoodie! I have been trying recreate her plantain chips recipe but something always went wrong. I can't manage to find unripe plantain in Doha. And when I do get one that in reasonably close, I can't find a way to cut them so thin. I am rubbish with the mandolin. So I decided to make plantain chips my own way.

I have developed two recipes with the same ingredients, I must admit that one of them happened by mistake! 

Plantain Chips and Puffs

Ingredients:

½ ripe plantain, small cubes
1  tbs plain flour
3 tbs dry fine breadcrumbs
½ tsp chili powder
a pitch of salt
vegetable oil fir frying

Directions:

using a hand blender, blend the plantain in a bowl until smooth. Add all the other ingredients and combine well, it the dough is too wet you can add more bread crumbs. You want to be able to roll the dough out without sticking to the pin. Divide the dough into two, one for plantain chips and the other half for plantain puffs. 

using a rolling pin, flatten half of the dough until its about as thick as a 2 pence coin and the other half should be flattened until it's about thick as 1 ½ of a 2 pence coin. Heat the oil in a medium pan and fry the chips and puffs for about 3 mins or until golden brown.

Serve with pepper sauce.

A Hungry Man...

What is it they say about hungry people again? 

A meal in my home is never a simple thing. Simple rice and stew could take longer than usual because once I enter the kitchen my brain starts to wonder what else I could do to make this simple dish extraordinary. This afternoon though was the wrongest time for me to experiment because AF was hungry. I mean H-U-N-G-R-Y!

I opened the fridge to get out the stew and check if there was any cooked rice left. That's when I noticed the very ripe plantains. I knew that if I didn't cook them then they will end up in the bin. That wasn't going to happen as I had to travel very far to buy them. I thought of the fuel I used up during that journey, ah!

However what  I was planning to do was serious risky business as I had a very hungry man waiting. I quickly put the rice to boil and set out to prepare something with the plantain. I wasn't going to fry them as they had gone past that stage. I suddenly remembered some food porn I had seen on Kitchen Butterfly's instagram page. It inspired me to create my own. She used a ricer to mash up the plantain. I didn't have one of those so I quickly chopped the plantains and as I was adding the other ingredients, I remembered that a cheese grater, the type you insert the cheese in a compartment and rotate the wheel against the actual grater. This would work perfectly.

By the time I had mixed the dough, Af had come into the kitchen twice to ask if I went to the farm to get the rice. I heard him pacing up and down the living room and at one point I heard screams. I ran to the living room to find out what was going on only for me discover he had lost in some game he was playing on his iPad. I knew then I was playing with fire. I quickly served him the rice and stew without the plantain meal, he can have that as a savoury dessert!

Plantain Stuffed Balls

Ingredients:

2 very ripe Plantains

1 tbs crushed chill

2 tbs honey roasted almonds

1 knorr Cube

5 tbs of plain flour

3 tbs of fine breadcrumbs

1 cup of medium sized prawns

Method:

mash the plantain until there are no lumps and mix in the chill, almonds and knorr. Add the flour and breadcrumbs and Combine thoroughly. What you want in a thick dough that would hold so you may need to add more flour. Flatten a table spoon of plantain dough in your palm, place one prawn in the centre and fold into a ball. Do this until you run out of dough. Deep fry them until they are golden brown and crunchy.

'Food' in Love

I think Rihanna is the queen of re-invention. She re-invents her image and her music every time she brings out a new album, you get a feel that she is someone new. And I personally feel she gets better and better every time. The first time she graced our screens she had the "girl next door" look. Now she is anything but that girl! Just take a look at what I mean:

I think she is absolutely gorgeous (no homo!). I believe it keeps life interesting changing and improving an aspect of ones self. The first time I created and tested this recipe I knew wasn’t quite there yet and there was room for improvement. I have given this recipe a fair bit of thought – I know what you are thinking, this girl is obsessed! I confess I am a FOOD ADDICT! For me the plantain mixture was a bit too "wet", I felt it needed to be drier, it needed a bit of crunch. The friends I served it to thought it was perfectly alright though. So maybe this isn't really a re-invention, more of a new plantain recipe. I have been thinking seriously about dying my hair blond though. On second thoughts...

What I have done with this new recipe is to replace the flour with bread crumbs, this holds all the ingredients together. Instead of blending the ingredients together, I mashed the plantain. This gives the whole recipe a rustic feel. I also introduced sausage meat to the mixture and left out any liquids, the plantain and peppers already contain enough moisture. I absolutely love this new recipe I must say. The sweet scent of the plantain mixed with meaty aroma is divine. Even though I could taste all the ingredients individually, I was still able to taste how they came together to make a really superb dish.

M tested this new recipe for me and fell in love with it. I may get her to try the first one and give me her thoughts. If you have the chance to try both recipes please let me know which one is the winner!

Oven Baked Sausage Plantain
Ingredients:
2 Ripe plantains
4 Sausages
2cm ginger
4 garlic cloves
4 tbs Bread Crumbs
1 Scotch Bonnet (Hot Fesh Chili)
1/4 Red or Green Bell Pepper
1/4 Onion
1 tsp coriander
1 Knorr Cube

Preheat the oven to 185 degrees Celsius.

To make it easier for you to mash the plantains, chop them first into very small cubes. In a large bowl, mash the plantain with a potato masher or a wooden spoon. Don't over work it as you don't want it to be too smooth. Finely chop all the vegetables and add to the bowl containing the mashed plantain. Remove the skins from the sausages and add to the plantain mixture. Add the breads crumbs, coriander and knorr cubes. Mix thoroughly. Roll the whole mixture as large sausage in baking paper or foil paper and bake for 30 minutes. I served this with egg sauce.

Money Slow To Enter....

A friend of mine and I went into Harrods just for the fun of it. This was a very bad idea! First of all it was a week before pay day so we were both broke and we were very hungry. Very bad idea I repeat. The clothes and bags looked so beautiful you could eat them and the food looked too good to eat. Why is it that it's when you don't have money everything seem soo lovely and you just have them? We were two professional girls, an engineer and an account manager but still we had to think twice about spending a bit of money for lunch (I hear you ask what did we expect from Harrods, trust me the food wasn't That expensive). And this was on the day the silly tax man announced a 2.5% increase on VAT. Argh! We walked out of there angry and hungry, bad combo!

One my way home I thought what I could cook without spending a dime. I remembered I had plantains that were about to go off (I hate throwing food out especially if I had to walk a long way to get - the day I bought these I was wearing a very long maxi dress and carrying loads of shopping in the sun, in short I suffered!). Anyway here is a recipe using ingredients I already had at home.

Ingredients
2 ripe plantains, 2cm ginger, 4 garlic cloves, 4 tbs sieved plain flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 2 tsps chili powder, 1 tbsp coriander.

Preheat the oven at 180 degrees. Blend all the ingredients together in a blender except the coriander. Add some water if required. Pour the mixture in a bowl and add coriander and mix properly. Add more salt if needed. Line 4 ramekins with butter and pour the mixture in them and bake for about 30 minutes or until they are golden brown on top. Serve with egg sauce. And enjoy...

I am not sure of what to call this recipe.. help!!!