Friday, October 21, 2011

Potato Cakes, Guacamole and Salsa



Its getting cold here. Got the sniffles already. Drinking lots of fresh juice, stocking up on this season's best fruit and veg, mmm.. Anyhoo here is a nice veg dinner for any kind of season.

Potato Cakes
Ingredients:
  • 3 large potatos
  • some extra virgin olive oil for frying
  • 1/2 tsp salt or to taste
  • 1/4 cup grated pecorino cheese or leave out and increase salt by a tsp
  • 1 or 2 tablespoons of milk or leave out
  • 1 egg whiskedù
  • 1 tsp powdered garlic or omit
  • handful of parsley chopped
Instructions:
  1. peel and chop potatoes. boil in pot of water for about 20 minutes or until soft/mushy.
  2. drain, transfer in a bowl and mash.
  3. mix in milk, pecorino, salt, chopped parsley and whisked egg. mix well.
  4. fry a spoonful of the mix (carefully flattening it out as you scoop it on) on a non-stick pan with some olive oil in medium heat. 
  5. wait 2-4 minutes or until it browns a bit before flipping on the other side. pronto!

Guacamole
There are so many ways to make guacamole. Its super easy what I did here. OR check out an old guac experiment here.
  1. Halve 2 medium avocados, remove seed
  2. trace a grid with a knife and scoop out layer by layer on a bowl (so you get nice even cubes)
  3. add juice of half a big lemon, grate some skin off the lemon (zest), salt to taste, dash of hot pepper powder, and some chopped fresh red onion. mix
Salsa
Another popular condiment and again, so many ways to make it. Here, my simple version
  1. 8-10 of those ripe small salad tomatoes. chopped finely or pulsed in a blender/processor.
  2. stick of celery minced
  3. half a medium red onion minced
  4. mix all together and serve



Plating the whole thing is easy with so much color and texture, its fun to see and even better to EAT. heeee
btw, used some of the free labels from PuglyPixel. ;)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I will make these!! I can't get avocados here in Faenza but I did score some mango chutney last time I was in Florence and would love to try it with these potato cakes. I'm also glad you provided the option of leaving the cheese out - my significant other doesn't like cheese (too bad for me) and so I'll make these that way.
Beautiful pictures you have on your blog by the way!
Tina (bellissimatina from Expats)

Anonymous said...

This looks amazing!! However avocados are hard to find here (just like the above comment) but I'm going to try to give it a go. Thanks for the comments on my blog. Are you another expat living in Italy?

Unknown said...

yeah I am! I live in the Marche area, bouncing between Macerata and Ancona. :) OH by the way I forgot to include: add a dash of black pepper and nutmeg for the potato cakes. hehe.. yeah avocados aren't IN italian season at all but sometimes we find them at this one supermarket and also at indian/asian shops. just had the first artichoke yesterday and been enjoying mushrooms as well <3

Post a Comment