mushroom fritters

So these fritters came about one evening when I'd invited Jeanette for dinner and wanted to make something with mushrooms because mushroom-hating JaBootaay was out of town.  We went through loads of my cook books, nothing was quite right or we didn't have the ingredients until we saw some write-up on corn fritters with a mushroom variation from Bittman's tome.  

 

ingredients

• 16 mushrooms (button mushrooms were on sale, that's what we used)
• 4 spring onions
• liberal handfuls of fresh parsley
  
• 1.5 cups wheat flour
• 1 egg
• 1 cup of milk
• teaspoon of baking soda
• salt and pepper to taste
  

 

So I started by chopping mushrooms and spring onions.  Jeanette made a batter with two cups of wheat flour, some baking soda, an egg and some milk.  The amount of mushrooms should seem a lot in comparison to the batter, maybe a 2:1 ratio.  It all got served together, so we had balls of mushrooms/onion held together by batter.  These balls get dropped into a couple of inches of oil like this:

Using wheat flour meant it was a little harder to tell when the fritters had "browned" but you can still pretty much just tell when they're done.  Basically just have about 4 on the go at a time.  Your yield should be about 20 or so.  I'd encourage you to make them not that big or they won't cook through.  Also, we served them without a dipping sauce, but I would definitely make up either a marinara or a chutney to serve these with.  They had a nice moist center, and a good one-two flavour punch from the batter and then the mushrooms.  We plated with the second zucchini au gratin I made, and overall they were a good pairing.