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John’s Grandma’s marrow flower fritters recipe

Posted by on Wednesday 7 July 2010 in cooking, growing, recipes | 0 comments

I remember eating some of John’s Grandma’s marrow flower fritters at the very start of our relationship and so they always remind me of that exciting trying-new-things-with-a-new-person stage. I’d been thinking about making some with the courgette flowers we’ve had popping up over the last few weeks – when John’s mum arrived with a bag full of them last week.

While I encouraged our niece Mia to play ukelele and take photos of strange things, John and his mum whipped up a batch of fritters for lunch. Here’s the recipe – but unfortunately it’s a bit vague as it’s not been written down in their family for decades (if ever!) <- suggestions for revisions gratefully received!


Marrow Flower Fritters Recipe

Ingredients (to make roughly 6 palm-size fritters)
Self Raising Flour about 2oz/50g per egg
The aforementioned egg or eggs
About 6 marrow flowers per egg
Some courgette/zucchini (optional but makes it more of a meal)
Pinch of salt
A little black pepper
A little water
Oil for frying

Method
Tear up the marrow flowers into pieces – size is up to you – anything from confetti size to about half the original petal size. If your plants are already fruiting, you can add a thinly sliced courgette (zucchini) to the mix too.

Mix the flour, egg, salt and water together to achieve the consistency of American pancake/drop scone batter – slightly thicker than usual British pancake batter.

Mix the flowers (and courgette, if you’re using that) into the batter.

Heat up some oil in a frying pan for shallow frying. (John & his mum used less oil when they made them and they stuck & burnt a bit.)

Drop a dollop of the batter-with-flowers into the hot oil and fry until golden brown. Flip over to cook the other side and serve immediately. John & his mum ground some more salt onto the top of the cooked fritters but that made them too salty for me – I’d have much preferred more pepper on top instead.

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First courgettes from the garden

Posted by on Monday 5 July 2010 in cooking, growing | 0 comments

courgettes

We picked our first courgettes from the garden on Friday night – the first thing we’ve harvested other than herbs and salad from the garden this year.

They’d been ready for picking for a couple of days but we weren’t ready to eat them – but on Friday, we picked some to have in our Mexican-ish dinner. I thought they tested a bit more courgettey than normal and stayed firmer during cooking. John was too busy cramming his mouth with nachos to say much about anything. Here, they’re frying with some cumin seeds and garlic – yum!

These were the first batch of seeds I planted – an early fruiter, although I’ve lost the seed packet so I don’t know exactly what they were. We’ve got five plants of those though and another five of the second batch, which have flowers on but no real fruit yet — there is a strong possibility we’ll be overrun with courgettes later in the summer!

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