Crunchy Red Cabbage Frittas

Hey guys!

Ingredients

• Red Cabbage (half of one large cabbage)

• Red Onion (one large)

• Saltanas (half cup)

• Nigella Seeds

• Cumin Seeds

• Salt

• White Pepper

• Turmeric

• Onion Powder

• Chilli Flakes

• Chickpea Flour

• White flour

• Palm Sugar

• Oil for Frying (4cm deep in your pan, hot enough to cook a cube of bread to golden)

I have never been a super fan of cooking Thai cuisine, and I set out this year to try some new food ideas and when I was experimenting with recipes, I really loved this take on a bhajee. It’s kind of like a mix of a frittata and what you’d traditionally make with just onions, but it’s crunchier and sweeter and it just works really well with a Thai meal.

So the basis of this recipe is to chop up some red cabbage, chop up a red onion and fry together until they start to soften. I cooked this in vegetable oil but you could use a vegan butter. Add a pinch of salt and pepper but keep it pretty simple until you can start to see transparency in the onions and the cabbage breaks down a tad. This should take about 20 minutes, and what I tend to do is cook it high for about 3, then turn it right down and let it just simmer, moving the pan so nothing sticks for a longer period. It takes a minute but it’s worth it because you don’t get any bitter burnt bits. Then after the texture is right, add your spices. It’s sort of back to front to what I would do with an onion alternative but it works. I added a tbsp of each cumin seeds, nigella seeds, onion powder, white pepper, turmeric and palm sugar. Then turn the heat back up and cook until the aromas fill the room. Take this off the heat and let to cool for at least 10 minutes.

Next in a bowl, you want to mix up some chickpea flour, white flour, water into a paste. I tend to feed this into a bowl dessert spoon at a time, I used 2 of white flour, 1 of chickpea flour. Then added an extra dash of turmeric for colour. Chickpeas act like eggs and it’s traditionally how you do this recipe, so now that you’ve got some cool vegetables, combine them and shape into balls with your hand.

This is the easy part, you’ve now got to put some vegetable into a deep pan and heat up. The way to see if this is ready to fry things is get a piece of white bread, a chunk like 2cm wide, and throw it in. When the bread goes golden, it’s good to go. So that’s your tester! Drop three balls into the hot oil and cook on each side for about 3 minutes. Then what I do, is drain the oil on some kitchen towels and rebake under a 200C oven for 10 minutes before serving. You cook off any of that greasy bit from frying, the crispy texture goes into overdrive and it’s just sweet and delicious.

This is a perfect side dish to anything and you can bring them out for lunch cold, or whatever! Let me know how you get on at home.