These little guys are more like patties than fritters so you can’t say, ‘What?  Fritters again?’

They tasted great but were quite time-consuming to make.  Don’t do what we did, open a bottle of wine and start preparing at 6:00pm.  We sipped as we cooked the cauliflower, toasted the pine nuts, fried the onion, chopped this and chopped that.  Before we knew it, there was a very big dent in the bottle of wine but still no patties.  It was a pretty late dinner and we were a little tipsy by the time we sat down.  Luckily, we weren’t in a hurry and they were worth the effort.

The good thing was that we made 34 fritters (even though the recipe says it makes 16) so it took us a few days to eat them all.  They taste all the better when there is no preparation involved.

The recipe is by Dixie Elliott, Cuisine Magazine, Issue 154, September 2012.  The recipe says it serves 4 but I think it would easily feed 6. We had them for 3 nights with still a couple left over.

Ingredients – Patties:

• 1 large cauliflower, cut into florets
• ¼ cup pine nuts
• olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• ½ cup plain flour
• 1½ cups fresh white breadcrumbs.  I put some stale sourdough in the food processor and processed it until I had coarse breadcrumbs.
• 1 cup parmesan cheese, grated
• ½ cup sun-dried tomatoes, coarsely chopped
• ½ cup basil leaves, coarsely chopped
• 1 egg, lightly beaten

Ingredients – Tomato and Spinach:

• 250g cherry tomatoes, halved
• 2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• 4 handfuls baby spinach leaves

Patties

1. Steam or boil the cauliflower until it is tender. Drain, then mash coarsely. Set aside in a large bowl.
2. Toast the pine nuts in a frying pan over medium heat until golden then chop.
3. Cook the onion in a little olive oil until soft.
4. Add the onion, pine nuts, flour, breadcrumbs, parmesan, sun-dried tomatoes, basil and egg to the cauliflower.
5. Stir until well combined then taste and season with salt and coarsely ground black pepper.
6. Shape ¼ cupfuls of the mixture into patties and set aside.
7. Heat some olive oil in the frying pan. Cook the patties, in batches, until golden and heated through.

Tomato and Spinach

1. Heat a little oil in a separate frying pan. Add the tomatoes and garlic and cook, stirring until the tomatoes soften.
2. Add the spinach and cover.  Cook until the spinach has just wilted.
3. Serve the patties with the tomato mixture.