Quick(er) Zucchini and Potato Fritters

Juggling work and the daycare drop-off is tiring, and when I get home I'm less than inspired to cook. I have tried saving myself some hassle by ordering a vegetable box online, but was really disappointed with the first one I tried. Even though it's the middle of summer, I was given loads of potatoes, onions, and carrots, and only small amounts of interesting veg. (What do you do with eight mushrooms? EIGHT!)

Amongst my kilogram of potatoes was a single zucchini. What to do, what to do... fritters! But I couldn't face cooking the potatoes, mashing them, etc etc. And I vaguely recalled totally failing to make a swiss dish involving frying raw potatoes. So I figured someone else must have gone through this before. And someone had! So here's something loosely based on their ideas -- the main thing to mimic was thoroughly squeezing the liquid out of the potato (not so much the zucchini, surprisingly) before you start.

Ingredients

• 2 medium potatoes
• 1 zucchini
• 4 spring onions
• 50-75g feta cheese
• 1-2 tbsp flour
• 1 tsp paprika
• a handful of finely-chopped herbs, especially mint and parsley
• 1 egg, lightly beaten

Grate the potatoes using a tower grater. Put in a colander or sieve and squeeze the liquid out: I find using my hands is the best way to do it. Shred the zucchini in the same way. Finely dice the spring onions and crumble the feta cheese. Combine all of the ingredients in a mixing bowl. Fry dollops of the mixture in olive oil, pushing down with a spatula to make them no more than 1cm thick, so the potato cooks well; fry 3-4 minutes each side, until golden and cooked through.

Spiralizer Week: Day Two: Zucchini Noodles with Chicken, Feta and Spinach

Day two saw me head to my usual Tuesday night Sh'Bam exercise class, so I was in need of a little more protein than a vegetarian meal would provide. Earlier in the day I bought a whole chicken and diced the breasts, so we could easily put this together after my class. (Oh, things that are going to be impossible when I am working in the office again!)

I have no idea what cuisine this was supposed to be, I just nabbed it from this blog. I replaced the spinach with sweet potato leaves from my garden, since they are totally out of control, and are much tastier and less soggy than spinach. Overall it was pretty tasty, if not super-memorable. The noodles are still fun!

Mushroom, Spinach and Feta Pizza

New toppings for a classic pizza! I used a slightly spicier tomato sauce by adding a pinch of chilli pepper flakes to our usual recipe at the start, so it became imbued with a lovely warmth. The sauce went straight on the base, then sliced and sauteed field mushrooms and finally cubed goat feta - the sharpest we can find in Australia. After 15 minutes, we threw on a handful of spinach for the final five minutes' baking in order to gently wilt it and bring out the earthy flavour. A quick season and it was ready for devouring.

Maybe a little bit more than a handful of spinach...

Beetroot and Feta on Cabbage & Pesto Pasta

This isn't going to inspire anyone to new heights of cooking, but it did come out rather prettily. I simmered a couple of peeled, cubed beetroot, toasted some feta and rosemary, and served over some al dente pasta stirred through with blanched, shredded Savoy and a very good tub of pesto from the deli. A nubbly conglomerate of odds and ends from the fridge.

Courgette and Potato Cakes with Carrot and Bean Salad

It's "winter" here - absolutely nothing has changed in terms of weather, which is still a glorious sunny 25-30C, but our electricity supplier has flipped 'peak' time from 11am-5pm to 5pm-9pm. So generally I avoid using the oven in the evenings, or at least I will until the house gets cold enough that I'd like a little extra heat. (It happens. For like... two or three days in the year!) So I've avoided making these little cakes because they're definitely best done in the oven, and ours is a bit of a power-hungry monster.

At the weekend the electricity is cheap all the time, so today I figured, why not? They're originally a Delia recipe, but over the years I've made a few modifications until they worked well for me.  We served them with a simple salad made from a carrot and a tin of beans, with a mustardy-garlic dressing and a few coriander leaves. Can you tell that I'm not doing the shopping until tomorrow? :)

Ingredients:

• two large courgettes
• two medium potatoes
• a 200g block of feta
• a medium bunch of mint
• one egg
• 3-4 tbsp flour
• salt and black pepper

Using a large tower grater, grate the courgette into long strands. Sprinkle over a tsp of salt and pop them into a sieve over a bowl or saucepan, then put a plate on top and something heavy on top of that. Leave for at least ten minutes, preferably for an hour - green water will start dripping out of the sieve. Squeeze the remaining water out with your hands - I got about 300ml just from two courgettes! Ignore Delia's advice to put them in a teatowel... you will NEVER get all the bits of courgette off the towel!

Meanwhile, grate the potatoes, then blanch in boiling water in a saucepan for five minutes. Drain thoroughly, washing once with cold water to cool them down. Strip the leaves from the mint and wash if necessary. Crumble the feta. Add the courgette, potato, feta, mint and egg to a large bowl, season well with black pepper, and sprinkle with the flour. Combine together with a couple of forks. If there is still excess water or the mixture is not coming together, add some more flour.

Between your palms, make little cakes out of the mixture - I made 12 with the above ingredients. Put on a baking tray and roast for 45 minutes in a 200C oven, until golden brown and crispy on the outside.