Corn Fritters and the Minnesota State Fair

I’ve been too busy eating to bother with blogging. Last week was the Minnesota State Fair. Have you guys seen this shit? The food is out of control. Here is a small sampling of what was consumed…

Clockwise: Fried apple pie with cinnamon ice cream, blueberry basil lemonade, totchos, and a mac n’ cheese cupcake

I’m not sorry about any of it.

But now I’m back, and I am desperate to eat some of the mounds of veggies taking up my refrigerator. I honestly cannot control myself at the farmers’ market – I just buy everything. So I had a dozen cobs of corn sitting in my fridge, and I thought I’d get creative with it. Corn fritters! Sounds easy enough, right? It took all of 1 minute to mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Then it was just a matter of pan frying it into patties. No big deal.

Problem.

I don’t wear pants in the kitchen.

I dropped 3 scoops of batter into the pan, and was totally unprepared for the amount of jumping oil, and corn kernels exploding into the air. I immediately jumped to the other side of the refrigerator to protect my skin. I obviously couldn’t leave those corn bombs on my stove, over medium-high heat. But I couldn’t go back to it without some protection. I decided to suit up, putting on my largest hooded sweatshirt, and a pair of sweatpants. With the hood up, and my hands mostly covered, I ran back to the stove to turn off the heat – then hid behind the fridge until things calmed down. One side was cooked. Time to flip. I repeated all of the above after flipping the fritters over.

The rest of the batter went into the fridge. Fuck this. I’m not going to burn my face off for a blog. (The picture is blurry, because I was terrified.)

Those fritters were fucking delicious, though. I might experiment with cooking the rest in the oven.

Corn Fritters

1/3 cup yellow cornmeal

1/4 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

Handful of parsley (I used dry, but do what you want)

1/3 cup almond milk (or regular, whatever)

2 cups corn

Coconut oil

In a large bowl, mix together cornmeal, flour, baking powder, salt, pepper, and parsley. Add milk and mix until thick. Add corn and mix well. Heat some coconut oil in a large skillet, over medium-high heat. Place scoops of batter into the pan, and flatten slightly. Then take cover! Or be a grown-up and handle it.

Each side needs 3-5 minutes.

Don’t burn your face off.