The first time I ate these corn fritters, Anna and Madi made them for me and Addison for breakfast on the deck at my mum’s about ten summers ago. We had the house to ourselves and the weekend stretched invitingly and sunnily before us.
I love the deck at my mum’s. We moved around a lot as kids but this is probably the house I think of as home; mum and my stepdad still live there. The garden is loosely Japanese style, with a pond, rocks and a weeping cherry and there’s no fence that separates that from the old part of the cemetery that lies just beyond. It’s in the middle of the Auckland suburbs but it has the feel of a much quieter place. In the morning, tuis with their elegant white ruffs make a lovely commotion in the Puriri tree outside.
I’m pretty sure the fritters were served with a tomato salsa but after that, Addison adapted them for himself and they became quite a staple of his repertoire, sans the salsa. I give my adaption of his recipe and usually serve them with shoyu as he always did, unless I’m feeling particularly motivated.
Where’s home to you?
Corn Fritters
You can add or lose some of the vegetables to no ill effect as long as they are diced to a similar size if the former, I just think this mixture makes the fritters a pretty colour. This will feed 2 hungry people – but it will double or triple just fine. I also took the liberty of adding some leftover diced mozarella in the photos since I needed to use it up but that was gilding the lily. These are great, hot, cold and in between.
1 x 340 gram can of whole kernel corn, drained (mine contained 285 grams of corn)
6 heaped tablespoons plain flour
1/2 capsicum, diced very small
1/2 carrot, diced very small
1/2 red onion, diced
3 or 4 diced mushrooms
2 tablespoons minced parsley
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
A tablespoon of shoyu
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
Plenty of pepper (out of a grinder, natch)
Heat a pan over moderate heat.
Put everything in a bowl and mix well.
Add a tablespoon or so of whatever oil you like to the pan and add the batter, taking care not to over fill the pan or let them join into one mega-fritter. Don’t worry that the batter doesn’t hold together well, once they are cooked the fritters will be fine, though like any pan thing (for want of a better term: I mean pancakes, crepes, fritters and hotcakes) you may be angry with the first one.
Serve with salsa, shoyu or a selection of the two if you manage not to ravage them all as they come out of the pan.
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These remind me of being little. My dad used to make corn fritters with little cubes of corned meat in them as well. I’m going to have to try it out again, and this looks like the recipe to go with.
Home for me is a bit “nowhere”. When you live in a few different places growing up, pieces of you end up belonging in those places. You will always be divided. You will always miss somewhere.
What gorgeous little fritters! I kinda miss my parent’s garden/yard now that I don’t have one of my own…
This sounds very versatile Sasa! :D I like the idea of being able to change the vegetables depending on what one has. Home is in Sydney – at least for the moment! :D
I love corn fritters. We had them for lunch yesterday. When I was a teenager and staying with friends I made them for her family. Her Dad complained all afternoon about having indigestion from my corn fritters. Later that day, they discovered he was actually having a heart attack. Fortunately he survived to laugh about it later.
Sasa where in NZ did you live?
God, a heart attack! How much oil did you use? ;P
I lived in Auckland…JAFA ;P
Actually I don’t think I was responsible for the heart attack. :)
I spent 30 years in Auckland. We lived Mt Eden, Whangaparoa, Takapuna. My boys went to Rosmini College in Takapuna.
Phew! ;P My grandparents live in Whangaparaoa so I’ve spent lots of time there :)
One day on Stanmore Bay beach I chatted with a NZ woman who lived in Japan and was visiting her parents at Whangaparoa. My son Chris, who is 29, played on the beach with her daughter and I’m wondering if it was you. It would have been around 1981/82.
wow! i love these kinds of snacks! perfect, versatile and full of flavor!
I love recipes like this that you can make any time and you can use to empty out the stuff in your fridge that might otherwise not quite make it into a dish in time. Very good stuff to know.
Home to me is Washington DC. I have lived here my whole life, and my parents are still here too. I’ve traveled a lot, both domestic and international, but DC has always been my home.
Nice cuts on the carrots :) It’s good to see that people still have knife skills. Now…the part that caught my eye the most on this recipe was the shoyu. I can’t even picture the flavors together. I almost always have some sort of fried corn something on my menu, but with shoyu? Mine are always latin, or Southern American (hush puppies, fritters, arepas, etc, etc.) That offers a lot of opportunity to fuse a dish a bit more. I will be trying that soon. Thanks for the suggestion. :)
Thanks ^^ I used to have a chef that made me turn potatoes (old school!) Yeah, the shoyu doesn’t really give it an Japanese flavour as such, just a saltiness with more depth I guess…I was actually thinking about the whole American South thing with corn when I wrote this (a thing I love the sound of but have no idea about), I’ll have to give *that* a try.
The question of home is an interesting one. I’d like to think I could stay in Berlin for the rest of my life as it’s the first place where I’ve really felt accepted precisely because of its divided history and bohemian poorness. Anything goes. But the house where I grew up in England is still something very powerful for me and I’m glad to return there so I can rediscover parts of myself left behind. Your recipes are always so tasty and inspiring, I’ve never made corn fritters but these are irresistible.
Yum, such delicious memories…
x
Corn fritters! God we used to eat them all the time. Yum. You have inspired me to try them again.
Hello there! I just stumbled on your site and I can’t wait to dig through the archives – this recipe looks amazing, as does the one featured on Smitten Kitchen right now. Thank you for your blog!!
These corn fritters are wonderful; I have no idea what that Japanese ingredient is but I will just skip it and still make them!
Home to me is Beirut even though I have lived mostly away for over 30 years!
Shoyu is Japanese soy sauce :)
oh, yum, how i love corn fritters…
Awesome! I made some recently as well. One of my favourite vegetarian dishes :)
Love corn fritters, it is what I usually get at barbies in NZ because I am a veggie, and I am glad for them :-)
Funny when you move around a lot and someone asks you where you consider home, I call both Muriwai and Liverpool home, bit confusing for some people. I love corn fritters too with lots of Indian spices. We were drinking Japanese plum wine at the weekend which I bought last year in Kyoto, what would you suggest making out of the plums at the bottom of the bottle or does one just eat them?
These fritters look fantastic! I love all of those chunky veggies. And these actually remind me a bit of home… my stepdad makes wonderful corn fritters, spicy with plenty of jalapeno. My parents moved out of the house I grew up in, which was strangely hard since I haven’t lived there in more than 10 years, but still… sad!
just made these today. i undercooked them so they were perfect on the outside, a little gummy and mealy on the inside. :( will have to try them again!
I was born in South Korea, went to Germany as a child, went back to Korea as a teenager and went back to Germany again. During this time school and family’s flat changed countless times. When I was younger, it always bothered me to lack an exclusive home(town) but after I settled down in Berlin on my own, I felt that in this city it didn’t count much where you come from or where you were going to and now I don’t care much about it either :=)
Crazy! It might well have been, I would have been 2 then.
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