Sweet Chili, Corn, and Zucchini Fritters

This week's entry comes from my cookbook, "Now You're Cookin': Vegetarian" (link here). It seems like a simple recipe, but I actually found it quite challenging and needed some help from my mom. I'll explain later how I remedied the situation and hopefully, should you attempt to make this, you can avoid my mishaps.

Sweet Chili, Corn, and Zucchini Fritters

Ingredients:
14 ounce can whole kernel corn
2 medium zucchinis
1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon sesame oil (I happened to have this in my pantry, but if you don't want to buy it for just one recipe, use vegetable oil)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 cucumber
1/4 cup and 3 tablespoons sweet Thai chili sauce (I actually only had the 1/4 cup and didn't want to run out to buy more, so I subbed the 3 tablespoons for Sweet 'n Sour sauce)

Serves: 3 or 4 (Calories: 114 per fritter); Prep time: 20 minutes; Cooking time: 20 - 30 minutes

Directions:
1. Drain the corn. Trim the zucchini and grate it coarsely.

2. Mix the corn, zucchini, flour, baking powder, eggs, milk, and 3 tablespoons Thai chili sauce together until the batter is smooth(ish).

3. Mix oils together (or not, it's your choice) and heat in a frying pan. Cook quarter cupfuls of the corn mixture in hot oil until golden and cooked on both sides.

4. Cut cucumber in half and remove seeds (I used a spoon for this). Cut into 1/2 inch cubes and mix with 1/4 cup Thai chili sauce.

5. Serve cucumber mixture with fritters.

Recipe review: As far as the actual cooking goes, here's where I went wrong. First, I got confused about the Thai chili sauce, and put the wrong amounts in the fritters and topping. Second, I didn't coarsely grate the zucchini, I used a food processor and got it finely grated. That doesn't seem like a big deal, but it really is. The finer grate made my batter too runny. I had a hard time forming and flipping the fritters and the first three ended in disaster:

They're in the corner of shame. I remedied it by adding more flour to my mixture. My mom thinks in the future, it might also be easier to flip them if they're on a griddle instead, so keep that in mind. As for the taste, they were delicious. We actually all agreed that the cucumber was unnecessary. I went even further and thought they were best without the Thai chili sauce on top (it is in the batter, after all). When I ate one plain, it tasted like a Frittata, which is never a bad thing.

Happy eating.

Cheers,
Emma

P.S. Today's cute animal photo is my kitty Tobey.