I think mine looked better than these from the Greggs website…

Picked up the award for the best two course meal served in our house ever last weekend…just one of those chance ideas that rolled through the in-box a few weeks ago, curried kumara fritters with smoked salmon…simple as a simple thing to prepare…

Serves: makes 12 large fritters so 2-4 people depending how hungry they are – this is very filling…

Preparation Time: 5 minutes

Cooking Time: 7 minutes

Ingredients

• 4 cups grated kumara (approx 500g)
• 1 red onion, finely chopped
• 1 Tbsp Curry Powder (medium strength)
• 4 eggs, lightly beaten
• Natural Sea Salt, freshly ground
• 2 Tbsp oil
• 125g sour cream
• 100g sliced smoked salmon
• 2 spring onions, finely chopped

Method

Place the kumara, red onion, curry powder, eggs and sea salt in a bowl. Mix well.

Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Place tablespoonfuls of the prepared mixture into the pan; cook for a few minutes on each side or until the fritters are cooked through and golden brown.

Serve as a layered stack, alternating the fritters, sour cream and salmon slices.

Garnish with spring onion, slamon and a dob of sour cream on top.

Serve with salad.

I had enough smoked salmon left over for a decent omelette for two the following night – Carmen felt that the salmon tatse didn’t quite come through enough so I’d recommend using the fill 100 grams of salmon across the four stacks.

Dessert was pears poached in red wine from our very old ‘Favourite Desserts’ book (also the home of our world-famous in Raurimu butterscotch pudding):

Serves: two

Preparation Time: 5 minutes

Cooking Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 pear, peeled, core and quartered
• 1 1/2 cups red wine (a stronger brew can be made safely with up to 2 1/2 cups of wine)
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 4 whole cloves
• An inch of cinnamon stick

Method

Dissolve sugar in wine and water  in a saucepan over medium heat.

Add pears, cloves and cinnamon stick.

Simmer until pears are cooked through

Remove pears and serve with ice cream. Pour wine juice to taste over ice cream.

The remaining juice makes a great semi-mulled wine served hot on very cold nights.

The original recipe called for six whole pears coooked whole with proportionally more ingredient – the first time I made this, the wine juice only penetrated less than 1/4 inch into the pears which didn’t really pick up the flavour plus there were way too many pears for just the two of us. This time we found that half a pear each i.e. two quarters with ice cream was heaps especially after the fritters…