COURGETTE AND BROAD BEAN FRITTERS / FROM PLOT TO PLATE

Hi everyone, welcome to my channel. If you are new my name is Emma, I put up allotment diary videos and this is my new YouTube series called From Plot to Plate where I'm going to show you some of the delicious recipes that I am cooking using all the produce that I grow on my allotment plot. In today's episode I'm going to be cooking some courgette and broad bean fritters. They are honestly so delicious and so super easy to make and they're a great great way of using up all of your broad bean and courgette harvest. If you've not got a courgette harvest just yet but you have planted some courgette plants you are about to be inundated with courgettes and this is just a really great recipe to use them up. The same with the broad beans as well. You can substitute the broad beans just for peas if you don't have broad beans or you don't like them and yeah let's get started and I will show you how I made them. So what ingredients will you need? Well you will need one or two courgettes depending how many you want to make, a handful of broad beans just as many as you can find, a lemon, one medium-sized egg, some baking powder though I didn't actually end up using that and some plain flour, some salt and some cooking oil. So the first thing we're going to do is cook our broad beans and it's actually ridiculously easy to cook broad beans because you don't even need to take the peas out of the pod to cook them. You just cook the entire pod in boiling water. Whacking our broad beans still in their pods, hopefully they'll fit. I thought that might happen. You can cook broad beans without the pods on, you can just take them out the pod and that's really good if you're making like a hummus-y kind of dip with them because it makes them more green and vibrant but these are just going into a a little fritter so it doesn't really matter. So we're just going to let that cook. So while that is cooking we are going to grate up our courgettes basically. So the trick to a really good fritter is basically to drain as much of this moisture as you can. So you can use kitchen towel, I don't have any so I've got a clean tea towel and I'm just basically going to drain the moisture out of them as much as I can. These courgettes hold quite a lot of moisture, I think they're kind of like more like a melon really aren't they and like a cucumber than a squash. Another way you can draw moisture out of courgette is to add a little bit of salt as well because the salt not only helps the flavour but it does draw the moisture out of the vegetable. So that's a little trick. Can you see how lovely and green these broad beans have now gone, how vibrant they are. Such beautiful colours and that's how you know they're done really. So just a few minutes and then you'll see them change colour to this lovely vibrant green and that's it. Take it off the boil, there you come. Right when they've cooled down a little bit we're just going to un-pod them. Now there you come, look at those, they are massive, amazing. Oh my goodness, now I can see why Jack traded the cow for some beans and Jack and the beanstalk. I think I would do the same if I was given these beans. They're pretty epic aren't they, amazing. So we've got all our cooked broad beans in here and they didn't take very long at all, they're absolutely massive. I'm so excited and now basically we're going to make our fritter batter basically and it's very simple, it's kind of like a bit of a pancake. In regards to all these as well, the pods from the broad beans, I haven't found anything online that you can do with these so if you know a way that you can eat the pods let me know but I just tend to throw them away now or compost them because I don't know what to do with them so put those aside for now. We've got our broad beans, let's whack in our courgette. Not like that, all right we're making a complete mess. Now what we're going to do is add a little bit of plain flour or if you're in the USA it's all-purpose flour and I think it's probably just going to be two or three tablespoons, you don't need very much and it's just basically to hold the mixture together. So I like to add the flour before I add the egg because otherwise I find that you just end up adding more and more flour to it and it becomes quite floury so add your flour, it dries up the mixture like this oh god it's all going wrong. I'm squishing up the broad beans as much as I can with this as well but I think it's quite nice to have bigger broad beans in it as well, it will cook, it will stay together don't worry. So now we're going to add our egg which should really hold the whole thing together. We're also going to add a little squeeze of lemon, add a little bit of zinginess. Okay I think I lost a lemon pip in there, got through my fingers, little rascal. Right a little squeeze of lemon, a lot of people add mint at this stage as well you can chop up mint and put it in but I don't actually like it with mint but you can do that and we'll add a little bit more flour and then we'll just swish it together until we start to get something that looks a little bit like a batter that we can actually fry. It's basically where we're trying to get to with this. So this is kind of where we're trying to get to, we're trying to get to a batter that kind of holds together like that so it's sort of holding its shape now so I think we're going to be ready to fry. So we'll just take some of our mixture like this I've done a couple of testers to make sure it's okay and I think it is, it's kind of the same way that you'd make a pancake really. There we go I think we'll do three at a time. It's just a few minutes on each side and you'll find that the courgette will go a really beautiful bright green which is what I love about courgette is that when you cook it it just seems to get greener and greener. There we go I'm losing a broad bean in that one but you can see how the broad beans are kind of like in the other ones and this one just seems to be a bit of an escapee, it doesn't want to be eaten. If you're thinking that this is at all fiddly it's really not, it's actually easier than pancakes because the like the batter is really thick and it really doesn't matter what shape you make, you can try and make a nicer shape but I just whack them all in as you do with everything in life to be honest and knowing when they're done is just when they're nice and golden on the outside and they really hold their shape like this one here it's just really really holding its shape so he's probably very almost done just keep flipping them until they go nice brown this one's got a really nice brown colour now so if you can see that broad beans hanging on look at that he's hanging on like a trooper oh he's we've lost him we'll save him for later I think so they are looking and smelling so good I really really hope you make them because you will not regret it they are so super healthy super delicious really really great little light lunch or dinner what can you eat them with well the truth is there aren't any rules I mean you could eat them with ketchup you can eat them with barbecue sauce if you wanted to anything you want I'm going to show you a really quick hack to do to like mayonnaise to kind of jazz it up a little bit and how I like to basically eat them so to my bowl I'm going to add a good old blob of mayonnaise we're going to squeeze over the juice of half a lemon and then we're going to add some crushed chili flakes and this just depends on your kind of personal spice level really I'm just going to sprinkle those over the top they look so pretty and not mix them in because you really want to get the the kick of them and that's my little hack for a spicy lemony mayonnaise there you have it how to make yourself some courgette and broad bean fritters with a lovely slightly spicy uh lemony mayonnaise dip I hope you enjoyed this video and if you do make this and give it a go let me know because they are honestly so delicious and you will use up all of your courgettes and broad beans in no time at all you can also freeze these and keep them in the fridge for a few days as well to take out and just heat up or just eat cold whatever you want to do um I hope you enjoyed the video if you did let me know and I will do some more cooking videos for you and do subscribe to my channel if you see you next time guys thanks for watching