Sweet veg cutlets
These cutlets have no added sugar. The recipe uses vegetables which are naturally sweet. The finished cutlets are quite unusual - you might even say even exotic. They have a nice sort of caramelised sugar taste after they've been fried. The colour is lovely too. Try them once at least. You might be pleasantly surprised. Like a few of the other cutlet recipes, this one is good for when you have a load of left-over cooked rice.
The list of ingredients calls for finely chopped, cooked carrot. Now, my favourite way of doing this is to simply put whole, unpeeled carrots in a pot, cover them with water and simmer them until a knife will go into them easily. This is time consuming - carrots take ages to cook this way - but it has its advantages. If they are young carrots you won't need to peel them. If they are old, a quick scrape with a knife will do and the greatest advantage of all is that it is both quick and safe to cut them up finely. Raw carrots are extremely dangerous when it comes to slicing them thinly and it takes ages to do one carrot.
Plan ahead and put your carrots on to cook before you do anything else. If you really don't want to do this, peel them and cut them into fairly large pieces. They'll cook quicker and you can cut them smaller when they've cooked. Whatever you do, don't try to cook finely chopped raw carrots. The colour and all the vitamins will seep out into the cooking water along with the taste and there's a good chance of you joining the ranks of the digitally challenged. Red peppers on the other hand are easy to chop up when they're raw.
Ingredients
3 mugs of cooked rice
2 cooked carrots, finely chopped
2 red peppers, finely chopped
170g (half a tin) of sweetcorn
2 tablespoons of flour
A small bunch of fresh coriander
Salt
Vegetable oil
Stir-fry the red pepper in a very small amount of oil (one or two dessertspoons). After a few minutes turn the heat down, cover the pan and leave the pepper to soften for ten minutes. Put the rice in a pot (the flat bottom is important) and give it a good mash. I use a wooden instrument with a thin handle and a broader flat head. It's perfect and using it gives me a lot of satisfaction . You could use a potato masher or the bottom of a coffee jar. The rice doesn't have to be beaten to a paste, just smashed up a bit. Stir in the other vegetables and give it all another quick mash, then stir in the salt, flour and chopped coriander.
Form cutlet shapes with your hands and dust each in a plate of flour before laying in a frying pan of hot oil. You might find that this cutlet mix is a little awkward to handle. Rice mixes can be a bit sticky and tend to fall apart. Once they're in the pan however they'll firm up in no time, so getting them in there is the only tricky part. Don't worry about the shape too much. Just toss them in and you can press them flat with a spatula while they're cooking. About five minutes each side on a medium heat should do them. These cutlets are great in a sandwich with a lettuce leaf and some mustard.