My Mac has recovered, so its back to France for a few posts.

When we visited the food market at Forcalquier, as mentioned in this post, the missus spotted some courgette flowers for sale. We both remembered seeing Jamie Oliver deep frying some ricotta stuffed flowers on one of his shows, and despite not having a cookbook or any access to the interwebs, we decided to gave it a go.

Without blowing my own trumpet, the results were great, and to be honest it was easier that I thought it would be. The following recipe serves 6 as a small starter (2 flowers each), and although I didn’t at the time (because my father ain’t fan of the spice) I’ve added some red chilli. Not very French, but there you go.

Ingredients

12 large courgette flowers

For the stuffing

250g Ricotta

50g Parmesan, grated

1 tablespoon finely chopped basil

1 tablespoon finely chopped mint

Zest of 1 lemon

1 red chilli, seeds removed, finely chopped

Salt & pepper to taste

For the batter

1 cup 250g self raising flower

1 cup of cold lager

Pinch of salt

Groundnut / rapeseed / vegetable oil for deep frying

Lemon wedges and salad leaves to serve

Method

The first thing to do is make the batter. Sift the flour into a bowl, and then add the beer and salt. The batter should be thick enough to coat your finger, but not stodgy. Now set it aside whilst you prepare the flowers. Resting the batter for this time will help make it crisp.

Now make the stuffing, which is easy enough. Just get all the ingredients listed above and mix them together. Have a taste, and then add salt and pepper if required. Now the hard-ish bit, getting the stuffing into the flowers.

The easiest way to do it is to spoon the mixture into a sandwich bag, and nip off the tip of one of the corners to make a piping bag. The fresher the flowers, the more open they’ll be, and the easier they are to fill. To fill, pick up a flower, and poke the business end of piping bag into the open end of the flower. Squeeze slowly but firmly, gently filling up the flower. The flowers will expand as you stuff them, but be careful not to overfill them or they will split. It’s not a disaster if they do, but better if they don’t. When they are almost full to the top, stop filling and then twist the top of the flower closed.

Now get a heavy bottomed pan of oil on the heat. You’re going to be deep frying the flowers, so the oil needs to be four or more inches deep. After around 5 minutes, test the temperature by dropping in a small piece of bread. If it sizzles and turns brown quickly you’re good to go. To cook, hold each flower by the stalk and dip into the batter. Let it drip off for a second or two, and they ‘lay’ into the oil away from you to prevent splashing. Cook two flowers at a time. Gently turn them in the pan with a slotted spoon. When they are golden brown, after 40 seconds or so, remove from the pan and place in a bowl with kitchen paper to absorb any excess oil.

Repeat the process, cooking the rest of flowers as quickly as you can. As soon as they’re all done, plate up with a few dressed salad leaves and a lemon wedge.

Tags: Basil, Batter, Chilli, Courgette, Flowers, Fried, Lemon, Mint, parmesan, Ricotta, Stuffed

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Lunch, Recipes, Snack, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.