Time to pull out the deep fryer.
I coated hon shimeji mushrooms with a beaten egg, let the excess to drip off and then coated mushrooms in masa harina and green japanese pepper shaking the flour off. 1 min in 350F – excellent stuff. Next time i’ll use the egg white only.
The coating for the shrimp was made with 1/3 cup of flour, 1tbs of chipotle, 1tbs of paprika, 2tsp of salt and some black pepper. 3mins in 350F. Next time – increase the amount of chipotle and salt. And raise the temp to 275F, for 2mins maybe? Still shrimps were excellent especially those heads on.

Dedicated to all of us who still cherish sweet memories of Chebureshnaya on Ploshad’ Nogina, Moscow circa 1970’s-1980’s…

A very simple idea – just a deep-fried meat pie, think samosa… but very hard to get it right, especially the filling that should stay loose w/o turning into a meatball encased in a dough… Very simple but i never had a successful cheburek even at restaurants in large russian diasporas, think Israel, or Brighton Beach…

So now equipped with a powerful deep-fryer and a dumpling press we decided to recreate a snack of our dreams at home.

With no time to make the dough we used Nasoya eggroll skins though they’re too thin and not elastic enough. We got the filling right fortunately.

3/4 lb of fatty lamb (shoulder) and 3/4 lb of sirloin grinded using a plate with large holes, 2 med white onions grinded, 3garlic cloves minced, 1/2 cup of parsley minced, a lot of kosher salt and coarse black pepper, 1/2 cup of ice water.

Used a 5" dumpling press to form chebureki. Deep fried them in 300F for about 6mins. Served with a lot of russian salad of tomatoes, kirby cukes, scallions, dill and sour cream. Heaven!

Deep frying technique got further perfected by revisiting  familiar ingredients – sweet potatoes and salt-n-pepper shrimp. Served with manchego/tomato pate (shown below) and avocado/tomatillo salsa. Total bliss…

Once the deep fryer is on the counter it becomes the point of no return. Inevitably we made salt and pepper shrimp for a dinner tonight. And once again the inspiration came from Zakarian’s Town/Country.

The shrimp coating was of flour, coarse salt, spanish paprika, cayenne and black pepper. We used large brown gulf shrimp. 3mins in 350F seemed ideal – the first batch made for 4mins was slightly overdone. Zakarian suggests to flavor the oil beforehand by baking it in low oven with some spices (ginger/coriander/peppercorns) but IMHO it made no apparent difference.

Oh and though H. loved a side of broccoli roasted with caciocavallo it was an overkill – some cucumber/radish or whatever big and green salad would have been enough.

After more than two years of neglect we pulled the Waring deep fryer out of the garage. The reason was a recipe for sweet potato fries (with a nice lemon-rosemary seasoning) in Town Country book and cravings the recipe induced. When we were in Vegas last year i couldn’t get enough of those at Burger Bar.

Zakarian suggests to cut potatoes into strips of 1/4-1/2" square and 3" long. And then deep fry for about 3mins at 375F. They came out very good though next time we cut then closer to 1/2" rather than 1/4" to achieve a better texture: crispy outside with fluffy inside.

Lebanese kofte recipe came from Mediterranean Street Food: very nice and juicy; the note to the next time is to form kofte into thinner sausages, around 1/2" in diameter though it might be tricky since the mince is quite moist (the moisture is coming from a copious amount of grated onion and parsley – i suppose i might try to squeeze the juice out of the onion after grating…)

Avocado hummus is by Ana Sortun (Spice book). The recipe sounded interesting, the result was nothing to talk about – there are tastier versions of avocado dips so no need to try this recipe again.