I found this recipe in the New York Times a few weeks ago, written by Bitty himself, Mr Mark Bittman… love that guy! So this past weekend when I stumbled into the kitchen I had a hankering to give it a go. All the ingredients go into a bowl and the I walked away for the “15 minute” wait for the contents to turn into a “dough” type consistency… Hmmm, curious, mine doesn’t look like a dough, uh oh whoops… upon further investigation it turns out that I had used coarse corn grits instead of fine ground cornmeal… apparently this makes a BIG difference.
Not giving up on wasting an opportunity to fry something, I wildy started throwing in more ingredients, to force a dough to come together and actually the results were pretty great.
Arepas (adapted from Mark Bittman)
1 cup corn grits
1/3 c chopped cilantro
1 c milk + 3 tbsp butter (melted together)
1/4 c chopped scallions
1/3 c shredded mozzarella
1 ear corn, kernels cut from or 1/2 c canned corn
1 jalapeno seeded and chopped
1/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and lastly pour over the heated milk and butter, stir to combine. Press to form hamburger sized patties. Heat a 2 tbsp olive oil in non stick skillet pan fry (about 4 mins) each side, until golden brown.
Yum nice and golden… we ate ours with salsa, sour cream and a twee cilantro garnish.
you can also split them in half and stuff em with a variety of goodies, I think Bitty suggests black beans, I was gonna make some eggs to go in or on top of, but by the time they were ready I couldn’t be bothered.. as above was just fine!
