Neauveau comfort food

One of my favorite comfort foods (beyond tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches) is zucchini patties. Of course, this is the best season for them!

Here's my mom's classic recipe:

Zucchini Patties
3 cups grated zucchini
2 eggs
1 cup cracker crumbs (saltines were the only savory crackers we had when I was a kid!)
grated onion
salt and pepper

Fry like pancakes.

This afternoon Kieran and I headed to the store to buy a new broom. We spent all weekend cleaning and conscripted our household broom to the garage...so we needed to buy a new broom for inside the house. Mike also suggested that I pick up something for dinner.

I knew we had some grated zucchini in the fridge from making zucchini patties last weekend so I told Kieran I was thinking about making them again. He informed me that he liked them, but not as much as "crabby patties." (Thank you, SpongeBob!) So we decided that we would try to merge the zucchini patty idea with crab cakes. We bought fresh crab.

I change the classic recipe, because Mike doesn't eat wheat and I try to avoid it when I can. So this is the APPROXIMATE recipe I used. I (stupidly) neglected to look at Mom's recipe beforehand, so I probably was off on my quantities some so had to resort to eyeballing the consistency.

Crab-zucchini patties
4 cups zucchini
4 eggs
6 oz. crab
3 crusts from Dave's Killer Spelt Bread, ground up in the food processor
About 3/4 cup (???) sesame rice crackers
Bob's Red Mill gluten-free pancake mix, thrown in until it looked right
No-salt seasoning
Fresh basil

How's that for vague? I didn't really measure my ingredients but was aiming for a pancakey consistency. Still, they are tricky to fry. You must use lots of nonstick spray and try not to flip them until they are brown and crisp on one side...otherwise, they will get mushy and break up. This might have been prevented if I had used more pancake mix. I suspect that the saltines soak up the batter better than the rice crackers/bread crumb mixture.


Here's the batter:

When we were at the beach I threw together a sauce of sorts from our ingredients on hand, and it was a hit...so I recreated it at Kieran's request. It's very simple...just light mayonnaise and Trader Joe's Thai Yellow Curry sauce.


Fry until golden on one side...but as I said, you must flip them at the right time or they'll be failures.

Waiting for dinner--playing outside in our lovely Indian Summer day today:

Perfectly fried! (That's homemade hummus in the background there--which I made because Nicholas was asking for hummus before dinner. However, he didn't like my homemade version...must have been the sesame oil.)

Finished product:

Yum!!