Hushpuppies

Made these Sunday night in my continuing efforts to adapt to life after deep fryer. I'm not entirely sure the recipe (from Tasting Table) came out the way it was supposed to... they weren't at all like beignets... but it was still quite tasty. I thought it was a disaster at first as the dough, with only 3/4 of a cup of whole milk as the liquid, was super dry... but the eggs were able to hold it together it seems. Like the flavors quite a lot. The difficulty in making this one exactly as written will be the corn flour... as I don't imagine a ton of people have that sitting in their pantry... but Bob's Red Mill does produce it, and we were able to find it at Whole Foods. If you are wondering what to do with all that extra corn flour afterwards, you can always make corn cookies.

I fried these up in my dutch oven using the Thermapen and found it to be super painless... making me wonder why I ever felt I needed a deep fryer in the first place. I know it was one of the first cooking things I bought when I was starting out on this path, but I don't recall the impetus. I would have guessed it had something to do with a Cook's Illustrated recipe I read, because they were basically my cooking bible back then... if they said everybody should own a deep fryer I would have believed them... but their reviews of deep fryers (sub required) imply the opposite stance. Well, either its purchase predated the blog or I just didn't write about it, so my reasoning is lost to time (though I wouldn't be surprised if Anna remembers). If you are deep frying a couple of times a month or more I can see why you'd want a dedicated appliance, but otherwise I think you should just take that $100 and spend it on a good thermometer.