If you are anything like us, you are still working your way through your Thanksgiving leftovers.
The first couple of days immediately following the big meal, I consider myself lucky that there are only two of us who appreciate leftover sweet potato casserole. On day four, neither one of us even want to look at it any more.
I hate wasting food, so now I’m on a kick to try to work leftovers into things everyone will eat, and since it’s a holiday weekend, decorations are up, and Christmas music is playing in the background, I don’t mind being a little on the unhealthy side.
Enter sweet potato fritters.
Not even close to the trouble of doughnuts, they require very little prep and cook up quickly so you still have plenty of time to spend your morning doing in other holiday-ish activities. . . i.e. lazing around in your jammies until at least 1 PM, but certainly NOT cooking and doing dishes.
Those are, in fact, little toddler fingers trying to steal a fritter from the plate in the photo above. I really don’t know how many this recipe makes because those little sugared puffs kept being snatched off the plate as they were cooked up and dusted, and I lost count.
I’m guessing it makes somewhere between two and three dozen.
Recipe:
(Leftover) Sweet Potato Fritters
Ingredients:
canola oil for frying
1 cup mashed sweet potato (from your leftover casserole is perfect)
1 beaten egg
2 1/3 cup Krusteaz buttermilk pancake mix
2/3 cup yellow cornmeal
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
dash of nutmeg
2 cups of water
2/3 cups granulated sugar + 1 teaspoon cinnamon, mixed
Directions:
In a medium to large pot, dutch oven (depending on how many you want to fry at the same time) or deep fryer, heat oil to 325-350 degrees F. It’s best to use a candy thermometer to measure the heat here, but if you’re winging it, you can put it on medium-low to medium and then watch the way the fritters fry up and play with it from there.
Combine mashed sweet potatoes and egg in a small bowl. Set aside.
In a medium bowl, combine Krusteaz, cornmeal, cinnamon and nutmeg. Mix.
Add sweet potato mixture to dry ingredients and slowly add water. Batter may be a little lumpy, but that’s ok.
Carefully drop batter by the teaspoon-full into hot oil. It’s best to do a test run before frying too many. The batter should sink to the bottom, then float to the top.
Gently flip the fritters by tipping them with a spatula or spoon, and flip several times during cooking. Each fritter should cook till golden brown on both sides.
On your first test run, remove the fritter from the oil and place on a plate lined with paper towels. Cut it open with a fork and make sure the middle is cooked through. If it’s cooked through, and you’ve got a golden brown finish, your temperature is right. If it’s golden, but the inside is un-cooked, your oil is too hot and they’re browning too fast.
Once you have your magic oil temperature, continue cooking fritters in the same manner, making sure to leave enough space, when cooking several, to allow easy flipping.
Remove fritters to paper-towel lined plate and let them cool slightly.
While still warm, either roll or gently shake them (in a large Ziplock bag) in the sugar-cinnamon mix.
Serve warm.
Source: Sara – out of leftover desperation. . . .
this is so creative!
Thanks! delicious things happen when we are desperate, huh??
um, yum. i want some.
yeah. I want more. . . . 😉
I think I’d rather eat those little toddler fingers in the background!!! Just rub a little cinnamon sugar all over them…:) Soooo yummy!!! All jokes aside, they were absolutely delicious!!!!!
Ha! Totally!! If you only knew the things I had to eat off those fingers…
She had peanut butter and honey on toast this morning. . . just imagine my race to get to her before she got to the rest of the house!
Yummmm! These sound delicious 🙂
Thanks!
I’m distracted by those fritters; they look like little animals. The pig in the left foreground is asking his neighbor, “So is that a good creeeature, or a bad creeeature?” The pig in the right foregroung doesn’t care; he’s just trying to hide behind whatever that thing is in front of him!
Once I get beyond that, I admit, they look yummy. They could consider me a bad creeeature. Unfortunately, we never have leftover sweet potatoes enough to “fritter” away.
Wow. . . . I’ll have to investigate that picture. Shouldn’t you be working or something?? xoxo!
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Will bisquik work instead of pancake in a pinch
Hey Whitney, I think it would! just check to see if there is any leavener in it. If not, I’d add some. Maybe 1/2 -3/4 teaspoon each of baking soda and baking powder….