Spring Onion and Potato Cakes, Onion Rings and Carrot-Ginger Dressing

I embraced my new cookery book a little too enthusiastically yesterday afternoon. I decided that I would make the spring onion and potato (pan)cakes and accompany them with some OMG Oven Baked Onion Rings and a salad with carrot-ginger dressing.

One of the benefits of the book is that you are supposed to be able to make these quickly after work. While that might be true for one item at a time but you can't generally eat the recipes alone. Accompaniments are suggested throughout the book. Obviously the more times you make something the quicker it will become but I spent about three hours in the kitchen yesterday making these three recipes (and some instant falafel mix).

So I started with the carrot and ginger dressing. It is really a carrot and ginger purée with a little onion, garlic, lime juice, red wine vinegar, toasted sesame oil and agave nectar. In itself I guess it doesn't take much effort or time. The only time consuming bit is the boiling of the carrots and waiting for them to cool down a bit. The recipe calls for 1/4 cup of lime juice and the same of water which I think is a bit too much. My dressing was quite watery. It is a simply but tasty addition to a plain salad and also went well with the potato cakes. The slight down side is that the raw ginger and garlic tend to stay with you afterwards!

The potato cakes again in themselves were not that difficult to make. Just mashed potato mixed with some spring onions and toasted sesame oil. You are supposed to use panko breadcrumbs both in with the potato mix and also on the outside, which I have discovered are Japanese style breadcrumbs. I tried the local supermarkets but couldn't find any. My favourite 'Continental Stores' didn't have them and the local Asian supermarket had run out so I had to make do with some Warburtons in the food processor instead, I think that this may have been my downfall.

I didn't seem to have enough breadcrumbs and the ones I did have didn't stick very well.  The end result was nice enough but didn't seem worth all the effort I'd been making all afternoon. I had some of the potato cakes for lunch today and they were nice. I think I'd make them again, just not at the same time as the onion rings and the dressing.

The OMG Oven-Baked Onion Rings promised the earth but didn't really deliver. Once again I think that it was the breadcrumbs that were my downfall. Mine were too big despite having been in the food processor. In the book it says that the method will take a bit of time to perfect, dunking each onion ring in the paste mix and then the sprinkling with breadcrumbs. I found that the first one was fine but the rest were awful with the breadcrumbs getting covered in the paste and sticking together.  I may try making breadcrumbs out of toast tomorrow, as this will make them smaller and drier, and see if that helps at all.

You can see the difference in the onion rings here. One breadcrumbed , many not!

As far as the taste is concerned the onion rings were nice but not fantastic, mainly due to the covering being quite sporadic. I certainly didn't get them to 'OMG' level but I will try them again.