Ramadan recipes: Courgette, chickpea fritters

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Updated 05 April 2024
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Ramadan recipes: Courgette, chickpea fritters

  • Fritter comes from the Late Latin word frictura, meaning to fry or to roast

Light, nutritious, flavorful, and delicious, fritter is a pancake-like dish made of meat, seafood, vegetables, fruit, or sometimes just dough, that is battered or breaded before being deep fried.

Fritter comes from the Late Latin word frictura, meaning to fry or to roast. Legend has it that the batter-fried dish emerged from Portugal and Spain and was introduced into Japan in the late 16th century.

Different countries around the world, including India, Indonesia, and South Africa, have invented their own fritter recipes using local ingredients.

Today’s recipe is an Indian version of courgette and chickpea fritters in which courgette is used as the main ingredient and is mixed with chickpea flour, herbs, and spices.

To make the dish, which is modified to be healthier, you need one large courgette, one raw egg, 60 grams of chickpea flour, one teaspoon of mixed dried herbs, quarter of a teaspoon of cayenne, salt, and black pepper.

First, shred the courgette into small, thin slices, squeeze out the excess water in a colander, and put it aside. In a small bowl, mix the chickpea flour, dried mixed herbs, cayenne, salt, and black pepper before adding the
egg, then add the courgetti.

Mix well.

Instead of a frying pan, prepare a baking tray with wax paper to make the fritters more healthy and less oily. Spread a bit of oil on the wax paper, low-fat oil or olive oil if preferred, put a tablespoon-sized amount of the mixture on the tray, and place in a preheated oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 12-15 minutes. Let it cool down a little before plating and serve hot.


Book Review: ‘Padma’s All American’ Cookbook

Updated 19 December 2025
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Book Review: ‘Padma’s All American’ Cookbook

  • For her, the true story of American food proves that immigration is not an outside influence but the foundation of the country’s culinary identity

Closing out 2025 is “Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond: A Cookbook,” a reminder that in these polarizing times within a seemingly un-united US, breaking bread really might be our only human connection left. Each page serves as a heaping — and healing — helping of hope.

“The book you have before you is a personal one, a record of my last seven years of eating, traveling and exploring. Much of this time was spent in cities and towns all over America, eating my way through our country as I filmed the shows ‘Top Chef’ and ‘Taste the Nation’,” the introduction states.

“Top Chef,” the Emmy, James Beard and Critics Choice Award-winning series, which began in 2006, is what really got Padma Lakshmi on the food map.

“Taste the Nation,” of course, is “a show for immigrants to tell their own stories, as they saw fit, and its success owes everything to the people who invited us into their communities, their homes, and their lives,” she writes.

Working with producer David Shadrack Smith, she began developing a television series that explored American immigration through cuisine, revealing how deeply immigrant food traditions shaped what people considered American today.

She was the consistent face and voice of reason — curious and encouraging to those she encountered.

Lakshmi notes that Americans now buy more salsa and sriracha than ketchup, and dishes like pad Thai, sushi, bubble tea, burritos and bagels are as American as apple pie — which, ironically, contains no ingredients indigenous to North America. Even the apples in the apple pie came from immigrants.

For her, the true story of American food proves that immigration is not an outside influence but the foundation of the country’s culinary identity.

“If I think about what’s really American … it’s the Appalachian ramp salt that I now sprinkle on top of my Indian plum chaat,” she writes.

In this book Lakshmi tells the tale of how her mother arrived in the US as an immigrant from India in 1972 to seek “a better life.”

Her mother, a nurse in New York, worked for two years before Lakshmi was brought to the US from India. At 4 years old, Lakshmi journeyed alone on the 19-hour flight.

America became home.

Now, with visibility as a model and with a noticeable scar on her arm (following a horrific car accident), she is using her platform for good once again.

Lakshmi is merging her immigrant advocacy with her long career in food media.

The photo of her on the cover, joined by a large American flag, is loud, proud and intentional.

The book contains pages dedicated to ingredients and their uses, actual recipes and, most deliciously, the stories of how those cooks came to be.