CM: Yeah. You’ve called out a few things. One is, Jesse this is your recipe, herby cauliflower fritters.
JS: Yes.
SU: I love this recipe.
CM: Which is basically cauliflower meatballs.
JS: Yes.
CM: That used riced cauliflower.
JS: Yeah. Because I don’t like riced cauliflower as rice. That doesn’t make sense to me. But you can use it in so many other different ways. Yeah, these are bound together like little fritter meatballs with breadcrumbs, and cheese, and egg. You fry them up and they’re really good.
CM: Yeah. Yeah.
SU: They’re like falafel, but cauliflower.
CM: Yeah, exactly.
JS: Yeah.
SU: They’re so good.
CM: Shilpa, you’re also calling out the green pea fritter recipe.
SU: Yes.
CM: Which this is from a little while ago.
SU: This is from a while ago. It uses cottage cheese, and eggs, and then a bag of frozen peas. You mix it together in a bowl, and then you portion out little fritters in a pan of hot oil. It’s one of those things that I make when I feel like, “Oh my God, there’s nothing in the fridge.” There’s always a bag of peas. Then it can be breakfast, it could be dinner. It’s just a convenient, quick thing to make.
CM: Why frozen vegetables? Why are they better in the green pea fritters, and frankly in other applications as well?
SU: I don’t know when is the last time I’ve had a fresh green pea, now that I think about it. I always buy frozen peas for years now. I just think they are much more tender, especially if you get the ones that are baby-
CM: The petite?
SU: … sweet peas. Yeah.
CM: What about frozen kale, frozen spinach? Why would you seek those things out, specifically frozen iterations thereof, rather than their fresh counterparts?
SU: Oh. One, I think it’s just easier to keep in your fridge. It’s much more compact, it takes up less space in your fridge. The fresh ones, they’re in your vegetable drawer. If you don’t get to it in time, they wilt, they get slimy. It’s just a good backup option to have. From a nutrition standpoint, frozen vegetables are just as good as fresh. I think the frozen leafy greens, like spinach or kale, I think they’ve been blanched a little bit before. Then they’re much more easier to use. You bypass that step of needing to blanch or cook your greens. You can go straight into making, I don’t know, a saag paneer for instance, with a bag of frozen spinach.
CM: Yeah, I’m glad you called that out. Texturally, they have much more in common with a cooked vegetable than with a raw vegetable. From a time-saving perspective, there’s a real consideration there.
From the standpoint of just flavor, I want to call out that, listen, they’ve given you starting point in terms of a frozen packaged vegetable. But almost to a tee, nothing has had any kind of flavor added to it. I think you need to probably just find a heavier hand with condiments and sauces that can be really fast and easy that you can hit your veg with as part of the reheating process, because that’s essentially what you’re doing with frozen veg. You’re not really cooking them as much as reheating and flavoring them.
