I made some croquettes for our Sunday lunch. The recipe is from Super Food Idea. The reason that I chose to make these small golden balls was they looked so attractive on the magazine. I assumed it would taste crunchy and perfect for a informal meal.

From my experience, Sunday cooking always is a bit tricky. After a luxury sleep-in in the early morning, the breakfast normally is held up till 10am to 10:30am. Naturally, the question like when to have it or what to have, sometimes becomes a serious issue. We often didn’t feel hungry until late of afternoon around 3pm or 4pm, when it’s getting pretty closed to the dinner. So the key to prepare a proper lunch is to make something different, a bite more like a snack, light yet yummy.

These croquettes are easy to made, but a little bit time consuming, as you need to prepare a kind of creamy stuffing called “Panada” ahead which is made of butter, plain flour and milk. And you also need to cook other ingredients like peas, onions and ham in a sauce pan first, then combine them with warm Panada to form stuffing mixture. Certainly it doesn’t take long. 5 minutes will do. But the mixture is required to be refrigerated for 2 hours to make it firmer, so to help to be shaped into small balls at later stage.

Fresh breadcrumbs are key element to a success in this recipe. Good quality and fresh breadcrumbs make the thing a lot of easier, and the final result satisfying. I modified the recipe and replaced the smoked ham with normal bacon. And for some reason, I was not patient enough to do my deep fry when I was doing the 2nd and 3rd batches, so some of croquettes were not crunchy enough.

But generally speaking, it was a great success for someone never done croquettes before, except some of balls got stuffing popped out when doing the fry. It tasted creamy, even a bit too rich for my husband. But he admitted he liked it, by persuading me to reduce Panada and increase quantity of vegetable in stuffing. He was right. Maybe next time, I would try to introduce some potato cubes into stuffing.

So this Sunday’s lunch, was croquettes, served with vegetable salad plus Italian dressing, and a pot of Chinese white radish soup with vermicelli.