Broccoli Tots

I'm still working on my next post from the South Island, but in the meantime:
Hello folks and welcome to another edition of Cooking With Sharmeela.  Today we'll be making broccoli tots!  

If you're anything like me, you love tater tots, but feel bad afterwards because they're the fattest food ever.

I don't know about you, but when I think of tots, I think of Napoleon Dynamite.  Best. Movie. Ever.

  

Anyway, let's start making our healthy version of tater tots (and let's be clear: by healthy version, I mean we're making something that has no similarities to the original besides the shape.  Woo hoo!).  

Here are our ingredients:

This segment cannot be complete until I forget a crucial ingredient.  Today's crucial forgotten ingredient:

An onion!  Yipee!  Man, is this exciting, or what?!

Start by preheating your oven to 400 degrees and lining a baking sheet with parchment paper (and setting it aside):

I bet you really needed that picture, huh?

Next, bring a pot of water to a boil.  While you're waiting for it to boil, let's deal with the bread.

Technically the recipe calls for Italian breadcrumbs, but I didn't have any, so I made some with a piece of bread and some Italian seasoning.

I didn't have any stale bread handy, so I toasted a piece of regular bread (I used an end piece and slightly over-toasted it):

and let it cool.  Then I broke it into pieces and shoved them into my Ninja with some Italian seasoning:

and then voila:

breadcrumbs!

Now, chop your broccoli into chunks:

Is your water boiling yet?  Mine is:

Now dump your broccoli in:

and quickly blanch it for a couple minutes.  While mine was blanching, I was thinking about where the word broccoli comes from, so I googled it:

Italy, more than 2,000 years ago.  The word broccoli comes from the Italian plural of broccolo, which means "the flowering crest of a cabbage", and is the diminutive form of brocco, meaning "small nail" or "sprout".

I can't tell you how many times a day people come up to me and ask me where the word broccoli originated.  Now I know.  Stick with me because I'm just dropping knowledge left and right!  

They say to put the broccoli in an ice bath to stop the cooking process, but that seemed like a lot of work to me, so I just rinsed them under cold water:

Good enough, it's not like Bobby Flay is coming for a tot tasting.  Who cares!

Next step is to chop your broccoli as small as possible.  I did not chop them small enough, I should have put them in the Ninja for a few pulses to get the pieces really minced, but oh well:

This was about 2 cups of broccoli.

Then I dumped it into a bowl and added all my other ingredients:

I added: 1 egg (I ended up adding another later to help the mixture bind together), 1/4 cup diced onion (again not small enough!), 1/3 cup cheese, 1/3 cup panko breadcrumbs, 1/3 cup Italian breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons cilantro (parsley or rosemary would work too), 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper.  My mom actually already had all these ingredients at home (besides the Italian breadcrumbs), so I didn't have to go to the store for anything!  Nifty!

I mixed this all together:

Yum!  Looks like barf.

Then I tried to form the tots, which turned out to be impossible because all my pieces of stuff were too big.  So, I added a second egg and a little bit more breadcrumbs and it kinda worked...kinda...sorta.

I had a technique where I'd ball it up by making a fist with the mixture at the base of my fingers (wow, this is getting way too technical) and then pushed the ends in so they're not pointy.  You have no idea how hard that picture was to take.  Take my word for it, it was not a pretty sight.

Place the tots on the baking sheet lined with parchment paper:

That's as good as it's gonna get, so just deal.

I baked them at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes (until slightly browned) and then I flipped them and browned the other side (another 8 minutes or so).

These are my finished tots.  Obviously I was unable to achieve the cylindrical shape, completely severing any ties it might have had with its original, ingenious counterpart.  Epic fail.

Overall, the taste was okay, but they were kinda dry, so you definitely need some sort of sauce (I just used ketchup with a splash of sriracha).  They were way better hot, so try to eat them right away, or heat them up before you dive in.  At the end of the day, they weren't bad, but they weren't great and I'm not sure that I would make them again.  It was relatively easy, but let's face it: Napoleon wouldn't be caught dead shoving these into his pocket for later.

Conclusion: Stick to regular tots and maybe make this into patties, similar to fritters and just fry them on the stove.  Not only would it be easier to form patties as opposed to tiny tots, but they would probably be less dry cooked in oil (obliterating any health value they once possessed).

Second conclusion: Just eat fat and be happy.

The end.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Cooking With Sharmeela.  Join me next time when I make Google explode by looking up the origin of every word on the planet.  How about peony?  That's a weird word.  Or aardvark?  Insane!  How about banana?  Someone just made that crap up!  Sapphire?  Clock?  Hippopotamus??  It's a joke, right?  Pillow?  Chipmunk?  Anger?  Yea, I better stop before my brain turns to mush and I start drooling all over my keyboard.