Potato Croquettes

My regular readers may recall me saying on a previous bread post that I’m in a bread phase right now. I’m making and enjoying all sorts of different breads recently and this often forms the main carbohydrate component of a meal. Two-day old leftovers get made into breadcrumbs and stored in the freezer until needed.

My bread phase meant that the bag of potatoes hidden in a dark cupboard was sorely neglected and started sprouting. These were not J.K. Mainland’s Shetland potatoes – the best potatoes in the whole world – I hasten to add, as they seem to be unavailable in the shops just now. They must be out of season as they always seem to disappear from the shop shelves this time of year. J.K. Mainland’s potatoes would never get neglected.

We’ve not had much summer-like weather for this Summer Solstice just passed. It’s felt more like autumn already with the cold, rainy weather we had for a few days. Perfect mashed potatoes and meatloaf sort of days. When I noticed the potatoes had started sprouting (and some had gone off and turned soupy) I thought a) how did people way back when get their home grown potatoes to last an entire winter? These rubbish supermarket variety ones sprout/liquefy a matter of weeks after bringing them home! and b) I’m going to need to cook all of these at once as to not waste them. Maybe I can get creative with leftover mash.

So I did! I found a simple recipe online for leftover mashed potato cakes and improvised a bit. I was making Nigella Lawson’s maple chicken and ribs (but I substituted the expensive luxurious maple syrup for 3 tbsp honey and they worked splendidly!) and wanted to make an accompaniment using the leftover mash, but potato cakes weren’t going to cut it.

These gorgeous crispy deep-fried calorie-intense cheesy potato croquettes, on the other hand, went down splendidly, especially with the teenage son and his friend who came over for dinner.

Leftovers croquettes can be reheated in a 220 C oven for 10 minutes and they come out perfectly crispy again! Apologies for the hastily taken photographs above. These were the reheated leftovers I was going to have for lunch which were getting cold! No time to do a classy stylised photo! Eating was needing to happen!

Since this is a frugal recipe using leftovers I’m sending it on over to the Credit Crunch Munch, a  frugal food recipe round-up by Camilla at Fab Food 4 All and Helen from Fuss Free Flavours hosted this month by the lovely Anneli at Delicieux (who, incidentally, just won the Brilliance in Blogging Award: Food at BritMums recently!) Congratulations Anneli!!

Credit Crunch Munch is  Blog Hop, so scroll down to the bottom of this post and see what other frugal foodies have been creating!