ok, hear me out.
I believe I can eat most of the food I would be served with. I love spices. I love MSG. I love deep-fried food. I absolutely frequently crave chili garlic sauce and oil.
And I love onions. And garlic.
Last weekend, I didn't get to go home because I was planning to clean up my apartment and do my laundry. They had been begging for my attention for a while now, and I didn't want to get sick -- oh, how that turned out -- from the dust collecting in all corners of my room.
I also did some grocery, but I later learned that I forgot to buy rice. I thought I should at least cook pasta (like, Charlie Chan pasta), but I wasn't really feeling up to it. In the end, I thought I wanted some onion rings.
Onion rings... except the onions I had were medium-sized red onions. I thought, hey, why not do something like... chopped red onions, chopped garlic, some spices, flour, baking powder, and some salt to taste?
Lo and behold, my onion and garlic nuggets.
spoiler alert:
they turned out unexpectedly good. the texture wasn't what i wasn't expecting (crunchy on the outside, soft and maybe gooey on the inside), but i repeated the process today, with a different kind of batter consistency, and i finally got it!
the flour i had was on the last cup, i guess, but it still managed to create a few batches of these onion and garlic nuggets. i love it.
I thought adding an egg would make it look chonky, but I guess I was wrong. The egg I had was an extra-large egg I bought from the grocery, then I also added a bit of water, fish sauce, and chicken powder to taste.
Unfortunately, the batter's texture was a little too liquid-y, but I was getting really hungry, so I thought I should just bear with it.
I did preheat my pan before adding the canola oil. I lowered the heat, put on some of the onion-garlic-seasonings-batter (which ended up looking a lot like tiny pancakes), then covered it for a few minutes.
In the end, they did look like mini pancakes instead of actual nuggets, but they tasted sooo good! Unexpectedly so. I also fried some mandu, just to get a little bit more source of protein. They're all so oily and a tiny bit salty, but I loveeed them!
take 2
Today, I've been off work for two days after getting sick. I was feeling a lot better than I did yesterday, but I was craving for some of this. Again. I tried to create some from what was left of my flour, and this time, I made sure that the consistency of the batter was a lot, lot thicker. Kind of like a cookie dough.
The moment I set it to fry, I knew that was perfect. It was so good, I almost cried. I dipped it in some ketchup, and I was brought back to my childhood. One of my aunts used to fry grated cassava with onion, garlic, and all sorts of seasoning, then a tiny bit of flour. She would make these into nuggets, too.
I almost replicated that particular taste, and I love it. I wished I had grated cassava here in Manila!
the recipe
i eyeballed the measurements, so if you'll try to replicate this, i hope you'll be able to get the perfect measurements for your taste!
- 1 medium-sized red onion
- 4 cloves of garlic
- all purpose-flour
- (optional) corn starch
- baking powder
- ground black pepper
- chicken powder
- fish sauce
- (optional, from my childhood) grated cassava