Starting off with failure: Domatokeftedes

For my first week I tried to make tomato fritters or Domatokeftedes. It was in this week, my first week that I learnt an important lesson about Greek cooking: Greek women lie about their cooking. That is to say they leave out important ingredient's in the recipes. For this recipes I should of noticed right away that it would not work. I however was to trusting of the poster and assumed I just didn’t know what I was talking about. Take a peek at the recipes

Time: Took me about 40 minutes of ineptitude Ingredients 1 ½ kg ripe tomatoes 1 large onion finely chopped 2 tbsp chopped mint

300g flour Oil for frying Salt and pepper to taste ??? ???

Preparation

1. Remove the skin, seeds and liquid from the tomatoes and finely chop them.	4. Add the flour – the mixture above should be approx 800g, for which 300g flour is enough, but if it should be more than 800g, you can add a bit more flour. Mix well.
2. Place them in a colander and drain any remaining liquid.	5. Heat the oil in a frying pan and then add spoonfuls of the mixture to fry. When one side is done, turn over.
3. Put them in a bowl and add the onion, mint, salt and pepper and mix well.	6.Remove and place on absorbent kitchen paper to drain.

"Greek Tomato Fritters (Domatokeftedes)." Authentic Greek Recipes. Web. 22 Nov. 2011. <http://realgreekrecipes.blogspot.com/2010/07/greek-tomato-fritters-domatokeftedes.html>.

Do you notice what is missing? Any binding agent. Normally for something like this a person would add a egg so that everything would stick together.   They where awful and a waste of time. I asked My Greek friend on why they would do this to me and she explained that Greek women routinely leave out important recipes ingredients just so that you can not out cook them. Lesson learnt for the next few weeks.

Another problem that I had when I was cooking this is that I had no idea how to cut up the tomato. How in the world does someone peel a tomato and get all the wet smooshy seed parts out? My pictures are a little deceiving and it almost looks like I know what I am doing, but I did in fact lose a good deal of the tomato just futzing around. So to prevent you from making the same mistake you could go here, or just read my basic explanation.

Step one: Cut off the top of the tomato and try to get the “stem out.”

Step two: Heat up some water to a boil and blanch the tomatoes. Leave them in for about 15-30 seconds

Step three: The tomatoes will get wrinkly looking, remove them from the hot water and put them into ice water.

Step four: You should be able to just push or peal the tomato now, the skin should just want to fall off.

Step five: Pull the tomato apart (our cut it apart) and just slide the seeds out. easy! Done!