After several years of struggles I’ve been diagnosed with fructose malabsorption and need to cut just about everything I normally would eat from my diet. This means I have to prepare all my meals and snacks as very few convenience foods are free of the dreaded fructose overload (think wheat, onions and garlic, apples and raisins…).
I am not a great cook, as several blog posts on here can testify. I guess it’s down to practice making perfect, and rather than practice, most nights I traditionally would satiate my hunger with hummus and crackers or wine and cheese, or order delivery food. However in order to get through my workdays and uni weeks, I have to pack a proper meal and some appropriate snacks, so suddenly I’m getting lots of practice in.
I have been scouring the internet for fructose-friendly meals and today I had a go at these as a form of procrastination as I am meant to be writing a treatment proposal for uni. I was amazed at how well they came out, and given there are a few tweaks to the original recipe, AND I “invented” a fructose-friendly dipping sauce, I decided to write them up for posterity and/or future reference. My main difference is I bulked these up with extra breadcrumbs as I am not so crazy about lots and lots of meat. They aren’t really a meal as such, but I will pack these as “second lunches” for the next couple of days, as I find I’m generally starving around 3pm and need a pick-me-up.
Makes 12-15 patties (3 serves)
Patties
500g chicken mince (regular rather than lean, so that there is some vestige of flavour in there)
1.5 cups of fresh GF breadcrumbs
2 eggs, beaten
2 small red chillies, chopped
4 spring onions — green part only, chopped
1 Tbsp fish sauce
handful of coriander, chopped
1 Tbsp Massaman curry paste (mine does have shallots and garlic in it, but in such minute quantities given the volume of the other ingredients that it should not affect anyone too much)
1.5 tsp of salt
generous grinding of pepper
to roll
1.5 cups of dry GF breadcrumbs (just pulverise some GF bread and then pop it under the grill to toast, rather than spend $6 on special GF breadcrumbs. The added advantage of this is when you realise you don’t have enough, you can easily make some more)
to fry
sunflower oil
Sauce (1 serve)
1 large tomato, roughly chopped
handful of fresh mint, minced
1 small red chilli, minced
1 tsp lemon juice
dash of fish sauce
1 tsp red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp of brown sugar
Mix all the ingredients for the patties together. If you are me, you will have stupidly mis-read the quantities and already put portioned and put away most of your chicken mince in cute little baggies. Pull the pink goop out of the baggies and curse your misfortune.
Once everything is combined, form into patties and roll in the dry toasty breadcrumbs. I made mine in varying sizes between a chicken mcnugget and two chicken mcnuggets. I haven’t eaten them since I saw THAT video, and I hadn’t realised how much I missed them. These are very chicken-nuggety.
Place your crumbed patties in the fridge for half an hour to chill, so they will hold their shape nicely for the next step. Heat oven to 170 C.
Once your patty-nuggets have chilled, heat some sunflower oil in a frying pan and brown the patties in batches for a couple of minutes on each side, until they are nice and golden. Drain on kitchen paper to absorb some of the oil, then pop on a baking tray and place in the oven for 10 minutes. They will come out nice and crispy and golden and — if you’re like me — not falling apart in the slightest. I’m really happy with the texture of these.
To make the sauce, blend all the ingredients very briefly, taste, and adjust seasonings to taste before whizzing again. It will make a sort of pink mousse which isn’t particularly fancy, but it will make a decent substitute for all the forbidden relish, sweet chilli sauce, BBQ sauce, ketchup, or that awesome soy mayonnaise I love but which is made with honey and therefore I can’t have.
today I did this for me 