Fancy Friday Feast - Millet cakes with parmesan and sun-dried tomatoes

While making out my grocery list the other day, I thought it'd be fun to ask my HunBun to pick out a recipe he would like me to make for dinner this week. "Anything at all," I said. I handed him the encyclopedia: The JOY of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, et al. After a few minutes and several flips of the big book, he smiled and exclaimed: "This sounds good. How about millet cakes with parmesan and sun-dried tomatoes?"

I said, "Wha?"

He showed me the recipe. It was listed under the JOY chapter titled "Grains." Millet cakes. I had never even heard of millet, couldn't recall ever hearing it on the Food Network. Millet. I was nervous; this was new territory. So I had to find out - What the heck is it?

Millet looks like this:

According to good ol' wiki, millet is a group of small-seeded cereals or grains that are used for food or fodder. Yes, it's spread as bird seed, but the kind that's used for human consumption is hulled and perfectly delicious when cooked. It's a grain largely cultivated and consumed in arid and semi-arid regions, particularly India, Africa, and parts of East Asia, because it does well in drought. It's also glucose-free and high in protein and B-vitamins.

This grain has been cultivated in East Asia for 10,000 years, and I had never heard of it! Crazy!

Millet cakes, then, are basically little fried grain pancakes.

The ingredients: extra virgin olive oil, hulled millet, long-grain white rice, sun-dried tomatoes in oil, onion, garlic, beef stock, and one egg. (I used beef instead of chicken stock because that's what I had on hand. If you're interested in these, please reference JOY for the actual recipe; I can't say enough how much I love that cookbook and how handy it is in the kitchen.)

 

So after dicing onions, dabbing tomatoes, sauteeing millet & rice, boiling stock, steaming & stirring, you get a fluffy mixture like you see below in the red bowl. At this point, the mixture tastes like a basic beef-rice-couscous pilaf. You may be tempted to add more seasonings, but all you'll need is a little salt. Anything else is really unnecessary; the initially underwhelming taste of this mixture is about to get kicked up in the following steps.













Add one beaten egg & some parmesan, mix well, then form the sticky mixture into little cakes with wet hands. I used a 1/4 measuring cup to help me form pretty, restaurant-style looking cakes. They stick together surprisingly well.

After letting these cool for about an hour, you fry them up on skillet:

 I served these cakes under beautiful skillet fried steaks with a salad, making a plate of food looked and tasted like it came from a fancy restaurant.

Let me tell you what they're like. Texturally, they are like fried hashbrown patties, crispy on the outside with a soft inside. When you cut your fork into one, you can see strings of melted parmesan cheese pull away. They're savory from the stock and toasted grains, and the bit of diced sun-dried tomatoes give it a layer of summery sweetness. This thing is quite complex in flavors, and pairs beautifully with the skillet roasted meat. Careful if you choose a dipping sauce, because I found that many sauces can overwhelm this complex little cake; if you go that route, less is more.

The total estimated cost for two plates, one for me and one for HunBun, was $8. Basically, $4 a plate. The steaks I bought were $5 for .97lb (in other words, they were super cheap steaks that needed help; I trimmed fat off them and cooked them up in such a way as to make even lesser steaks into something divine - don't worry, I'll blog about my steak method later). The salad with croutons and ranch was about $.50 a plate, the millet cakes about $.25 each. And I have enough leftover ingredients to make millet cakes for days.

Challenge Millet Cakes complete! This definitely makes for a Fancy Friday Feast!