Bad Little Fried Things

While my husband is away on business travel, I'm on my own with leftovers and whatever's in the fridge. So I guess it's no great surprise that I had another batch of milk go sour on me this week. I've had a lot of fun in the past, using up sour milk in various ways. Today's concoction might beat them all for cheap and not totally unhealthy decadence though. I'm not sure what to call these treats, but they sure were good.

Here's what I used:

2/3 cup old fashioned rolled oats
1 cup sour milk
1 1/2 cup all purpose flour (plus a little extra for rolling out the dough)
1/2 cup currants
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon salt
peanut oil for frying
1/3 cup powdered sugar

I combined the rolled oats and sour milk in a small bowl while I mixed the flour, currants, baking soda, cardamom and salt in a mixing bowl. Then I poured the oats and milk into the dry ingredients and stirred until the dough was uniform. This I turned out onto a floured board. I formed the dough into a ball and then rolled it out into a slab just a little under 1/2" thick.

Then I heated about 1/2" of peanut oil in a saucepan. While that heated, I put the powdered sugar in a small paper bag. When the oil was hot, I cut thin strips of the dough with a pasta cutter (a pizza cutter or aknife would have been fine too) and dropped them into the oil, just enough so that the pan wasn't too crowded. After about a minute, I turned the pieces of dough over to brown nicely on the other side.

When both sides were browned, I used chop sticks to pick up the dough and drop them into the bag of powdered sugar. Folding over the top of the bag, I shook the contents so the fried dough was well coated with the sugar. I put them on some pages torn from an old phone book to soak up the grease, but the pages showed almost no trace of oil.

These were very quick and easy to prepare, and absolutely delicious with my morning cuppa. Too bad I'm the only one here to enjoy them. They look a lot more decadent than they really are, since the dough itself contains no sugar. The dough also contains only a trace amount of fat (from the whole milk) before it's fried, so even in that regard it isn't too bad. The currants and oats give these a faint sheen of nutrition too. I'm very partial to cardamom in lightly sweet things. But you may prefer to substitute the more familiar cinnamon.

Anyway, that's where some of my soured milk went this morning!