Fry Me To The Moon

Hey, y'all. Welcome to our home

I am so excited about today's show. And why is that? Because it's all about using my favorite appliance in my kitchen

and that's my deep fryer. So today, y'all, we're gonna celebrate my deep fryer

with collard green wontons. And how does a fried halibut sandwich with a creamy mustard sauce sound, y'all

Then it's the best crab pushpuppies in the whole entire South. And just wait till y'all bite into my deep fried cheesecake

So batter up, y'all, because today's recipes are gonna fry me to the moon

Well, the first dish that I'm gonna start off making is a recipe that we came up with for mine and Michael's wedding

wontons that have been stuffed with collard greens and cream cheese. Now to

cook our collard greens, I'm gonna start by putting a couple of ham hocks into my

boiling water, and now I'm fixing to add my seasonings. I'm gonna add a teaspoon of

seasoning salt, a teaspoon of our house seasoning. My house seasoning is so simple

a mixture of salt, pepper, and just garlic powder. Now I'm gonna add probably a tablespoon or two of hot sauce

and this is gonna give our collard greens a nice little bite

Now I'm gonna just put a little olive oil, because I'll tell you the secret to good greens

is that they have to have that fat and that seasoning on them

I had filled my pot up with water, But while I was getting everything else ready, it kind of boiled down a little bit

so I think I'm going to add just a wee little bit more water. You know, not too much

You don't want your collard greens swimming. But you certainly want to have enough water that that ham hock can cook in there

Now, the ham hock is smoked, so it's fully cooked. And let's move on to our collard green

In the center of each collard leaf is the stem. So you want to get rid of that stem

and you just do that by just stripping that leaf away from the vein

And all we're going to do is just stack up our collard greens

fold them over, and we're just going to roll those up, and we're just gonna slice those rolls of collards into strips

And this is kind of what they're gonna look like. Now we're just gonna take our collards, throw them in the pot

and you know I can't hardly cook anything without a little butter

That butter is gonna give it a wonderful flavor. So I'm gonna cover those up

And I'm going to let that cook for about 45 minutes to an hour

And we're just going to kind of turn those down and kind of let them simmer for that long

Well, I've got another pot ready here. And look in that pot

Don't they look delicious? Oh, and that ham hop. Now, what I'm going to do is just come in here and lift out my collards and let them drain

So there are collards. And I want to take a little bit

I want to try to get a little bit of meat off of my ham hock

And I'm just going to take that skin off. just like that and just kind of shred that meat up

This is going to add a lot of texture and flavor to our wontons

Okay, so in it goes. And I have some cream cheese that I've had sitting out on the counter

and really the amount of collard greens will determine how much cream cheese you want to put

So I'm going to start off with a kind of smaller amount and just work it in

Okie doke, and look how that looks. And now let's come on down here and let's start making our wontons

Now I'm just using just like wonton shells. You usually find these in the produce section

at your grocery store, and they'll come in different sizes. You can get the bigger squares or you can get this size Now I just gonna take these and rub the edges with a little water because we don want these to come loose on us So we just

gonna put a little dab of the collard greens and we're gonna just turn these

over. We're just gonna work that air out of there and if a little of the filling

comes out, that's all right. So there we go. It's just that simple. See how quickly we got that

together? Now I've got some more down here in the drawer that I had been working on earlier

All right, so in the deep fryer they go. Now I always fry in peanut oil, and I've got my fryer heated to 350 degrees

So we just want to kind of flip those over and just kind of keep giving them little flips

Now, I'm going to take a quick break, and when we come back

we're going to be chomping on collard green wonton. Coming up next, it's a golden fried halibut sandwich

And later, it's crab hush puppies. And I'm swallowing hard for this deep fried cheesecake

Hey, y'all. Welcome back. I'm almost through frying up our collard green wontons

and they look so good. All right. Now let me show you this quick little trick

that you can do with collard greens, and it takes only a second

And I came up with this out of necessity at the restaurant

for garnish. I couldn't find a garnish. So I had plenty of collard greens in the cooler

So I just dropped them down into the deep fryer and only cook them for just a little bit, not long at all

Oh, and those collards smell so good frying. And I kind of keep them stirred using my tongs

All right, now we're going to drain those. And I'm going to take just a little seasoning salt and sprinkle on them

toss them around and you can hear them in my basket like hitting the sides. They're crisp

That'll let people know that the ingredient in these wontons is collard greens

Alright, so we'll just stack those on our plate. Now I have just mixed up a quick dipping

sauce using an orange marmalade, red pepper flakes, and a little rice wine vinegar. And it's

great for a last minute dipping sauce when you've got unexpected company dropping in

Mmm. Mmm. They are so good. You'll blow them away with this one

Now I'm going to fry us up a big old Mac Daddy fish sandwich

I'm using a halibut. It's a beautiful white mild fish. We're going to put just a little coating on our fish

I'm going to start with two tablespoons of flour. A half a teaspoon of salt

and some cracked black pepper. All we have to do now is just dredge our fish

Now, I've gotten my pan hot, and I'm just going to put a little bit of olive oil in there

Not much, not very deep, but just enough for our fish to kind of fry and brown up nicely

And this little bit of flour is going to give it just a very nice light crust

Okay, I'm going to cook these between medium and medium high. While our fish is cooking, let's quickly come on over here and make us up a sauce to go on our fish sandwich

I'm going to use a little mayonnaise. The ratio is a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise to one tablespoon of Dijon mustard

I'm going to chop up about a tablespoon of fresh dill. Okay, so we've got our sauce together just that quickly

Mmm. Oh gosh, that's good. the dill and that mustard. I'm gonna turn those over now

And look how good they look. Isn that beautiful I gonna take the bottoms of my bun and just kind of lay them up there and let my bun start

to heating because you know there's nothing that I hate worse than having a wonderful hot sandwich

with a cold bun. So this is a quick way to to get that bun to heating and it's gonna be real real good

Ooh, look at those buns. They're starting to get hot and soft

All right, so I'm going to go ahead and cut off my heat. Pull that out

Look at that. I'm going to put some sauce on it. I'm going to add tomato slices

a purple onion. Okay. Mmm. That looks pretty good, doesn't it

Ooh, doggies. Michael is gonna love this. He could eat seafood every day

Look at that fish sandwich. Ooh. Let's put a little pasta. And what a beautiful lunch we have

Ooh, this is going to be an elbow licker, I can tell. Mm-hmm

Mm-hmm. Wonderful. If y'all don't mind, I'd be kind of like a private moment with my sandwich

Coming up next is delicious crab hush puppies. And later, y'all, deep fried cheesecake

Hey, y'all, welcome back. I'm in here getting our crab hush puppies ready

I'm just finishing up dicing a few green onions, and I'm using the white part and the green part

And I'm going to need about a half a cup, so that should do it

You know, down in the South, you can't have fish without having a hush puppy

It's the most succulent bread. But we're taking these up to a whole new level on this recipe

Now, I'm going to start adding all my dry ingredients, and I'm starting with one cup of all-purpose meal

And then one cup of all-purpose flour, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of garlic powder

Whoops, a little bit more. And a teaspoon of baking powder. And then I'm going to come over here and I'm going to add a half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper

The last dry ingredient I'm going to add is a half a teaspoon of baking soda

Now I'm just going to mix all those dry ingredients together. So I have one tablespoon of minced fresh thyme that's going to give it a nice little unexpected flavor

Okay, I've got two eggs. that I'm going to put together in this bowl

And I didn't get any shells in there. That's good. All right, now I'm going to add a half a cup of buttermilk

Give that a little beat. And then I'm going to add a half a cup of sour cream

There we go. and into our milk and eggs. All right, so I'm just gonna beat those up

Now I'm just gonna toss these in our bowl that's been sitting over here

with our dry ingredients in it. I'm just gonna give those a quick mix

You don't wanna over-mix this. we're gonna toss in our green onions

just love onions in my hush puppies and I've got some nice crisp bacon about a half a cup

so in that goes These are really gonna be an extraordinary hush puppy Now to that I gonna add a pound of crab meat that been picked through making sure it got

no shells in it. And I'm using a lump but you can certainly use a claw. Just that

quickly, we have our hush puppies together. All right, now I'm gonna put my

baskets down in my deep fryer. I have just a cup of plain water and I've got my

spoon. You'll want to make sure you dip your spoon down and that just rolls

right off your spoon. So we'll do that for every hush puppy that we drop, right

down in the grease. You know, I told you anytime you're cooking like hush puppies

or frying up biscuits, you want to turn them quickly because they can get heavy

on one side and then you can never get those hush puppies to turn over. And I'm

I'm frying these on about 300 degrees, y'all. And you can throw this one to the dogs, honey

and I promise you it will hush those puppies up. All right, so those are almost ready

While those are finishing cooking, I'm going to come down here and get out

You want to see what I'm getting out? I'm getting out the cheesecake

because when we come back, I'm gonna be deep frying cheesecake. Sorry, I couldn't wait on y'all

These are so good. Look in there. All that crab and those onions

Like I said, it brings a whole new meaning to Hush Puppy. All right, well, let's move on down here

to a sinful fried cheesecake. You can buy you a cheesecake that's frozen, or you can make your own

And I'm going to cut these into like one by three pieces

Now I've got an egg wash, and again, I'm using my wonton wrappers

These are one size up from the collard green wontons that I used

So we're just gonna brush this, and we're gonna lay our cheesecake right there in the center

I've got a little chopped milk chocolate over here. Now I'm gonna wrap this just as I would an egg roll

So just like that. All right, I've got my fryer heated to 350 degrees

I'm going to lift my basket out and lay them right on the basket

I'm going to drop them down in there. You'll kind of want to give them a turn

Just when you thought you couldn't make cheesecake any better. And it won't take these long to brown

This looks perfectly delicious. All right, I think those are nice and done

Watch it. Watch it. I'll just transfer them to my paper towel

Then I'm going to bring them over here. Now you can serve these whole, or you can kind of cut them

Oops. Before I cut this bad boy up, though, I think I need to run him through a little powdered sugar

Just in case he's not sweet enough. All right, so we'll just kinda cut him diagonally

Now look at that. Do you see how that chocolate has melted? Mmm

All right, y'all, I've got a chocolate glaze and a strawberry glaze. Whoa

A little bit more powdered sugar. A little fresh cream. A little vegetable

And look at that yummy fried cheesecake. This is so good, y'all

I don't know how to top this fried cheesecake, y'all. y'all. So I guess it's time for me to sign off. And until next time, you know that I always send

y'all loving best dishes from my kitchen to yours