Carnival week: try the Sicilian homemade bread fritters!

In my family, especially when we were younger, the Sunday before the famous pancake tuesday (that precedes Ash wednesday, day of fasting and abstinence from all meats) we used to prepare different kind of scrumptious food, majority of them fried.

The Carnival week in fact screams for delicious homemade fritters of all kind!

Since I was a kid I remember how much my oldest sister Barbara loved preparing these yummy fritters when she was bored on a rainy afternoon.

A simple and poor recipe had the power to turn a boring moment of your day in something incredibly exciting!

I love this recipe because not only is very easy but also allows you to re-use the old bread that is left and probably abandoned in a corner of your kitchen cabinet, too stale to be eaten.

Another alternative when you really want to make these lovely fritters would be to buy the proper bread on purpose (as I did in this case), so I went for the typical French baguette. I bought it a couple of days in advance and cut it in slices, so that it had the time to get dry.

Enough with the introduction now we have our lovely stale slices of bread. What are we gonna do with them? 

Let’s start by saying that we don’t really have measures for this recipe. It really depends on how much bread you have left or how long is your baguette.

In addition to that you will only need some milk, all purpose white flour (00), caster sugar, cinnamon powder and sesame oil (or coconut or olive) to fry. Then we usually improvise!

I would suggest to prepare three soup plates or three medium bowls: one with the milk, one with some flour and one with sugar mixed with a teaspoon of cinnamon powder. On a medium flame, start warming up some oil of your choice in the frying pan.

Soak every single slice of bread in milk on both sides, until is quite soft (but not soggy please, otherwise will be a disaster!) then dust it with flour, again on both sides, and fry it straight away.

Make sure the oil is already hot!

Your fritters are ready!

Serve them on a colorful plate while still hot, along with some cinnamon or vanilla tea to accompany them. 

Trust me, they won’t last more than 10 minutes and there is no better, easy and yummy afternoon snack than this for Carnival or… simply for a tedious, gloomy day!

Indeed food can lift our mood sometimes!

Enjoy!