Gourmet Appetizers: Pinions (AKA) Fried Pickle & Onion Ring Balls

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I had a little foodie fun tonight. While frying up some onion rings to go with my turkey burger dinner, I went Food Crazie again. It seems like I'm on a roll lately so I decided that while I already had the mess of the deep fryer out, why not try a unique appetizer. The thought immediately came to mind, since I also had the pickles out, that I could combine onions with pickles with a little cheddar cheese added to the mix. How to make this work though so everything would stick together in the fryer? Easy, with a lot of help from flour I'll show you step by step how you can make what I'm calling Pinions, also known as Fried Pickle & Onion Ring Balls.



Ingredients:

• Vidalia Onions sliced thin
• Best Maid Pickle Slices
• Cheddar Cheese slices
• 2 scrambled eggs combined with a tbsp of water
• Panko bread crumbs
• All Purpose Flour
• Peanut Oil (for frying) 
• Bacon (if you're Food Crazie enough)

Take a couple of pickle and onion slices along with cheddar cheese (cooked bacon optional) and coat them in the scrambled egg.

After you generously coat pickle, onion, and cheddar cheese slices in the egg, dip them combined into the flour (above) and afterwards into the Panko bread crumbs (below). On a side note, the flour is a very important ingredient in this creation. It acts as the glue to keep everything stuck together when you ball this up and stick it in the fryer.

Now here's the fun part...

After you're done mixing these, squeeze the pickle, onion, and cheddar cheese slices together to form a nicely packed ball of food.

Carefully place this ball in the deep fryer on about 390 for 2 to 3 minutes to really crisp them up good.

These may look like an alien life form but they sure are tasty!

When this comes out of the fryer, you're going to say, "I've created a monster". Actually, this might be one of the most Food Crazie posts I've done thus far. To make matters worse, I have a confession to make, I actually used a slice of bacon in one of these so called Pinions to see what it would taste like. Needless to say, it put this already over the top foodie creation over the top just a little more. It had such a powerful fried goodness taste that I would definitely use bacon in some of my Pinions if I make this again.

And making this gourmet appetizer again is going to be a definite. Not only was the bacon pinion good but so was the others that I combined pickle, onion and cheddar cheese. All these ingredients combined make this a very hard appetizer to describe because it's a taste (like a lot of my Food Crazie creations) that I haven't quite experienced before. If I were to describe the taste, think about how stuffed crab tastes and even though that's seafood, it's kind of like eating something comparable to that. The reason is simply because it combines a lot of different ingredients together. I for one love the deliciousness of a ton of ingredients rolled into one especially when I can drizzle ranch on top like I did these. If you have the same taste, then I would place Pinions on the recommended list of Food Crazie recipes you should try.