In issue number 10, 2025 of Eesti Elu / Estonian Life newspaper, we shared a recipe for potato pancakes to accompany a pot of pea soup around the time of vastlapäev (Shrove Tuesday).
But if pea soup isn’t your thing, or you’re looking for other meals that you can serve together with potato pancakes, here’s a main course that uses seasonal, healthy Canadian produce and lean ground meat, formed into what’s almost like the Estonian version of a Salisbury steak or a croquette. Once again, we see how using a grater can expand our options in terms of how food is presented and ingredients are combined.
Yield: a generous dinner for two (six kotletid and two mounds of coleslaw)
Coleslaw ingredients:
-two carrots
-four radishes
-four cobs of corn
-a bundle of thyme
-one lime
-a spoonful of mayonnaise
Kotletid ingredients:
-500g of ground chicken/turkey
-half a cup of breadcrumbs
-one egg
-a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce
-a tablespoon of paprika
-tablespoon of garlic powder
-a few cracks of freshly ground black pepper
Method of preparation:
Let’s get all the vegetable prep work done first. Shuck four ears of corn. Then, wash and boil a bundle of fresh thyme in three cups of water on the stove with the lid on. After ten minutes of boiling, place the corn in to cook for about three minutes, until it’s all soft and bright in colour.
While you’re waiting, wash the two carrots and four radishes and grate them into a large bowl.
Let the corn sit a little bit in the hot thyme water while you finish grating the carrots and radishes, so it takes on as much of that flavour as possible. Then, when the corn is no longer too hot to hold, grate that into the bowl as well, grabbing onto the end of each ear and pushing down against the grater.
Take another mixing bowl and put the ground chicken or turkey into it, along with half a cup of breadcrumbs, one egg, a couple splashes of Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoon of paprika, a tablespoon of garlic powder, and a few cracks of fresh ground pepper. Mix this all together.
Heat up a pan with some olive oil over medium heat. Form the meat into balls with your hands before putting them on the pan to cook for seven minutes on one side, before flipping and cooking for another seven minutes. After flipping, press down gently on each with a spatula so that the kotletid are a little bit flat and some of the juices are released while they’re cooking. You can use another pan as a cover to help the sides of the kotletid cook thoroughly. The internal temperature to aim for is 74° Celsius.
Wash and cut open a lime and squeeze this over the grated vegetables. Put a soup spoon’s worth of mayonnaise into the combo in the bowl and mix it all well before serving it on each plate with the kotletid and potato pancakes.
Head isu! Bon appétit!
