To compliment the fried shrimp I posted earlier this week, I had to share this no fail hush puppy recipe. These make a great paring with fresh or fried seafood, and this basic recipe allows you to customize your hush puppies with additional diced ingredients. You could try adding, jalapeños, cheese, or stuffing the hush puppies with crab meat.

I served these simply with some homemade honey butter, which was a nice compliment to the sea salt.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup finely diced sweet onion
• 1 1/2 cup self rising white cornmeal
• 3/4 cup self rising white flour
• 1 1/2 Tablespoons sugar
• egg lightly beaten
• 1 1/4 cup buttermilk
• coarse sea salt
• vegetable oil
• deep frier

Directions:

1. In a large bowl mix together onions, cornmeal, flour and sugar.
2. Add egg and buttermilk, incorporating until batter is moistened.
3. If your deep frier requires heating, add vegetable oil to appropriate fill line.
4. While oil is heating roll out hush puppies to desired size (I like mine about 1 – 1.5 inches in diameter)
5. Once oil is heated, place hush puppies in deep frier in batches, removing after their color has reach a browned color as pictured above. Make sure you are prodding the hush puppies during cooking so that all sides are cooked evenly.
6. Remove hush puppies with a slotted spoon, and transfer to paper towel lined plate or tray.
7. Immediately sprinkle with seal salt.
8. Serve and enjoy!