Cannibal!

  

  
This thing is also called a German pancake, but it is more fun to say "Honey, do you want to eat a Dutch Baby for breakfast tomorrow?"

The recipe for the pancake is exactly the same as the one found here, (except that I always use salted butter) but there are a couple things I think are useful to know, namely that

1. It does make a big difference to use eggs & milk at room temperature. They poof much less when cold.

2. Make sure the oven is fully pre-heated, then make up the batter. It is too easy to get impatient and ravenous and put the batter in the oven before it's hot enough.

3. Freshly grated nutmeg & cinnamon.

4. Heat the skillet on the stove top, not in the oven. Otherwise you will get it smoking hot and the butter will scorch and it will not taste good.

5. NO PEEKING! If you open the oven even once, the thing will go all flat and never recover, but it will taste good anyway.

This recipe, cooked in a 10" frying pan is exactly the right amount of breakfast for 2 modestly sized, moderately hungry adults. I skipped the orange sugar recommended in the original recipe, and went with jam and greek yogurt on one piece and maple syrup and super-dark chocolate on the other. Break the chocolate into bites and poke them into the hot pancake to get melty before slopping on the syrup.

In the middle of the winter, I'm going to break down and cook one of these in bacon drippings.

Pancake Day

 

 
IHOP says it's pancake day. I sorta failed to take in the IHOP part and just fixated on the pancake part, so I made a mess o' flapjacks for breakfast.

1 1/2 cup AP flour
1 1/4 cup water
1/4 cup dry milk
about a teaspoon salt
about a tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 egg
2 tablespoons veggie oil

Mix everything together vigorously until there are no bumps, or at least, no big ones.

Heat a large, lightly oiled skillet, or 2, to medium high. Drop the batter about 1/3 cup at a time, and fry both sides until they're brown. Decorate them to suit yourself. I like some of everything, obviously.

There isn't much to know about making pancakes, but:

- make sure the skillet is hot enough that the batter sizzles a bit when you put it in, and
- don't flip them until they're nearly cooked through, then
- just brown the other side lightly, or they will go dry.

Dad could not make good pancakes. They were always heavy, dense, greasy, hard, rubbery, and burnt in places. They usually tasted like too much baking powder, and were a bit sulphurous from too much egg. In his culture-bound mindset, to make something 'good' you should pack as many rich ingredients into it as possible. Which meant using lots of oil and eggs in the batter, and practically deepfrying them in animal fat. Unfortunately lots of egg and oil makes a very solid pancake, which means you need lots of leavening to lighten it up, which means all you can taste is baking powder and egg white. And whatever animal contributed the fat. Sometimes that was a pig, but frequently it was a duck. Or a chicken.

Naturally, I was convinced for decades that pancakes were gross. I don't know exactly when that changed. Trader Joe's pancake mix might have helped. That was the first step on my road to pancake recovery. I used to have a box of the multigrain mix around all the time, but then 2 things happened: I moved out here and ate Pete's pancakes that he makes from scratch, and I realized that it didn't make sense to keep what is essentially a box of flour that I can only use for 2 things along with all my normal flour. I mean, even if you get a box of mix, you still have to add eggs, and oil, and milk, so at that point why not add the flour and leavening too, right?

Pete makes great pancakes. This isn't his recipe, his are fluffier, and I think he uses yogurt in them so they have an extra yummy flavor, a bit like a yeast batter but not near as fiddly. I saw him making them one morning and sort of went 'Huh. So that's how you're supposed to do it.'

Potato Pancakes

  

  
Not only am I not Irish, I'm not Jewish either. Several weeks ago I went and scrounged a potato pancake that Cynthia and the girls made, and I remembered that I love these things. While I was cooking them, I also remembered that the last time I grated a potato must have been about 12 years ago. Probably about this time of year, while I was prepping the holiday latkes at that deli. (Yes, I know, Passover isn't the latke holiday, that's Chanukah, but it billed itself as a jewish deli, and...you know) I'm sure that's the reason why, in all this time, I have never made latkes again. I worked with a woman who was truly, horribly, injured making latkes. I don't know how many hundreds of pounds of potatoes I had to peel or how may dozens of times I shaved little pieces of my knuckles off with that demonic peeler. Thank goodness for the Robotcoupe. We had a mixing bowl as large as a kiddie pool that we mixed the grated potatoes for the holiday latke recipe in. Sometimes I wish I had one of those industrial food processors. I digress. Please note, that I did not bother to peel my potatoes today.

about a pound and a half of yukon gold potatoes, the newer the better
about 4 tablespoons of flour
about a teaspoon of salt
3 eggs
2 or 3 green onions
2 tablespoons, more or less, minced parsley
some pepper
olive oil for frying

This makes about 8, 4-5" pancakes.

Mince the green onion and parsley, and mix them with the eggs, flour, salt and pepper. Wash the potatoes and grate them into another bowl. Grab handfuls of the grated potatoes and wring out as much water as possible before adding them to the egg mix. You may be tempted to skip this part- don't. Once you get the potatoes mixed in with the salt in the batter, they will sweat out an amazing quantity of water.

Use 2 frying pans. Put about 1/4 inch of oil in each one and heat to medium. When the oil starts to shimmer in the pans, drop about 1/3 cup of batter for each latke into the pans. I can fit 3 latkes into a 10-inch pan. Cook them for about 5 minutes on each side, until they are golden and a bit crispy. Drain on paper towels.

Notes:

1. The potatoes will oxidize very fast. Grate quickly and mix them into the batter just as soon as you want to eat them. At the deli, we used to mix up a water bath with a few tablespoons of an anti-oxidant to grate the potatoes into. The anti-oxidant was this weird substance which demonstrated a property that I learned about in high school which I think is called 'heat of solvation'. That is, when a chemical in crystaline form is dissolved in water, it will release heat, due to the fact that an organized solid is a higher energy state than a bunch of loose molecules floating around in suspension. Some crystals will release quite a lot of energy this way. If you held a scoop of that anti-oxidant and dribbled a little water on it, you could give yourself a significant burn. (That's not what happened to Ann.)
2. As I said, the potatoes emit a great deal of water. You can either squish it out before frying, as I did, to keep your pancakes neat in appearance, or if you like an eggier latke, stir it back in. The last few will be rather sloppy, but will taste good.
3. Medium heat is best. They take longer to brown, but you need to cook them long enough to get the potatoes soft. Crunchy-raw potatoes are not very satisfying to eat.
4. Don't crowd the pans. Too many latkes all at once will generate a cloud of steam which will inhibit crisping. Cooked through is good, soggy is not.
5. You don't have to use yukon gold potatoes, any kind will do just fine. I like that variety because the color is appealing, and because the skins are usually thin and tender enough to dispense with peeling.

I did not have either sour cream or apple sauce, which is ok, because I don't like apple sauce unless I make it myself. Greek yogurt and raspberry jam was very good, and a fried egg is even better.

'Stolen' Apple Pancakes

Which is what the handwritten recipe in my mom's recipe notebook says.

I associate a childhood trip to chicago with this recipe. There was a pancake restaurant. I think I was in first grade, and I did not appreciate it. I have never been a good traveler, nor a person who enjoys meeting strangers. Going to Chicago was something I wanted to do not because I actually enjoyed the experience, but because like all children, I didn't want to miss out on anything that might be fun. How was I to know at that age that I was destined to be a curmudgeon? I was six.

The pancake restaurant was noisy, crowded, I was at a table with many strangers, and I don't remember what I ordered. Waffles, maybe. With strawberries, because we never had such exotic things at home, but I don't think they lived up to the expectations I had of them. Somebody else ordered the apple pancakes. I don't know if that was when dad first had them or what, but evidently they made a great impression on him, because this recipe showed up in mom's cookbook. 'Stolen' I assume because dad had to approximate the originals on his own.

On the other hand, while thinking about this recipe brings up memories of some very uncomfortable family excursions, the pancakes themselves, and the making of them, impart a feeling of great wellbeing. Even, I hate to admit it, of nostalgia! This was a special occasion breakfast to begin with, and later on, Dad would just decide that he wanted apple pancakes from time to time. Sometimes the tai chi group would come over, Dad would make a bunch of these things, and the house would smell like hot cooking oil and sugar all day.

The pictures are not that great, but I plead ravenous impatience to eat breakfast.

1 large apple, 2 would have been better
1 or 2 T cooking oil, canola or like that, not olive.
a teensy pinch of salt

a generous handful of brown sugar
punkin pie spice or cinnamon, if you like

I have no idea what the pancake recipe was on that card. I know that it used only white flour. It had a bunch of eggs in it. I was feeling lazy, and just used pancake mix: TJ's multigrain. It makes a fluffier, lighter dough than the ones Dad made, but I like things to be less heavy than he did. Also, do not attempt to make this in a flimsy pan or one with a non-stick coating.

1 1/2 c pancake mix
1 egg
1 cup water
a dab of oil

Pre-heat the oven to 475.

Peel and slice the apple into 1/4 inch pieces or so. Get the oil pretty hot in a well seasoned all metal skillet and throw in the apples and a sprinkle of salt. The salt is very important, it makes the apples sweat, and keeps them from being one dimensionally sweet. When the apples are a teensy bit brown, turn them once and sprinkle the brown sugar and spice over them. The sugar will begin to caramelize very rapidly.

Mix up the batter ingredients up really fast, and don't worry about a few lumps. You will actually only need to use about 2/3 of the batter. Pour the batter over the apples and cover for a few seconds. When the caramel begins to ooze up around the edges and through any little holes, remove the cover and put the skillet in the oven to finish cooking.

When the pancake is just barely done and is starting to brown at the edges, take it out, cover it and let it sit for about 3 minutes. This lets the pancake finish cooking, and allows the apples to steam loose from the pan a bit. Turn the pancake out onto a plate and poke any apple bits back into it that have got stuck in the pan. Eat with scrambled eggs and cheddar cheese.

Definitely, this is for eating with company. It will taste just as delicious by yourself, but it would be a terrible pity to have nobody to enjoy it with.

Pancakes for dinner? Seriously?

I had been thinking about pesto on pancakes ever since I moved out of Pete and Cynthia's house. Lazy me misses Pete's cooking. Anyway, I really need his pancake recipe, because while trader joe's pancake mix is fine, it isn't what I originally wanted. The thing is, P & C actually keep milk in their fridge and I believe he puts some in his pancakes. Since I don't drink real milk, it's something I never think to buy, and if I did, chances are it would spoil before I used it. Unless I'm making yogurt, and then there wouldn't be any left over for other stuff.

At any rate, here's the picture, it turned out really pretty.

So: pancakes with 2 kinds of pesto, tomatoes, ham, and fresh mozzarella.

I had to cut back my basil plants before they bloomed and went to seed. I made regular and lemon-basil & walnut pestos. The lemon-basil version is fine, but once the leaves are all chopped up, the lemon scent is rather muted. Also, I think I should have stuck with my original inspiration, which was breakfast, and had poached eggs with it.

But it was a really quick dinner, (except the part where I spent 20 minutes taking pictures of it) and I bet a glass of 2 buck chuck wouldn't have hurt either.

Also, I really want one of those little kitchen blowtorches. I wanted the cheese to get brown crunchy spots, but the pancakes started to get too crispy.