The Pattern Continues - Back to Asia as We Visit China

I'm sensing a pattern here, and me thinks it will continue next week once we're done with China.  So for Chinese pancakes, we did no research because I learned how to make Chinese pancakes several years ago from our friend Lei, who is from China.  While we didn't have to research a recipe for these, I have had to think about how to present this recipe, as I learned it without making any measurements for ingredients since this is the way Lei makes them.  I will give rough amounts, and show you what the consistency of the batter should look like once you're done.  That way if you decide to make them, you'll have an idea of what it's supposed to look like.  Here's what you need to make Chinese pancakes:

flour
green onions
water
salt
eggs (2 for each person you will be serving, so if you're serving 2 people, you will need four eggs)

First you'll need to chop the green onion.  We usually just chop the whole bunch of onions as you buy it from the store, because we really like green onions.  Adjust the amount to your personal taste preferences.

Next you'll need to "measure" out the flour.  I started out with about a cup and a half of flour.

After "measuring" the flour, you're ready to begin adding water.  I usually put the faucet on low and whisk the water in with the flour as the water is being put in.  The picture below shows that the batter is too thick and lumpy still.  There shouldn't be any lumps, this is how you'll know there is enough water.

This next picture shows the batter quite a bit thinner, although it's a bit blurry.  Don't worry, I do have some video to show you the final consistency of the batter.

Next you'll need to beat the eggs.  We used 6 eggs because we wanted some left over pancakes to eat later in the week.
 

Once you've beaten the eggs, you're ready to add them to the flour and water mixture.

You can add the green onions at this time too.  Now comes the tricky part.  Below you'll see a video of what the consistency of the batter should be like.  Add more water if you need a thinner batter or more flour if you need a thicker batter.  Just add a little at a time until you get it to the right consistency.  If you over add something, add the opposite to take it back to the right consistency.

 

 O.K., now we're ready to cook up some Chinese pancakes.  We always use our crepe pan to make these, but you can use any frying pan.  Spray some oil (we used olive oil from our misto) on the crepe pan and heat it up.  You can see in this next picture that we're also having some gyoza to go with our Chinese pancakes

Now ladle some of the batter into the pan, and swirl it around as you would when making a crepe.

Cook until the pancake begins to brown slightly around the edges and looks pretty dry.  The edges will go up slightly as well.  When the pancake is dry, spray more oil over the top and then flip it over. 

This is what the pancake should look like once flipped.

Cook it for a couple of more minutes and then remove from heat.  I suppose you could eat them flat, but Lei always rolls them for us, so we rolled our first one up and gave it a try.  It's important to try the first one before you make anymore so that you can adjust the seasonings.  If it's too salty, add a little more flour and water.  I usually err on the side of not enough salt and have to add more.

Continue cooking pancakes until all of the batter is used up.  Keep the pancakes warm in an oven or under a clean towel.  We also chopped up some cucumbers to go with our breakfast because, once again, Lei always serves cucumbers with the Chinese pancakes when she makes them for us. We usually sprinkle a little bit of salt on our cucumbers too, because that's what Lei would do.

 We were so happy that it was a beautiful, sunny, and warm winter day.  So we decided to take our meal outside.
 

It was yummy, as they always are when we eat them!

I'll leave this post with one more photo, an artistic through the glass shot.
 

It Wasn't Chilly in Chile - Back to South America

Aye, aye, aye - all of this travel back and forth between Asia and South America is causing some serious jet lag to my taste buds.  Hahaha!

Here we are back in South America on the western coast.  I will have to say I was VERY excited to learn that Chileans eat one of my favorite types of pancakes, potato pancakes!  Who could ever say no to a fried potato?!?  In Chile they refer to potato pancakes as milcaos, and they make their milcaos slightly different than I'm used to making potato pancakes.  I was very excited to get started on these!  Here are the ingredients for milcaos:

• 12 medium potatoes
• 3 tablespoons vegetable shortening, at room temperature
• 1 tablespoon butter
• Vegetable oil for frying
• Salt to taste

First you'll want to take 6 of your potatoes and peel them.

Next put them in a pot of water on the stove, and bring the water to a boil.  Once the water is boiling, simmer on medium heat until potatoes are tender.  I chopped my potatoes into smaller pieces so that they would cook a bit faster.  After the potatoes are cooked, add in the butter and salt, then mash the potatoes well.  Set aside to cool.  While the mashed potatoes are cooling, begin peeling and shredding the rest of your potatoes.  We used the small grate of a box grater to grate ours. 

We thought the above picture was an interesting one of the potato peels, so I included it in the blog.  Here is what our grated potatoes looked like:

Don't worry if they brown a little bit like ours did.  Once they fry up, the color changes again anyway.  After you've grated the remaining potatoes, you need to squeeze out all of the excess liquid from them.  I do this by repeatedly placing them between dry paper towels and squeezing until I can't get any more liquid out.  You can see a picture of a part of this squeezing process in my Chanukah Post. 

Now you're ready to mix everything together.  We started with mixing half of the mashed potatoes, half of the shredded potatoes, and half of the vegetable shortening together.

Once you have half of it mixed together, go ahead and mix the rest of the potatoes (both mashed and shredded) and shortening in until you have what looks like potato dough.  Heat up 1-2 inches of your favorite oil for frying.  Once the oil is heated, form potato pancakes with your hands.

Once you've shaped your pancake, place it in the hot oil and fry until edges are brown.  Then flip to finish cooking.

While the milcaos are frying, get a cooling rack out and place it over a cookie sheet.  You can also take random pictures of your dogs if you have any:

Once the milcaos have cooked on both sides, remove from the oil and allow excess oil to drain off on the cooling rack.

Continue cooking until all of the potato batter has been cooked.  In Chile they eat them just like this, but we decided we wanted a little bit of protein with ours.  So I rinsed a can of black beans, added a cup of corn, and a container of my favorite salsa (sorry, I don't have the size, but it's just a normal size of salsa you'd buy in the grocery store). 

You can eat the black bean salsa as is by itself, but we put it over our milcaos.

Deeeeeeelish!

Millets are so 80s - We're in Chad

We've now traveled back to Africa to the country of Chad.  I'm seriously experiencing some jetlag here!  I'm wondering if maybe we should have planned our trip a bit differently, like all of the countries on one continent and then moved to another continent.  Oh well, we didn't, so here we are back and forth across the world again.  

While researching Chadian pancakes, we discovered that millet is the important grain in this country.  At first we found lots of references to something called aiysh in Northern Chad and biya in Southern Chad.  We soon learned that these are the same thing, balls of fried millet, in both regions.  For some reason they just have different names.  We were a bit disappointed to find out that these were balls, because we don't really consider fried balls of dough to be pancakes (with the exception of abelskivers of course, but we'll get to them when we get to Denmark).  So we continued to look for Chadian pancakes.  We did discover that they make pancakes out of millet as well, however, we weren't able to find a truly authentic Chadian millet recipe as we weren't able to discover the name for pancakes in Chad.  So intstead, we looked for a millet recipe that sounded good, and this is what we ended up with.  For these millet pancakes you will need the following:

• 1 millet (once you cook this, you will only use about half of it)
• 1 large apple shredded 
• 1 tsp vanilla 
• 2 tsp sugar 
• 1 egg 
• 1/2 tsp baking soda 

The first thing you'll want to do is cook the millet so that it has a chance to cool.  You don't know how to cook millet you say?  Well, neither did we.  We had to do a search for cooking millet, and this is what we learned.  First toast the millet in a frying pan until it smells nutty (about 4-5 minutes on medium heat with frequent stirring).

After toasting the millet, place it in a pot and add two cups of water.  Heat on high heat until boiling, and then lower heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes.  After 15 minutes, remove from heat and let cool.  It only takes about 5-10 minutes for the millet to cool.  If you want to, you could precook the millet the night before and store it in the refrigerator until you are ready to use it.  Once the millet has cooled, peel and shred your apple.  We used a slightly sweet, but still tart apple, but you can use whatever type you like.

Now all you have to do is add all of your ingredients to the blender and give it a whirl.  This is what ours looked like:

Remove batter from blender.  Heat your favorite oil in a frying pan, and then add 1 - 1 1/2 cups of batter to the pan.  Fry until browned on both sides.

Remove from heat and enjoy!  We poured some sourwood honey over the top, which we had purchased on our recent trip to Savannah.  

We also added some some scrambled eggs seasoned with thyme and havarti for a little bit of protein.

I thought these were yummy!  Sam thought they were just O.K.  In hindsight, we probably should have added some water to the batter to make it truly more like a batter.  Our batter was a bit clumpy, and our pancakes didn't look anything like the picture in the original recipe (which can be found here).   All in all, I enjoyed them, and I would eat them again exactly as they turned out.

Oh Canada! Your Pancakes Are So Lovely!

Next we find ourselves on what could seem like the far opposite side of the globe in Canada.  In all of our research, we found that Canadian pancakes are very similar to American pancakes, especially in their many and varied forms.  We opted to go for a buttermilk version of the Canadian pancake, and we made sure we had real maple syrup imported from Canada to go with them!  Here's what you need for the buttermilk Canadian style pancakes we made:

• 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon of salt
• 1 3/4 cups of buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons of butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla
• oil for cooking

Place all of the dry ingredients into a large bowl and whisk together until combined.

In a separate bowl, mix together the wet ingredients.  We made sure to mix the melted butter with the buttermilk first, so that the melted butter would cool a bit and not cook the egg once we mixed it in.  Here's the buttermilk we used, because of course, Sam likes to take product placement photos:

Once you've combined all of the wet ingredients, gradually add them to the dry ingredients, whisking until all ingredients are combined.  You will  have a slightly lumpy batter.

Once the batter is ready, heat some oil on a griddle pan then pour some of the batter into the pan.  We used 1/3 of a cup to make each pancake.  Cook in the usual manner until pancakes look crispy around the edge, and the batter on top looks fairly dry and then flip to cook the other side.

Once they are cooked on both side, remove from heat and keep warm in the oven.  Continue cooking until all of the batter is used up.  Serve with maple syrup.

We added some protein to our meal in the form of sausage.

As you can see, these pancakes put a smile on our face.  Canada, we'll eat your pancakes anytime!

Cameroon Bananaroon - Cameroonian Crepes Are Next In Our Travels

On our journey to discover Cameroonian pancakes, we found many recipes for akara.  For those of you who may not have read some of our other African pancake recipe, akara is a black eyed pea type of pancake.  In Cameroon they aren't flat like in the other African countries we've visited.  Instead they are shaped like balls and look more like fritters.  So we opted not to make Cameroonian akara on this particular journey.  We did run across a recipe for African crepes from Cameroon in our search, so we decided to go ahead and give it a try.  For Cameroonian crepes, you will need the following:

• 140 grams of flour
• 50 grams of sugar
• pinch of salt
• 360 milliliters of milk
• 4 large, ripe bananas mashed
• oil for frying
• powdered sugar for dusting

The first thing we did was mash the bananas.  Our bananas were quite ripe with lots of brown spots on the outside, so we were able to mash them quite easily.  We started out using a fork to mash them, but switched to a potato masher.

Next whisk the dry ingredients in a bowl, and then whisk in the milk until you have a smooth batter.  Once you have a smooth batter, whisk in the mashed bananas.

Once the bananas have been incorporated into the batter (it will be lumpy with bananas), you are ready to begin frying your pancakes.  Heat some oil in a crepe pan.  Once the oil is heated, ladle batter into the crepe pan and swirl as usual for a crepe.

Fry until golden brown around the edges, and then flip.  It takes about 2 minutes for it to brown.

Cook for about 2 more minutes, and then remove from heat.  Continue cooking in the same manner until all of the batter is used up.  Once you've cooked all of your crepes, sprinkle with sugar and eat.

I wasn't overly fond of these.  For me they just had too much banana in them.  If I made these again for just myself, I would probably only use 2 bananas instead of 4.  However, Sam loved them with all of the bananas in it!

140g flour 50g sugar 2 tbsp sugar pinch of salt 360ml milk 4 large, ripe, bananas, mashed groundnut oil for frying icing sugar to dust

Read more at Celtnet: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/miscellaneous/fetch-recipe.php?rid=misc-african-crepes
Copyright © celtnet

Off to Asia - Cambodia is Our Next Stop

As we arrived in Cambodia, we soon discovered that Cambodia has rice flour pancake.  Sam was really excited for this pancake, as the recipe also calls for shrimp.  We discovered that this style of pancake is called banh xeo in Cambodia, and while we found several recipes for banh xeo, many of them were not for Cambodian banh xeo.  We eventually found a Cambodian recipe.  So here is what you'll need to make Cambodian banh xeo:

• 1 3/4 cups of rice flour
• 2 cups of water 
• 1/2 teaspoons turmeric 
• 1 yellow onion sliced 
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp of vegetable oil 
• 1 pound of medium shrimp, peeled and deveined ( we used frozen shrimp that was already peeled and deveined for us from Trader Joe's)  Instead of the shrimp, you can also use mixed varieties of sliced mushrooms for a vegetarian option or you can use ground pork meat or chicken meat or a combination.
• 1 small green onion thinly sliced 
• 1 1/4 teaspoons of salt 
• 1 1/4 teaspoons of freshly ground pepper 
• 2 1/2 cups of mung bean sprouts  

The first thing you'll need to do is measure out your rice flour.  Since we had coarse rice flour, we decided to give it a whirl in the food processor to make it a more fine flour.

Once you've measured out your rice flour,  mix in the salt, pepper, and turmeric.  Chop up the green onion.

Add the water to the rice flour mixture, and then add in the green onion.  Stir until you have a homogenous batter:

Set the batter aside, and thinly slice the yellow onion.

After slicing the onion, heat  1 1/2 teaspoons of oil in a skillet over high heat.  Once it's heated, add a few slices of onion and shrimp and cook until lightly browned.

Once they've browned, you're ready to add some of the rice batter.  Measure our 1/3 of a cup of rice flour, and pour it over the onions and shrimp in the frying pan.  Make sure to tilt the pan as you pour it in so that it is equally distributed.

Cook until the sides of the pancake turn deep brown and curl up, then add 1/4 cup of mung beans (bean sprouts) and fold in half.

So once again, making pancakes with rice flour has foiled us.  This is what ours looked like:

 While they may not look very savory, they actually tasted really great!  They also smelled delectable as we were cooking them.  Unfortunately the texture was way off on these, and the great flavor didn't make up for the bad texture.  We tried a couple of more times to make them, but we didn't have any success.  So instead, we used the "filling" (shrimp, onions, and mung beans) and a few eggs to make this:

We had omelets instead of pancakes on this Sunday.