Pancake Travels

The weekend of April 13th found me in Seattle for the weekend, so I wasn't able to make pancakes from a new country this weekend.  However, I did make an effort to eat pancakes on Sunday while I was on my trip. I ended up at Portage Bay Cafe in Ballard.  I chose this cafe for two reasons:  1)  It had great reviews on Yelp! and a local friend recommended I eat here, and 2)  I had plans to visit the locks in Ballard, so I thought it best to just drive once and eat there.  If you find yourself in Seattle, this was a fantastic place to eat, and they do have locations other than the one in Ballard. Upon looking at the menu, I opted not to have traditional pancakes, because they had one of my favorite meals on the menu, and it had a little twist to it.  It was the Vegetarian Cannellini Bean Benedict.  I love poached eggs, and I was looking forward to trying them on top of a bean cake instead of the more traditional english muffin.  A bean cake can ...

Once again I find myself behind on blogging about our pancake adventure, but I am determined to catch up this week.  Thus, here is the first of what I hope will be 4 posts this week.  So in researching Andorra this week, I learned quite a bit about this tiny country.  The first thing I learned is that it is located in the Pyrenees mountain range between France and Spain.  I will admit, I had no clue there were any countries other than Spain and France in that area.  I also learned that it is the 6th smallest country in Europe, with a land mass of only 181 square miles and a population around 84,000 people.  Given it's location, you can correctly assume that the cuisine in this country is similar to Spanish and French mountain cuisine.  I think I'm getting better at finding the pancakes for each country, because instead of an hour or so of research, I found the Andorran pancake in about 10 minutes.  It's called a trinxat, and it's made of potatoes,...

All I have to say right now is computer problems stay away!  That is the reason this post is late.  Now that all of the computer problems are cleaned up, I can get to the important stuff of blogging about pancakes! My next destination was Algeria.  I was excited about Algeria since it's a country in north Africa.  I thought I would be using some sort of exotic grain to make my pancakes this week.  Algeria did not disappoint, not only did the recipe call for semolina, but it called for yeast as well.  I've used semolina in the past, but I've mostly used it when making Italian breads and pizza dough.  I love the taste of semolina, and the texture it gives to breads is fantastic!  I wasn't too sure how it would go in a pancake batter though.  When I first read the recipes I found for Algerian pancakes, called baghrir, I was unsure why yeast was needed; and I was tempted to just leave it out.  I mean pancakes don't need rise time, and they'r...