Pancake Travels

All I have to say is darn you Blogger for helping me discover something else to waste my time on!  What has Blogger helped me find to waste my time on you ask?  I'll tell you what.  Blogger lets you track where your blog gets the most hits from, and one of the sites that keeps popping up on mine is a site called StumbleUpon.  This particular site keeps popping up on my list of sites, and then dropping off.  Anyway, it popped up again this week, so I decided to go on over to the site and check it out. Of course, you can't fully check out the site and how it works until you sign up for an account, so I went ahead and signed up.  After signing up it asks you to list things you're interested in, and of course I did.  For anyone who is using Pinterest this set up process might sound familiar.  The difference though is in this.  Unlike Pinterest, which has a whole bunch of things popping up on your home page (which for someone like me is WAY too mu...

O.K., here's another one of those funny little pancake things I've run across as a result of starting this blog.  Enjoy!

So I've finally arrived back from my vacation, and for three Sundays following Belarus, I managed to find interesting pancakes while on the road.  The first Sunday on the road brought me to Moab, UT.  I wanted to get up early, have some pancakes, and then head out to Arches National Park.  Well, I accomplished 2 out of the 3 things I had planned.  I didn't get up early.  I did end up eating at a restaurant called Jailhouse Cafe, and it was named that because it was the former site of the jail in Moab.  I had their old fashioned ginger pancakes with dutch apple butter.  These things were tasty.  Somehow I managed not to get a picture of these pancakes.  I'm blaming it on still being tired despite sleeping in, but here's a picture of the outside of the cafe. My next Sunday brings us to Breckenridge, CO.  I ended up eating at Daylite Donuts .  This time I opted to skip the pancakes as I was suffering from altitude sickness.  Inst...

This next post takes us to Belarus, my first Eastern European country.  I discovered that the blini is a popular pancake in Belarus, which makes sense since Belarus used to be a part of the Soviet Union.  However, knowing that blini are a Russian form of pancake, I wanted to make sure that I was using a blini recipe that could be credited to Belarus and not Russia.  I soon discovered 3 types of blini recipe that Belorussians eat.  They were:  a potato blini,  an oatmeal blini, and an apple blini.  The potato blini reminded me of a latke, so I opted not to make this one.  I really wanted to make the apple blini, but apples were out of season when I made these; and the apples I was finding  at the store at the time didn't taste very good.  This left the oatmeal blini, which was perfect since I had all of the ingredients I needed in my cupboard already.  Yay!  No hunting down ingredients this week! At last, I arrive back to posts ...

This week wasn't much of a challenge finding my recipe; however, while finding the recipe wasn't a challenge, finding the ingredients for this simple recipe was.  In my research I found a couple of interesting facts about Barbados that I thought I'd share.  First, did you know that the Lesser Antilles is sometimes referred to as the Caribbees?  Also, I eventually learned that Barbadans eat a lot of cassava (aka yuca or manioc).  Well, the recipe I found was super simple.  It called for cassava flour.  Hmmmmm . . . where can I get cassava flour.  I tried all of my usual places for this exotic flour, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and Bristol Farms.  However, I had no luck finding this flour at any of them.  I even tried the new Winn Dixie, hoping they might have it in their bulk section; but I don't think cassava flour is considered a popular bulk item for them as I didn't find it there either.  Finally, I looked it up online and bought it th...

I "landed" in Bangladesh a few weeks ago, and I initially had some difficulty finding a Bengali pancake.  After my experiences the previous week with Bahrain, and now difficulty with Bangladesh made me fear that I was losing my touch when it came to finding pancake recipes.  Fortunately I'm tenacious, and I eventually found a recipe for them. I discovered that Bengali pancakes are called patishapta pitha.  It's a type of crepe made from rice flour, and it has a candied coconut filling.  When researching this recipe, I thought I might have a little bit of trouble finding rice flour, and I really didn't want to have to make our own.  I was also a little bit worried about finding a sweetener called jaggery.  Fortunately I was able to find both at my favorite Indian grocery store.  If you've never had jaggery, it is an unrefined sugar that is popular in southern Asia as well as Mexico.  In Mexico it's called panela.  Anyway, jaggery is a sweetene...