Pancake Travels

We've now reached the third night of Chanukah, and I think my tummy might not make it to the 8th night.  Latkes are VERY filling when eaten night after night.  Here's a cool picture Sam took of the chanukia tonight. So we were going to make a "modernist" (as it was described by Saveur magazine) style latke tonight, but we had some trouble tracking down potato starch.  We DID (key word being did) have a box of it in the cupboard, but we somehow used it all up.  I thought it would be readily available at the grocery store, but I was sadly mistaken.  After the second grocery store and no luck.  Sam informed me that he bought it at the Vons/Pavillions store the last time he bought it.  Oh well!  The one grocery store I didn't go to. While at the second grocery store, I decided to pick up a couple of sweet potatoes and come up with my own version of a sweet potato latke.  I say it's sort of a sweet potato latke because I did use some regular potat...

Moving on to night number two of Chanukah, we decided we needed a protein packed latke.  Thus we ended up making quinoa pancakes.  I had discovered a recipe awhile ago for these, and it called for a poached egg on top.  What could be better than quinoa pancakes and a poached egg?  Well, we decided to poach the egg my favorite way, which is in tomato sauce instead of water.  Keep reading and you'll see what type of latke meal we had for the 2nd night of Chanukah. Before beginning the explanation of this recipe, I have to admit that we were not very good at taking pictures this time around, so sorry if it seems like there aren't enough.  We'll try to do a better job tomorrow night. There are several steps to making these latkes.  The first thing you'll want to do is cook the quinoa.  Thoroughly rinse 1 cup of dry quinoa.  Place it in a pot with 1 1/4 cup of water.  Bring to a boil, and immediately turn down to low and cover.  Simmer f...

Welcome to our eight nights of pancakes, or rather, I should say latkes.  We decided to prolong our break from our "travels" since it's Chanukah, and instead we are exploring the many different types of latkes that people are making during this time of year. Traditionally latkes (yiddish for pancake) are made out of potatoes; however, as often happens over time with many things, the view of latkes as always being potato pancakes is being challenged and changed.  Because of this, we decided to devote each night of celebration to a newer idea of what a latke can be. For the first night of Chanukah we decided to stay somewhat traditional in our latkes in that we did make potato pancakes.  However, we used a slightly different recipe than what we would normally use.  Generally speaking, we usually grate the potato in large shreds, but this year we did the smaller shreds.  We also opted to leave off the traditional applesauce or sour cream topping.  You may reca...

So this Sunday finds us having had too much work to do the previous week and no time to do any research into pancakes for Burundi, the next and final country in the Bs.  Seriously, trying to paint a kitchen and get report cards done at the same time are two activities that just don't mix.  Anyway, I digress as I often do, back to the important discussion of making pancakes. It's now Sunday, and we find ourselves without a pancake recipe and little energy to put into researching one for Burundi.  While waiting for the dog to finish his business so that I could close the back door, I discovered this: All of my previously slightly yellow, but mostly green lemons had decided to ripen up at the same time.  Yippee!  My mind said, "Let the lemon madness begin!"  I'm always excited by the first big batch of ripe lemons on the tree despite the fact that we pretty much have lemons on the tree year round (just not so many).  Thoughts of lemon cookies, lemon loaf,...

As we researched this week's pancake country, we were presented with a bit of conundrum.  We had arrived in Burma (at least that was where we should be according the the list we were using).  However, upon arriving there we discovered that they call themselves Myanmar, while much of the rest of the world continues to call them Burma.  What are a couple of poor pancake bloggers to do in this situation?  Do we classify them in the Bs, or do we wait and eat their pancakes in the Ms?  After much research into the history of the country's name and and why so many western countries continue to call the country Burma, we discovered that this country's people refer to themselves in both ways, and the official name of the country is much less of a controversy to those outside of the political arena.  So, we went ahead and put them in the Bs for now (who knows, we might decide to revisit them when we get to the Ms as well).  We discovered that pancakes in Burma/...