Pancake Travels

Alright, we bought the plantains we needed for pancakes from Cote d' Ivoire.  We then proceeded to wait a few weeks for them to ripen up.  Well, when they were finally ripe enough to use, we didn't have the time to make pancakes.  This led to them becoming over ripe. We tried finding more plantains that were ripe enough to use, but had no luck.  I did find some that were close, and I will be monitoring them at the grocery store for purchase next week.  Maybe we'll get to make pancakes from Cote d' Ivoire then.  For now though, we head to the island nation of Cuba, where arepas are the pancake of choice. When researching Cuban pancakes, we discovered that their pancakes are really more like a pancake sandwich.  They take two arepas and melt cheese in between.  It sounds an awful lot like a grilled cheese sandwich to me!  I hope it tastes as good as a grilled cheese sandwich!  Anyway, here is what you'll need to make Cuban arepas. 1 cup of...

So we should be in Cote d' Ivoire (Ivory Coast) for our next trip, unfortunately we couldn't find any plantains that were ripe enough to make their pancakes.  We did buy some in the hopes that they will be ripe enough for us to use in our next trip.  For now we decided to skip Cote d' Ivoire and head to Eastern Europe, where we discovered Croatian palachinke. If you've followed our blog since the beginning, you might recall that we had palachinke in Albania as well.  Croatian palachinke are similar in some ways to those in Albania in that they are crepes with cheese in them; however, the final step in preparing them makes them very different.  In the final step, you bake the crepes; and these end up being much more like a blintz than a crepe.  Here we go on our Croatian palachinke journey.  You'll need the following to make your palachinke: For the crepes 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour 2 cups of milk 2 eggs pinch of salt 1 tablespoon of butter, melted For ...