Georgia On My Mind . . .

So, I once again found myself in a world without pancake Sundays.  I havne't had a whole lof time to discover the pancakes for my next country.  

During my time away, I did make pancakes from Georgia and Germany.  I just haven't had the time to blog about it yet.  Now, finding a little bit of free time on my hands, I decided to go ahead and blog about these two countries.  So, without further ado, I move on to Georgia.

Before giving you the pancake recipe from Georgia, I just wanted to mention that my travels first took us back to Africa, to the countries of Gabon and The Gambia.  However, I had the same problem I've often had in African countries, no pancakes that I could discover.  After some pretty serious investigating, I decided to move on to Georgia.  As always, if anyone knows of pancakes from either of these two countries and can point me in the right direction, I'd gladly revisit these two countries.

In Georgia, pancakes are called mchadi.  Mchadi are a cornbread style pancake.  Also, Geogians apparently eat a lot of beans, which are called lobio.  So I decided to make lobio with sweet corn to go with my mchadi.  I originally made the lobio up, and when I went to make the mchadi, I discovered that I didn't have all of the ingredients for it.  I ended up freezing the lobio.  I don't have pictures of the lobio making process for some reason also.  However, I used the recipe from the Georgian Recipe website, and it has some great pictures.  Take a look at the website to learn how to make lobio with sweet corn.  Here is what my lobio looked like once it was made:

For the mchadi, you will need the following ingredients:

400 grams of white ground corn meal
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1 cup of cold water
oil for cooking

Here is a picture of the cornmeal I used:

Mix the corn meal and salt.  Then you will need to slowly add the water to the corn meal until the dough is firm, but not wet.

I found that I couldn't get my dough firm, it was just grainy, so I kept adding water until it became what I thought was firm, but not wet.  When you have a firm dough, heat the oil in a pan, and make small flattened mounds in your hand.

Place them in the hot oil, and flatten further with the back of the spoon.  Cook on both sides until golden.

I must stay that the mchadi were not good.  However, my dough also didn't look like the dough from the recipe.  Also, my finished product didn't look the same either.  The finished mchadi should look more like a flattened biscuit.  I suspect that this might be because I should have used corn flour instead of corn meal.  I've found that what other countries call corn meal, is actually what we call corn flour here.  Our corn meal tends to be much coarser.  This is probably why they didn't turn out.  I will probably try making these again, using corn flour the next time.  The lobio was really good though, but it was quite spicy.  It also froze very nicely.