Pancake Travels

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 ...

Next we find ourselves on what could seem like the far opposite side of the globe in Canada.  In all of our research, we found that Canadian pancakes are very similar to American pancakes, especially in their many and varied forms.  We opted to go for a buttermilk version of the Canadian pancake, and we made sure we had real maple syrup imported from Canada to go with them!  Here's what you need for the buttermilk Canadian style pancakes we made: 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour 3 tablespoons of sugar 1 teaspoon of baking powder 1 teaspoon of baking soda 1/4 teaspoon of salt 1 3/4 cups of buttermilk 1 egg 2 tablespoons of butter, melted 1 teaspoon of vanilla oil for cooking Place all of the dry ingredients into a large bowl and whisk together until combined. In a separate bowl, mix together the wet ingredients.  We made sure to mix the melted butter with the buttermilk first, so that the melted butter would cool a bit and not cook the egg once we mixed it in.  He...

This week we find ourselves once again in Eastern Europe eating palachinka (aka crepes).  We arrived in Bulgaria, only to discover that there was a delay in our departure to pancake land.  Delay you say?  Yes, there was a delay.  We should really read the recipes we find in their entirety so that we can be prepared and able to eat pancakes for breakfast in the morning.  The particular Bulgarian palachinka recipe that we found requires a 2 hour - overnight refrigeration process.  Thus, despite the fact that we were super hungry this morning, we weren't able to eat palachinka for breakfast.  Instead we had strawberry smoothies.  Here is what our breakfast smoothies looked like as we looked at them in the blender from up above. We did eat palachinka today, we just ate them for lunch instead.  I have to thank Faux Chef for 5 for her lovely palachinka recipe.  Her husband is Bulgarians, and she makes him these when he is missing home....