Pancake Travels

The weekend of April 13th found me in Seattle for the weekend, so I wasn't able to make pancakes from a new country this weekend.  However, I did make an effort to eat pancakes on Sunday while I was on my trip. I ended up at Portage Bay Cafe in Ballard.  I chose this cafe for two reasons:  1)  It had great reviews on Yelp! and a local friend recommended I eat here, and 2)  I had plans to visit the locks in Ballard, so I thought it best to just drive once and eat there.  If you find yourself in Seattle, this was a fantastic place to eat, and they do have locations other than the one in Ballard. Upon looking at the menu, I opted not to have traditional pancakes, because they had one of my favorite meals on the menu, and it had a little twist to it.  It was the Vegetarian Cannellini Bean Benedict.  I love poached eggs, and I was looking forward to trying them on top of a bean cake instead of the more traditional english muffin.  A bean cake can ...

Once again I find myself behind on blogging about our pancake adventure, but I am determined to catch up this week.  Thus, here is the first of what I hope will be 4 posts this week.  So in researching Andorra this week, I learned quite a bit about this tiny country.  The first thing I learned is that it is located in the Pyrenees mountain range between France and Spain.  I will admit, I had no clue there were any countries other than Spain and France in that area.  I also learned that it is the 6th smallest country in Europe, with a land mass of only 181 square miles and a population around 84,000 people.  Given it's location, you can correctly assume that the cuisine in this country is similar to Spanish and French mountain cuisine.  I think I'm getting better at finding the pancakes for each country, because instead of an hour or so of research, I found the Andorran pancake in about 10 minutes.  It's called a trinxat, and it's made of potatoes,...

All I have to say right now is computer problems stay away!  That is the reason this post is late.  Now that all of the computer problems are cleaned up, I can get to the important stuff of blogging about pancakes! My next destination was Algeria.  I was excited about Algeria since it's a country in north Africa.  I thought I would be using some sort of exotic grain to make my pancakes this week.  Algeria did not disappoint, not only did the recipe call for semolina, but it called for yeast as well.  I've used semolina in the past, but I've mostly used it when making Italian breads and pizza dough.  I love the taste of semolina, and the texture it gives to breads is fantastic!  I wasn't too sure how it would go in a pancake batter though.  When I first read the recipes I found for Algerian pancakes, called baghrir, I was unsure why yeast was needed; and I was tempted to just leave it out.  I mean pancakes don't need rise time, and they'r...

Welcome to Sunday #3 on our trip around the world eating pancakes!  I will say it has been very exciting for us not only to discover new pancakes to eat, but also to learn more about each country during the process.  When researching Albania, I learned that the traditional Albanian breakfast food is rice and paca, which is a soup made from animal innards.  I also discovered that sometimes a soup made of lamb is eaten for breakfast as well.  As I continued my research, I began to wonder if Albania would be the first country that did not have some sort of traditional pancake.  Hmmmm . . . Not to be deterred by the first road block, I continued searching, just to be sure.  It would be awful to skip Albania because on first appearances it might appear they don't have a pancake style food in their cuisine.  As I continued my research, I soon learned that Albanian cuisine is influenced by Turkish, Greek, and Italian cuisine.  Since I know that Italy has...

Yes, yes, yes, I know this post is late.  I did actually make and eat these pancakes on March 18; however, I'm sure everyone can relate when I say sometimes life just gets in the way of things we truly want to do.  So this time I did the research to find a pancake for Afghanistan, and I must say that it definitely did take some research.  First I used the search term "Afghanistan pancakes", thinking that Google would definitely pull something up.  Wrong!  Then I used Bing, and I still did not have any success.  So I changed my search term to Afghanistan cuisine.  From this point, I decided to search for images of Afghanistan cuisine since I had no idea what the foods were based on their Afghan name.  See, I can use my brain and think outside the box when necessary.  I started sifting through images on the Internet, and for awhile the closest thing I found to a pancake was naan.  I consider naan more of a bread than a pancake, so I began ...

Sunday #1 takes me to the country of Austria.  It all began the Saturday before as I set myself the task of finding a pancake recipe for the next day.  While searching I decided I should go in alphabetical order, which leads me to Austria. Now you would think that having been to Austria, not once, but twice, I would have already tried Austrian pancakes while visiting the country.  It would have made sense if I had, but alas I didn't.  It was probably because I was too busy eating all of the yummy pastries in Austria.  I basically ate pastry the entire time I was there; and when I did eat a meal, it always included a couple of pastries with it.  Anyway, I got my first taste of Austrian pancakes right here in the U.S., and boy were they yummy! Now on to the recipe and the pictures.  We'll start with the recipe.  I found it on allrecipes.com, and we have to thank Dardoubert for the tasty introduction to the Austrian pancake. Ingredients ...