Korean Style Vegetable Pancakes

Do you have in your life, or are you one of those difficult people with some kind of dietary restriction? Vegetarian? Gluten free? Lactose intolerant? Here's the recipe for you: meat-free, dairy-free, gluten-free. And tasty and pretty filling. (Not vegan, though, sorry vegans.)

The basis for this recipe is from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian," and I am loving it (I've probably made these 4 times in the last month). I multiplied it the original by 1 1/2 and should have done even more, because if you're going to stand over a stove cooking stacks of pancakes, might as well go big, like when you make crepes, always double or triple the recipe, you know they'll get eaten. 

This would be a good recipe for using up leftover difficult vegetables. You could probably even use one of those bags of prepped coleslaw or broccoli slaw mix. This time around I used shredded carrots, chopped onions, and slightly steamed cabbage. I think putting green onions in it gives it more of the Korean vibe, and I particularly like it with sauteed mushrooms, to give it a little meaty-ness. And it's an easy recipe to adjust, the egg : flour : water ratio is simple (1 : 1 : 3/4) and doesn't require complex math to scale up or down. And these are good the next day, and the next day after that, they just need a little rewarming, so go ahead, scale it up, and turn on a TV show or find a good book to read while you do some serious pancake cooking.

Korean Style Vegetable Pancakes

3 eggs

3 cups rice flour  **see note at bottom 

2 1/4 cups water

salt to taste

pepper to taste

any other spices you like (chili powder, coriander, paprika, basil, garlic, etc) to taste

about 3 cups? ( I didn't measure, oops.) chopped or shredded vegetables (carrot, summer squash, green onion, slightly steamed cabbage, peppers, regular onions, sauteed mushrooms, broccoli, etc)

Whisk together eggs, rice flour, water, salt, pepper, and any spices you want. Add your chopped and shredded vegetables. There should be plenty of vegetable per batter, I wish I'd measured for you. 

Heat up a skillet to medium or medium high heat, lightly oil the skillet and scoop out some vegetable/batter onto the hot skillet. I used about a cup, maybe a little less, of the mixture in my 9" cast iron pan. There should be enough batter-iness to the batter to completely encase the vegetables, but it should still be plenty vegetable-y. I found that I had to quickly move rearrange clumps of vegetables to get them evenly distributed among the batter. 

batter in the pan a couple minutes before flipping

pancake in pan after flipping

Let it cook for a few minutes, the bottom should get getting a little color, and the top will probably be dry, carefully flip it over and let it cook a few minutes more until the top gets a little color on the parts that stick out, then gently scoop it off onto a plate. Repeat with remaining batter. Be sure to flip gently, and don't flip before it's ready, especially if you are doing all rice flour, they will be more delicate than the regular breakfast pancakes you might be used to, because there's no gluten to hold it all together.

Cut into triangles and serve with soy sauce, sriracha, Thai sweet chili sauce (my favorite), or whatever else floats your boat. This size batch made 6 9" pancakes. 

**Mark Bittman says you can use all or part wheat flour, but I like the texture of using all rice flour best, and then you can feed it to your gluten-free friends or self. I get rice flour at the Asian or international grocery store, I think you can also get it at Whole Foods or in the special healthy section of a grocery store if you have a good grocery store.

Veggie Spring Rolls

I haven't had a lot of creative juices lately, so I don't have a big story for you, just some pictures to show how easy it is to make your own summer rolls, just like a friend showed me, she also has a special dipping sauce for it, I think it is peanut ginger, we just used an all-purpose Korean sauce.

You'll need some rice paper, I got some at the vietnamese store, the are probably easy to find at regular stores too, here's what to look for:

You can use whatever you want for filling, I used:

Carrots
Cucumbers
Daikon radish

I used about 4 carrots to 1 cucumber to 1/2 daikon radish, and that made a lot of rolls.

Shred the carrots and radish, and cut the cucumbers into strips. Put some warm water in a bowl, dip rice paper one at a time in the warm water for about 5 seconds, remove, then arrange the fillings on the rice paper, and roll it up like a burrito.

Easy peasy!

Deliciousness

On my flight to the Frankfurt airport, I heard the flight attendants talking about this spread that is like peanut butter but tastes like speculatius cookies, which we love. Listening to them, I thought, they don't know what they are talking about, they probably think Nutella is this special spread. But today at the grocery store, while looking at the different hazelnut spreads, I found.... speculatius spread! As well as some other flavors, like coconut and pistachio. We think this will be killer on crepes, we're planning a crepe brunch party next Sunday. I'm also trying to calculate exactly how much of this stuff I can fit in my bag, and I'm glad I packed light. Oh, for your reading pleasure, a very short article about the market for this stuff in Belgium.

speculatius (speculoos, speculaas) spread

Here's another bit of deliciousness from Germany. Quark is a soft, fresh cheese, kind of in between yogurt and cream cheese. I only heard of quark last summer, so I've been looking for it here and so far been unsuccesful in finding plain quark, but I have found several flavors, like these two savory ones, and the plum/cinnamon holiday flavor as well as other fruity flavors.

red pepper and herbed quark spreads

Plum and cinnamon quark

Oh, and here's a little quark brotchen, it's kind of like a cream cheese danish, and I've eaten at least three of them already. We've gotten them from cheap self-serve bakeries for about 1 euro. I'm so impressed that even the cheap places like those bakeries have really good stuff. I wish there were more places like that in the States.

quark filled sweet bread

three of us with our quark breads

 This was quite possibly the best apple strudel I've ever had. Of course, most of the strudel I've had has been super cheap frozen grocery store variety when we were living in Vienna. So, yesterday morning we went out to a Viennese cafe for warm drinks and cakes, and some of use ordered strudel. It was obviously the best choice since there was a fight over the last few crumbs. The cakes and marzipan stollen look pretty good, but they didn't come with warm with warm vanilla sauce and whipped cream and currents. Yeah, I know, you wish you were here, right?

Viennese apfel strudel

chocolate/vanilla cake for the monkey, gluhwein cake with cherries, and stollen with marzipan for Lovemuffin

 

Weihnachtsmarkt Foods

I'm in Germany for a couple of weeks for Christmas and New Years with Lovemuffin's family. Last week we enjoyed the Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market). We visited 3 markets, Wiesbaden (where we are staying), Mainze (where I got most of my pictures) and Rudesheim (which is supposed to be great, but it was a little disappointing for us). We tried to go to the Frankfurt one, too, because we heard it was big and awesome, but we got there a day late and they were just finishing taking down all the stands. That was too bad.

My favorite market was the one in Mainze, because that is where we found these amazing mushrooms. The mushrooms were simmered in this creamy sauce that is a little bit spicy, like it maybe has spicy paprika in it or something, not strong chili powder. Then they top it with a big spoonful or two of sour cream plus cucumber/herbs (I think it's cucumber in there, something crunchy and refreshing). It is so good, I'm very impressed. I'm sure other Christmas markets have these mushrooms too, but Mainze is close and cheap to get to and I went back a second time for more.

mushrooms cooking in cream sauce, one side is done, the other just started

Mushrooms in cream sauce with sour cream topping

Another food that is nice at the markets is curry wurst. It is a sausage with a ketchup-y sauce on top with a sprinkle of curry powder spice. You can also get fries on the side topped with mayonnaise and ketchup. This delightful meaty treat is not restricted to Weihnachtsmarkt, I've had it in the summer at bratwurst places, and I would definitely recommend it. We think that they ketchup sauce is a little different that regular ketchup, but still made by Heinz. We saw a bottle in a store and I think I'll try to bring some home. It's pretty good stuff and I might try it on a veggie sausage.



almost close-up shot of curry wurst

enjoying curry wurst

Here's another bit of delectableness. I think these are called schoko-kuss, but I could be wrong. These come in lots of different flavors, and are filled with marshmallow goodness. Surprise, marshmallows are much better when fresh. The first time we got them, we shared a box of 12, and we were so surprised and pleased with their deliciousness, we decided to go back for a box of 25. But you can get very sugar-high very fast when eating these.

variety of shoko-kuss



"After Eight" minty marshmallow treat

"After Eight" and liebkuchen flavored schoko-kuss

Before coming this year, I had heard that the Weihnachtsmarkt smells great, and one of the things you smell when you walk around them are these candied nuts. They are mostly almonds (mandeln), but you see some pecans, pistacchios, etc. There are usually different flavors of mandeln made with different spices or flavorings like amaretto. They are kind of expensive, these little (100 gram) packets costed 3 euro each, but they smell and taste so good.


packets of spiced mandeln

The other thing that you see at every Weihnachtsmarkt is Glühwein, which is a mulled wine. I haven't partaken (so, no pictures), but it comes in these cute commemorative mugs that say which city you drank it in. If you return the mug, you get part of the money back, so say you pay 2 euros for a drink, you bring the mug back and get 1 euro back. Or you can keep the mug as a souvenir. We made our own spiced fruit juice drinks for our celebrations at home. More on that later.

Oh, and to celebrate my 100th post, here are some extra pictures.

Mainze Weihnachtsmarkt

I don't know what these are called, but I like them

me and brothers-in-law at markt

sausage/salami stand at market with blutwurst/blood sausage (at just left of center)

Mainze Weihnachtmarkt surrounding the Romanesque Cathedral

Rambutan

Yesterday we went to Eden Center, an area of town with a high concentration of Vietnamese stores, and got some food and some fruits called rambutan. These are related to lychees, with the outside peel and the inside fruit. These have a very pleasant grape-y flavor, without the floral tones of lychees. The texture of the outside shell reminded me of millipedes, which made me nervous to pick them up, but they weren't gross at all. Older Brother also discovered that if you get the outside shell off  mostly whole, you can put it on your nose and look like a clown and have the delicious smell of the fruit constantly wafting up your nose. I'm sorry I didn't get a picture of that.

I also had bahn mi for the first time, mine had caramelized tofu skins instead of meat on it, and it was pretty delicious. I'll definitely be going back for more awesome stuff.

rambutan before peeling

rambutan with fruit in the middle

Some happenings in the kitchen and around town

Here's some of our adventures in eating lately.

Ethiopian Food today at Awash, it looks like a mess, but it's quite delicious.

Brownies with cardamom and orange peel topped with preserved kumquat and orange sauce, kumquats from Chinatown, New York City, sorry the lighting was bad, but these were pretty amazing. Just add about a teaspoon of cardamom and some orange zest to your favorite brownie recipe and try to make an awesome orange topping.

What we made with our eggplant from the market: Eggplant casserole with onion, pepper, tomatoes and kefalotyri cheese (a fabulous greek cheese I got from my friendly neighborhood middle eastern market).

Peach and cardamom upside down cake, not super successful, will develop a better recipe, probably in muffin form, coming . . . sometime, if I ever figure it out.

Buckwheat Crepes

In Russian these are called blini (блыли) which is also a mild curse word, because you know how when you make crepes or pancakes, the first one off the griddle usually doesn't work right, so you say "блын!" like you would say "darn it!"

filled with mushrooms spinach and feta cheese

Buckwheat has an interesting flavor, not interesting in a bad way,  just different than whole wheat flour. It is still very mild, though. And it has a strange color to it, especially when mixed into the batter. I would recommend trying it for a nice change of pace from regular wheat things. It is nice to get some more variety when it comes to the grains we eat.

note the strange color of the batter - it's supposed to look like this

I think you can just substitute buckwheat flour for all-purpose flour in your favorite crepe recipe. But I noticed that the batter was very thick after resting, so I added about 1/2 cup more water. I used a 1/4 cup of all-purpose flour, I thought they would need a little of the gluten to help them hold together, but now I think they will hold together just fine with just the eggs, they would be a little more delicate, but still manageable. So theoretically they can be gluten-free and I think you could also use just water, no milk and make them dairy-free too. But I have not tested either theory yet. ** see edit below **

Buckwheat Crepes (adapted from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian) 
1 c. buckwheat flour
1/4 c. all-purpose flour (optional)
1/2 c. milk
1 1/2 c. water (approximately)
pinch of salt
2 eggs
2 Tbsp. melted butter, cooled

Blend everything together really well. Let rest for at least an hour or overnight. Add more water if the mixture thickens too much. Heat up a crepe pan or your favorite pancake griddle to medium hight heat (you'll probably need to turn it down a little after the first 4 or 5) and pour on a little less then 1/4 cup of the batter (depending on your griddle size) turning the pan as you go to coat the whole surface with batter before it sets up too much. Let it cook for a minute or two - the top will be dry and the edges will start loosening and curling up - then flip it over and let the top cook for another 30 seconds or minute. Flip it onto a plate and repeat the process with more batter. Fill the crepes with your favorite savory filling and either eat as you go, or put them in a pan in the oven on low heat until they are all assembled. We ate some leftovers the next day with scrambled eggs. I think that these would be good as a dessert crepe with something fruity, but we have not tried that yet either. ** see edit below **

cooking the second side of the crepe

** edit ** I made these again with just buckwheat flour (1 c.), eggs (2), water (2 c.) and salt (pinch) and they worked great. So they can be gluten and dairy free, I even forgot the butter. And they were delicious with both apricot jam and Nutella as dessert-y crepes.