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.

Fig, Apricot and Pecan Bars: the recipe

Here is the recipe I used for these delicious treats, it is adapted from the blondies recipe in my Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook (11th edition). They were still a little crumbly, I think because of the oats. If you want you could use only all-purpose flour, but the oats do give it a nice texture.

Fig, Apricot and Pecan Bars

1/2 c. chopped dried apricots

1/2 c. chopped dried figs

1 c. packed brown sugar

10 Tbsp. butter

2 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 c. quick oats

1 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. ground cardamom (or your favorite complementary spice)

1 c. chopped toasted pecans

Preheat oven to 325. Grease a 8 x 11 inch baking pan (Better Homes and Gardens says 9 x 13, but I like the bars tall instead of spread out), set aside.

Place the dried apricot and fig pieces in a small bowl and pour boiling water over them, enough to cover them. Set aside.

In a sauce pan heat the brown sugar and butter until the sugar dissolves, stirring constantly. Cool slightly. Mix in the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla extract.  Mix in the flour, oats, baking powder, soda and cardamom. Drain the soaked fruit in a strainer and mix the nuts and fruit into the batter. Pour it all into the prepared pan and bake for about 30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool slightly on wire rack, consume.

What do I think of the Thingamajig candy bar?

thingamajig

Here is Hershey's limited edition Thingamajig candy bar. It has a crisp rice part, and a peanut butter part. It is not stunning. It is mediocre. The peanut butter part is not great, and the crisp rice part is really hard. If you like crisp-rice candy bars, get a Crunch bar, if you like peanut butter candy bars, get some Reeses. This is not combining the best of both worlds. See a more detailed review here. Have you tried it? What do you think?

"Pigs in a Blanket"

Does anyone know a clever name for vegetarian pigs in a blanket? I can't think of one, and from my quick internet search, it seems that no one else has either. These were my Lovemuffin's idea, but somehow I ended up making them. The "pigs"are the Tofurky Italian Sausages, the ones with the tomato and basil. I cut them in half and the bread is Trader Joe's herbed pizza dough. I rolled them in semolina flour to make it easy to take them off the baking pan.

no pig in these blankets

A New Toy

Last week Motherdear sent me an awesome food dehydrator (Thank you thank you thank you!!!) so this weekend we made all sorts of things. We dried some fruit, made yogurt, and made a fruit and yogurt leather that was pretty good, but sort of weird. Lovemuffin says he is going to try to make jerky this week, and I would like to make yogurt covered granola as a snack.

Dried pineapple was the best, although strawberries were a close second, and blueberries were the other close second. We discovered that blueberries will dry just fine from frozen, which is great because we have discovered a really cheap source of frozen blueberries.

We are going to be making a lot of yogurt because we can make twice as much as the tub we usually buy for half the price, and it tastes so good! So fresh! And we use a lot of yogurt in our house, so it definitely won't go to waste. I was going to share with you a recipe for muffins that uses yogurt, but I tried it this morning and I apparently can't get it to rise correctly, so maybe later. In the meantime, here are some pictures to make you jealous.

the beautiful Excalibur food dehydrator

Lovemuffin preparing the fruit/yogurt leather snack

delicious yogurt ready to be made into a delicious smoothie

Some of the dried fruits and snacks, we already ate a lot :)

Fruity Yogurt: or some ideas for using the sweetened condensed milk you opened by mistake

A few days ago I needed some milk for a recipe, and didn't have any regular milk, so I went to my trusty pantry and opened a can of what I though was evaporated milk, so that I could dilute it to make it regular milk, but as soon as I opened it, I realized my mistake, it was sweetened condensed milk. So I dumped it into a jar and put it in the fridge and found a can of evaporated milk and went on to do my thing.
I had to think for a few days to figure out what to do, it would be such a shame to waste sweetened condensed milk, something I hardly ever buy. I though of making dulce de leche, but I'm afraid of explosions, and I don't know exactly what to do with dulce de leche. I remembered this thing we had from an asian bakery/cafe that was sort of like a slurpee, but it had chunks of mango with shaved ice and sweetened condensed milk drizzled over it, it was very yummy, but there were not any mangoes at the grocery store. And then this recipe that looks like Almond Joy candy bars caught my eye as well as this other candy, called brigadeiros, from Brazil, but both of them seem way to sweet for me to handle right now. I will probably still make the almond joy things sometime, but do them the same as I did my macaroons, with unsweetened coconut. And then I saw this recipe for vietnamese yogurt, and it is the solution to (almost) all of my problems. Lovemuffun and Pricklypear both eat a lot of yogurt, and I am always fighting with the Lovemuffin because he eats his with a ton of jam, the jam that I made all by myself, and then there is never enough jam or yogurt for me, which frusterates me. So, here's what I did:

Fruity Yogurt
1 Large tub of plain yogurt with no added weirdness (no gelatin or corn starch for thickening)
1 Bag of frozen fruit of your choice
Some sweetened condensed milk, to taste (I used about 1/4 of the can)

Drain the yogurt over a sieve lined with cloth or just a paper towel. Let it drain for several hours till the yogurt is nice and thick, like greek style yogurt. It is nice to have it thick because the fruit will add more fluid and this is an easy way to keep it from turning into drinking yogurt. Unless you want drinking yogurt, that is okay with me, this is a very flexible recipe. Thaw the frozen fruit while the yogurt is draining, then blend the fruit up a little, so that it is chunky, not too fluid. Add the fruit to the drained yogurt, and add sweetened condensed milk to taste. You could, of course, just sweeten your yogurt with sugar, but where is the fun in that? Also, I think that would make it runnier, because of the way sugar pulls the juice out of fruit.
This large batch will last us about 3 days and I like it so much more than the pre-fruited and sweetened yogurt at the store. You can make it the level of sweetness you desire, and you can be sure that there is real fruit in there, not just artificial colors and flavors. So far I have used blackberries and a fruit medly containing strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, and I still have plenty of sweetened condensed milk. Up next is peaches.

Granola

Here's another recipe that my mom invented. She used to make a huge batch of this granola for our annual backpacking trip. Her batch made 4 times as much as the recipe that I'm giving you now, it was pretty amazing. And it is much cheaper than buying granola at the store. This recipe is really easy to change the flavors by using different spices, or adding nuts or coconut or anything you like. Today I even added some soaked cracked flaxseed. You could make it taste like gingersnaps by using ground ginger and replacing some of the water with molasses, or you could use maple syrup and eat it with bits of dried apples. You may want to add even more spices than I call for here if you find that it is too bland. If you want to add dried fruit like raisins, you should just add them to your bowl when you eat it. I once tried adding raisins to the mixture before baking, and they soaked up all the moisture and then burned, even though the rest of the granola was fine. But if you add dried fruit to the granola when it is dry and packaged, the remaining moisture will soak into the granola and in a couple of days you will have damp or even moldy granola. But the options are endless, so go crazy!

Granola

9 cups regular rolled oats, or a mixture of regular and quick cooking oats

1 cup chopped almonds, lightly toasted or raw

1 cup brown sugar, packed

1/4 cup oil or butter

1 tsp salt, or more to taste

3/4 cup water

1 tbsp cinnamon

other spices to taste

In a large bowl combine the oats and almonds and any other dry add-ins you want. Heat the sugar, water, oil, salt and spices in a small saucepan, stir until sugar is dissolved and butter (if using) is melted. Pour the liquid mixture into the oats gradually, a little at a time, and stir it thoroughly. Divide the mixture between two or three cookie sheets and bake slowly at 250 for about 1 hour, turning with a spatula every 15 minutes. Let it sit in the oven to finish drying in the residual heat and then cool completely.  Store the granola in an airtight container.