Scallion Pancakes Ad Infinitum

So, for the cooking adventure I'm about to narrate, the moral of the story is: never quadruple the recipe.

That being said, the potato-cabbage-scallion pancakes came out pretty well! (All 40 of them, or whatever ungodly number there turned out to be....)

It seemed like a good idea at the time. After splitting an enormous Chinese cabbage with our share partner, we ended up with a half a cabbage weighing a pound. (Did I mention "enormous"?) Paging through my binder of CSA recipes, I found one for potato-cabbage-scallion pancakes that called for a quarter pound of shredded Chinese cabbage. "Hey," I thought, "if I quadruple it, I'll use the whole darn thing up!"

Yah.

As a stay-at-home Mom riding herd over a 20-month-old girl who wants to spend every waking moment at the neighborhood park, the only uninterrupted stretch of cooking time I get on any given day is the hour and a half of naptime. Well, in an hour and a half, you can chop a pound of cabbage, a pound of scallions (do you know how many scallions that is???), and a pound of potatoes, and you can boil and mash the potatoes and crush the fennel seeds and prepare the rest of the spices. You can even put everything in the food processor and discover that there is NO WAY that all that and two eggs and the mere tablespoon of flour that the recipe calls for is going to cohere into a dough that is cohesive enough to roll flat. And you can even experiment with adding more and more flour, until you discover that 2 cups is closer to the necessary amount. But you can't finish the recipe. No, not even close.

It was not until after I had thrown together something entirely different for dinner (no small feat in my small kitchen, when most of the space is taken up by scallion pancakes in media res), eaten with my family, and cleaned up, that I had time to continue making the dough. By 9 pm (having put my daughter to bed), I was ready to roll out the pancakes. It was at this point that it hit me that I had quadrupled the recipe, and so had four times as many pancakes to roll out and fry than I might ordinarily have had, which is more than any sane person wants to do at 9 pm. At the same time, given the fresh dough staring me in the face, I was committed - I had to finish!

Suffice it to say that I would make this recipe again, but never again in such volume. On the bright side, I certainly have discovered several different ways to serve and eat these tasty pancakes! My favorite accompaniment to them (besides a tasty green salad) is applesauce - this sweetens the delightfully savory and fennel-y taste of the pancakes. I imagine that sour cream would also work very well with them. Not surprisingly, they also take well to soy sauce. To reheat the pancakes, I toss them in a 300 degree toaster oven and keep them there until the kitchen fills with a warm fennel fragrance.

Here is the recipe (originally from essortment), modified so you don't have to repeat my adventures with the flour jar and the food processor:

Ingredients:

1/4 lb. russet potatoes, peeled, boiled, and mashed dry
1/4 lb. Chinese cabbage, shredded
1/4 lb. scallions, peeled and chopped
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp fennel seeds, crushed
1/4 cup sunflower oil

Using a food processor, combine mashed potatoes, Chinese cabbage, eggs, flour, salt, pepper, and fennel seeds until a dough ball forms. (Use the general-purpose chopping blade, rather than the dough blade.) Fold in scallions.

Heat sunflower oil in a frying pan. Divide dough into 16 balls (it will be a little sticky). Roll out balls in plenty of flour until 1/4 inch thick. Fry for 5 minutes on each side until golden brown.

Radish Curry and Greens Quiche

This week in our CSA boxes, we got:

• corn
• sweet potatoes
• Chinese cabbage
• peppers
• lettuce
• apples
• radishes

Ordinarily, I would be swapping with our share partners so that we can have all the radishes - but this time, there were enough radishes for my favorite radish dishes without having to keep them all! (Here's one I like: radish-potato curry - mmmm!) I think I'll "bank" the radishes, though - they'll keep, and I'll do something fun with them in weeks to come.

The radish greens, though, when put together with the mustard greens and Swiss chard from past CSA boxes, will make enough greens for my favorite garden greens quiche - a tried and true favorite that works with any combination of greens I have ever thrown at it. Even with a storebought pie crust instead of fresh, and cheddar and mozzarella cheese instead of Swiss, this is simply delectable - and it freezes!! If I manage to keep our paws off it, I will give it to my sister-in-law, who's moving to our area in a few weeks.

Sandy Spring CSA: Fall Season Begins

The Fall season of the Sandy Spring CSA started this week. We got:

• Swiss chard
• Broccoli
• Carrots
• Turnips
• Red Delicious apples
• Mustard greens
• Butternut squash

I gave our share partners the squash, in exchange for all the broccoli and carrots. This past spring, when we had put compost on our front flower beds, we got some "volunteer" vegetables growing due to lingering seeds in the compost - so we actually have a volunteer butternut squash that is ready for harvest now!

For this week's menu, I'm actually still working through some of the previous CSA vegetables.

• Monday: baked chicken with lemon and herbs, with leftover rice and leftover veggie stir fry
• Tuesday: [dish for our weekly potluck] beets and carrots with West Indian spices
• Wednesday: the rest of the chicken, the rest of the beets, and mashed potatoes
• Thursday: lima bean casserole (Joy of Cooking) and sweet potato stuffing (Vegetarian Times Cookbook) with tomato gravy (Vegetarian Times Cookbook)
• Friday: [date night]
• Saturday: ditto Thursday, with the addition of a green salad
  
• Sunday: butternut squash and pear soup, either broccoli or salad, and tofu turnovers (Cooking with Tofu)

The sweet potato, the broccoli, and the salad greens are from last week's CSA box, and the potatoes, the tomatoes, and the pears are from the farmer's market this past Saturday.

As for this week's produce, I may make another greens quiche to freeze. I'm thinking I may do another stirfry with the broccoli and carrots. Then for the turnips, there's a wonderful recipe that my husband invented with turnips, pears, and sausages, that I'm looking forward to trying again.