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.
