The subtitle for this post ("Are you f***ing crazy!?") is geared towards people like my roommate, who, this morning awoke to the sweet, sweet smell of fall (cinnamon, nutmeg, apples) creeping into his room. He entered the kitchen, leaned over the pan where I was flipping my flapjacks, and remarked about how incredibly delicious my f***ing pancakes looked. He then inquired as to the ingredients of said flapjacks.
When I told him that zucchini was one of the main flavors of the dish, he wrinkled his nose and exclaimed boldly (I thought, since I was cooking him breakfast, goddammit!) that the pancakes were ruined and that I shouldn't have ruined good pancakes with zucchini and that I was an idiot and possibly a jerk.
Despite the rudeness (I excused him because he looked tired and maybe a bit disoriented), I served him four of these pancakes, and I'm proud to say that he f***ing loved them. Maybe because I'm a really f***ing good cook, and he should thank his lucky stars that he has such a cool roommate who spends an hour making him brunch and then doesn't bat an eye when he openly insults his painstaking efforts to deliver nutritious, scrumptious food every Sunday almost precisely at noon, which is obviously the best f***ing time to eat brunch.
Anyway, here's to zucchini, and here's the recipe. Enjoy, and don't let the naysayers bring you down!
Apple-Zucchini Pancakes
Wet ingredients:
1 c. milk
1 egg
2 tbsp maple syrup
Dry Ingredients:
1 c. all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1 zucchini, grated
2 apples, peeled, cored, and chopped
Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl, then fold in wet ingredients. Mix until smooth, but as a general rule, pancakes are better if not overmixed. Let mixture sit until you see bubbles on the top. This means that the baking powder is doing its thing and the pancakes will be fluffier.
Heat up a skillet or griddle and coat with vegetable oil. Get it good and hot, then add 1/4 c. of the mixture for each pancake. As per usual with pancakes, the first couple will be shittier than the last. This mix should make about 12 solid-sized pancakes.
One thing to note about this recipe is that it's CHUNKY and MOIST, which is great but can pose some difficulties for the novice pancake maker. I would just follow the rule of waiting until the edges of the pancakes start getting hard and testing the bottom of the pancake with your spatula to make sure they're fully-cooked before flipping.
Serve with maple syrup and butter, or just straight-up. They're incredibly delicious either way...
P.S. (Do you have to P.S. in a blog post, or can you just keep typing?), my friend Joost from the Netherlands told me an interesting story last night about nutmeg. Nutmeg is indigenous to Indonesia, which used to be a Dutch colony. Thus, old Dutch people put nutmeg on f***ing everything! Another interesting tidbit is that, if used in excessive quantities, nutmeg can be a powerful hallucinogen, lasting up to 72 hours...If used in even more excessive quantities, nutmeg can be downright DEADLY.
Anywho, recently, an old Dutch couple accidentally spilled an entire jar of nutmeg onto their mashed potatoes. Nutmeg is a standard way to spice up mashed potatoes in the Netherlands, apparently. Instead of scooping out the excess spice, or scrapping the entire dish, as most people would do, according to Joost, "because they were old," they decided to go ahead and chow down.
And, you guessed it, they croaked.
If you're as interested in nutmeg as I became after this story, read on.
I think what you mean to say is that they were tripping for the next three days, over the course of which they accidentally kidnapped an indonesian child after mistaking it for a garden gnome, and ate lots more (non-spiced) potatoes.
ReplyDeleteThat's what you meant. Right.