Wonderfully fresh and flavorful eggs from a local farm (thanks Don and Joni for passing them along!), delicious gouda with mustard seeds, Marieke, and the main delicacy, in her view, a mixed-root pancake. Her contention: We don't get enough vegetables at breakfast. This is a preparation to right that wrong.
This went from dinner the night before--accompanied by a sort of "ranchy" sauce, preceded by a roasted cauliflower salad--to breakfast the next morning. It became something of a theme of that snowy weekend to keep one meal segueing into the next....
Quite simple, extremely tasty. I've dubbed them pancakes, but they're definitely more in the latke style pancake than the batter-y sort of usual breakfast 'cakes. The eggs and flours just barely hold the vegetables shreds together. You could call them flat fritters, I guess, but that does not seem so appealing... Careful not to grate your knuckles into the mix.
Root Veg Pancakes
1 large potato
1 large parsnip
1 carrot
1/2 small celery root
1 small onion
1 small leek
Peel and grate the first five; slice the leek very thin and add to the grated veg. Add:
2 eggs
2 Tbsp each all-purpose flour and cornmeal
salt and pepper to taste
Mix and let sit for at least 30 minutes.
Heat a heavy fry pan--cast iron is excellent--and add 1/8 inch fat--we used duck fat and a little canola. Stir up the mixture and spoon out 1/2-cup portions into the pan, pressing down with a spatula (alternately, you could make one big, full-pan-sized cake, and cut it into portions, though this will be more difficult to flip). Cook over medium heat for five minutes, then flip over. Continue to cook for a total of, say, 18 minutes, turning often so the insides will cook through without burning the outside--lots of natural sugar in the mix, so be careful of that.
Serve for breakfast just as is, or with a dollop of sour cream; at dinner we mixed a bit of mayo, half & half, cider vinegar, chopped red onion and minced garlic, salt and pepper, for that "ranchy" sauce. Could be a side dish to grilled meat, roast chicken.
Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw
2 comments:
Hi Brett,
I love these types of meals. We eat vegetable fritters quite often with herbed plain (homemade of course) yogurt as a drizzle sauce.
Hey, Angie: The colder weather always makes me think of rich meat dishes, but in recent years the fall veg preparations often steal the show--or shove the meat aside completely. I'm generally not that big of a parsnip fan, but we got these gorgeous specimens from some friends/neighbors out at the cabin, big, firm, and sweet, which are causing me to reassess.
These pancakes were referred to on the Heavy Table website as "domestic okonomiyaki," which I have never heard of, but it sounds wonderfully exotic, so I think I'll run with it...!
Fritter on~ Brett
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