pancakes of all shapes and ingredients

We are equal opportunity pancake eaters in this household, so it is only fair that we would diversify our pancake consumption. A task which we have succeeded at quite well in the past few weeks. It is not hard to convince us to eat breakfast for any meal, at any time or basically ever.

Pancake variation # 1 was my attempt at German potato pancakes. I say attempt because this before picture doesn't reveal that I managed to forget the eggs that were supposed to be mixed with the rest of the ingredients. Opps. I got ahead of myself and wanted to start frying :- )


So these potato pancakes became more like potato pancake hash browns. Tis hard to know the difference I say, except that these were sans eggs in the batter and we made scrambled eggs to go with them on the side.


These were center stage hash browns with eggs playing the supporting role. Trust me when I say these were good. Because they totally were. And I now know one can easily forgo the frozen bags of hash browns for the real stuff.


Pancake variation #2- Cracker Barrel pancakes for Easter morning made with a recipe Holli found and that required our created-with-a-lemon buttermilk that she has become such a pro at making.

And when chocolate chips are not an option- walnuts and chopped up snicker bars. What Easter pancake shouldn't have mini snicker bars chopped up in it?


Pancake variation #3- Potato pancakes round 2. Except this time I ix-nayed the previous recipe in favor of a recipe called "Amish Hash Browns." Being a Western PA girl, I know the goodness of Amish food. And these called for corn meal! And I also couldn't help but throw in some red bell peppers for color and redeeming vegetable qualities.


A bell pepper version of Amish hash browns....so good.

I need to do some AllRecipes searching to discover what other pancake variations can come from our Mongolian kitchen :-) Breakfast is always a welcome meal at our house.

recipes are merely suggestions.

"Recipes are merely a suggestion" 

I'd say that's the motto we've adopted. When preparing for a meal for our Mongolian kitchen, it is not unusual to visit 4 different stores. So, the adoption of this motto comes from some frustrating times of not finding the ingredients we need. Now, we use most of the recipes we find as a guide. In other words...we make it up. 

As of late, that's been a little difficult, though. Our beloved and trusty oven said "NO MORE" and it quit working. After a few weeks of stove-top only recipes, borrowing a microwave and finding out our oven is "unfixable," we finally got a new oven. 

  

I can honestly say the day our new oven arrived was one of the most joyous days of our Mongolian life. 

Prior to the arrival of our new oven, I had already decided we should try making the Korean sushi called "kim-bap" or something like it. We did our best and although it didn't turn out perfect, it tasted good.

This, my friends, is the first thing we baked in our new oven. That's right peach cobbler. Delicious, or amtay as we say in Mongolia.

And this is our latest suggestion-creation. Indian food. After we discovered, became obsessed and had to limit ourselves to a once-a-month visit to our local Indian Restaurant "Hazara" we decided maybe, just maybe we could make our own. Well, we did. This is "Murg Makhani" roughly translated to: butter chicken. It turned out well but WAY spicy. 

We are rockin' our Mongolian kitchen. Watch out America because when we get back to easily accessible ingredients, we're gonna be out-of-control. I'd venture to say even then, we will keep our "recipes are merely suggestions motto." 

-Chef Holli

the other lettuce

Cabbage! I know, I know- it's not really the other lettuce.

But I live in a country where basically the only vegetables you can get easily without paying an arm and a leg for them are carrots, potatoes, onions, bell peppers and....cabbage.


And I'll admit that I can't ever remember even eating it prior to about two weeks ago. If I were to buy a leafy green in the States it was consistently spinach.

But six months of being here had me finally wanting to try making something with cabbage. Combine that with the fact that our oven broke, leaving us only with the stove top and my desire to always consume more vegetables....and you have the cabbage, potato and chicken stove top casserole recipe that Hol found.

Which is to say that it included ingredients we didn't have and called for ham.

But we chopped and diced ourselves some onions and potatoes.

And then we did the same with some cabbage and chicken.

It was quite good and I'm always a fan of anything that allows me to combine chicken, potatoes and other veggies.

Since we've needed to be using this head of cabbage up we've also:

-steamed cabbage and put it with rice
-stir-fried cabbage with other veggies for an orange chicken recipe
-chopped it up and put it in baked vegetable spaghetti casserole

Any cabbage recipe suggestions from you all? So far we've mainly just thrown it in as an additional vegetable to already vegetable-filled recipes, but I'd be up for a cabbage-centric recipe if you know of any good ones.

navajo fry bread in ub

visitors who bring recipes are always welcome at our apartment :-)

Heather brought the recipe for Navajo fry bread with her (she lives and serves on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico) when she came in March. And so we set to making it in our UB kitchen, enjoying the connections that we've discovered between the Navajo and Mongolians- including but not limited to their love of mutton and fried flour concoctions. Fry bread is similar to a Mongolian dish, except the Mongolian version has meat inside of it.


Frying the dough....And then we took the pieces of fry bread and dumped ground beef, cilantro, bell peppers, onions and shredded cheese on top. Fry bread makes an excellent foundation for a taco of sorts.

Anything that allows me to make a mountain of vegetables on top is a-ok with me :-)

peanut butter is expensive in mongolia

which means that no-bake cookies are not really a cost-effective option here. 1/2 cup of peanut butter is a lot to use for a batch of cookies. Especially since Hol and I try to stretch our little containers of peanut butter imported from Mexico as far as we can.

However, nutella-like things are relatively abundant and not too expensive. So when we happened to have a jar of that around and a craving for no-bake cookies, nutella became our peanut butter substitute.



if you don't like chocolate, these cookies are not for you. if you do, enjoy :-)

perhaps next time I'll use 1/4 cup peanut butter and 1/4 cup nutella. peanut butter/nutella no-bake cookies anyone?

(thanks to Heather who took the pictures while we made the cookies and then let me steal them to post this :- ))

taco time.

Special Edition: Cooking Class.

Recently I started a cooking class on Fridays. It started with a simple request to learn how to make cake we soon realized it was too much fun not to make it a part of our weekly schedule. So far, we've learned French food and Mexican food. It has turned out to be the ladies of the church and I cooking and then sitting down to share a meal together and talk. It has been more of a blessing to me than to them, I think. I'm beginning to think that is what "mission" is all about anyway. We are supposed to be infinitely blessed by the people that God has surrounded us with, they are there to teach us and point us back to Him with gracious hearts.

Here are some pictures from our Mexican Friday.

Rolling out the tortillas...

...cooking the tortillas...

...ready for another...

...mmm...peppers and onions...

...taco time!

We had a lot of fun making the tortillas and then making the tacos. Next week...Italian food.

3 apples can totally become a pie

a different crust recipe this time around, but same filling recipe from thanksgiving. it calls for 8 apples, but we only had three. cutting up the apples into thin slices helped make up for the lack of heaping piles of apples.

before baking:
after baking:

this recipe is the first I've ever used that calls for the sugars and butter to be heated on the stove top and then poured over the apples/lattice crust. this makes the lattice crust all kinds of delicious as the sugars solidify on top and seep down into the apples.

next time I think I'll make sure we have more apples (this pie was an impromptu dessert and not planned) on hand....and I'll definitely re-use this crust recipe- it's flakier than the thanksgiving pie's and it still doesn't require shortening (which is not readily accessible here).