...to make a successful recipe. For a project one of my children was doing, we tried to make Swedish pancakes, an example of which is seen above. The recipe we used is found here. Pretty straight forward in terms of ingredients--not very many, and while it calls for eggs, milk, and butter, if you have them in powdered form, it can be food-storage friendly. (I don't recall having tried any other form of butter than actual butter, so those of you who have it in powdered form are ahead of me...)
At any rate, I share this particular recipe not necessarily for the ingredients involved, but because of how difficult it turned out to be to make these enough to get the picture above, which we wanted for the aforementioned project. There are only two steps in terms of directions, so how hard could it be?
Turns out: pretty hard, actually.
When the recipe directions say to pour it out in a thin layer, the easy part is over--at least it was for me. These are very, very thin pancakes, and I had one mangled pancake after another leaving the pan. Hard to remember now, but what looks (if one is being extremely kind about it) like a divided pancake above, was actually a conglomeration of, if not two pancakes, more than two pancakes, which makes it mostly look like one of my pancakes actually worked out in its entirety. Not so. While we got a piece here and there that looked kinda sorta like the pancakes pictured in the original recipe, it was, as memory served, only the occasional piece that worked out that way...
This is not to say that this is not a good recipe--my husband really liked them, actually. This is to say that if I want a pancake recipe that has few ingredients and that makes wonderfully thin pancakes, thus hopefully making more pancakes to go around, I will have to practice a lot more than once to be able to make my ingredients stretch. It's hard not to imagine, when I am making a recipe that I think may be food storage friendly, how frustrated I would be if I had limited resources, little to no way to replace said resources, and hungry mouths to feed, and my recipe turned out the way this one did.
Bottom line--variety is good when collecting recipes that use basic ingredients, but make sure that you have the skill to successfully make those recipes before adding them to your emergency notebook. This one has not yet made it there, because sometimes you need more than ingredients to have a successful recipe experience...
Hope you have more luck with these than I did, if you try them...I actually hope to have more luck with them next time I try them myself... :)
4 comments:
I had the worst time for years knowing just when to turn pancakes of any size. They always ended up a gloppy unedible mess in my pan. Even though I have since learned the magic secret (small size and wait for the bubbling)I still rarely make them because I mentally discarded them as a breakfast option for so many years that now I just don't think about them!
I have the same problem with fish. Undercooked fish landed me in the ER many many years ago. Fish in my house means fish sticks. Shame too because fish is soo good for you..when it isn't battered and deep fried.
Katrina--Glad that it's not just me when it comes to perfecting the pancake flipping. I hope to get better and better...
As for fish, I too am a frozen fish kind of person, mostly because I just haven't been that interested in learning about preparing it in other forms. May not be the exact same thing, but I'm not wild about tuna, either. :) Thanks so much for your comment!
Are these crepes? Something I just mastered. Hot pan, oil every other crepe, make it wetter/runnier than you think it ought to be... even if you add more liquid than it calls for. We put a dab of jam, a dab of yogurt, a drip of honey, a wedge of banana on ours- not at the same time. It took me a couple of batches to get the process down. We mix the batter in the blender.
Mama4x--They are called pancakes, but I would say that they must be similar to crepes. I'll have to try adding oil to every other crepe, because these were certainly a struggle to make, and anything that would help might make it easier. They seemed to be super runny, but I'll have to experiment more the next time I make them. Hadn't thought of the blender, either.. Thanks so much for your comment!
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