Danish pancakes (Ebelskivers)

Ebleskiver's are traditional Danish pancakes. They are made in a special pan called a monk's pan (see adjacent image).

For Christmas, Barb and Jake gave me an Ebelskiver maker. It all came about because Barb was looking for a gift for someone else and asked to get mine and Stacey's opinion about it. I told her that I would want one because it just looked cool and who doesn't like pastries with fillings inside?

So when I opened up my gift, surprise, it was the Ebelskiver maker!!! Everyone thought that it was an egg poacher, but no, it's supposed to make yummy breakfast pancakes with filling or nothing at all. I thought this would be great for Jae to a) help make since it's pretty much just pancake batter, b) insert the middle filling, c) have fun eating! Well, he didn't really do any of these three, this time.

With all things, practice makes perfect. Bill and I attempted to make the recipe that came with the pan and there was enough for about a couple dozen. We forgot to cut the recipe in half or quarters, so we had a whole big bowl of batter. Since it was our first time, we limited the help that we would need from Chef Jae, which didn't really make him happy. We just needed to focus and make sure we were doing it right. We followed the instructions that came with the pan and it started out really well, but once we put the filling in, that's when it started to fall apart.

For our first attempt, we tried chocolate, jam, and peanut butter. The chocolate was good, but we didn't have any morsels in the house, so we ended up using some dove chocolate pieces. It was dark chocolate and didn't melt that well and we ended up burning one side b/c we hadn't quite mastered the temperature. The jam was a disaster. We put the filling in and added more batter on top and then flipped it over when it was ready, but the jam had gotten too hot and oozed out of the other side, so it made a mess in the pan and started burning. The peanut butter just never warmed up. So needless to say, we didn't really have ourselves an Ebelskiver breakfast.

We decided to stop making these after the second batch and instead made regular pancakes with the batter. Luckily we had some m&m's in the house, so Jae got pancakes with m&m's in them.

We will try making these again until we have perfected them! Wish us luck.



This is what they look like.

The Art of Making Korean Food

Patience! That is the key to making Korean food. Most of you locals know that there is a new Korean market in Tigard called H-Mart. For Bill's birthday, I got him a Korean cookbook, so he could make ME some meals. Ha! We had been talking about making something for a couple of weeks now, but weekends get hectic and it's hard to cook an elaborate meal during the week. So with the Labor Day Weekend here, we decided to give it a shot.

Setting: Monday afternoon, going shopping at H-Mart. Not as crowded as last time and the kids are in a really good mood! We buy the ingredients we need to make Beef with Dangmyun Noodles aka Chopchae and a spicey tofu soup. We head home and hysteria ensues in the kitchen..actually, just a crying baby and two adults trying to get stuff done.

I start my soup since this can sit. Mine is simpler and just requires a couple of ingredients. After I am done, Bill starts his Chopchae..only we didn't realize that's what it was until I was stirring the noodles around. I finally looked at the page with the recipe and sure enough the second word was chopchae. I'm like "Bill, you just made chopchae, I wondered why it was looking so familiar!" So Bill was like WTF when I said this and proceeded to sit down on the couch and sigh. Here we thought we had made some meal that we'd never had before!

All in all, dinner was good. Definitely not my mom's cooking, but edible. Although Bill says that ours tasted better! Unfortunately Hannah bear woke up from her nap and needed attention so we were not able to eat the meal together (one thing I'm looking forward to leaving behind). After the meal was done, we both looked in the kitchen and was like "wow" what the hell just blew through here? Pots and pans and dishes everywhere! Perhaps we need to cook Korean more often so we'll learn how to minimize the dishes used or just not cook it anymore at all?