Pancakes (or crepes, in South Africa we call crepes pancakes, or other places call pancakes crepes, your choice) are great, I would be one of the first people you would hear say that. However there is a big problem I have with pancakes, less of a problem with the pancakes themselves though and more of a problem with how people treat them. I know people of the opinion that there is only one way to eat a pancake: with cinnamon sugar. Others are less close-minded about the glory of pancakes but still see it as something that has to have a sweet filling or that only a handful of fillings could possibly work... Rubbish!
It is these people that truly bug me, no imagination. I like to think of pancakes as more like a sandwich. Anyone who only knows one or two ways to eat a sandwich would be frowned upon, or at least I really hope so. Imagine that there are only two ways of eating a sandwich, a peanut butter and jam or a bacon, lettuce and tomato. How quickly would you be bored to tears? Fairly quickly I would think. I would extend treating a pancake as a sandwich to even include those fillings, I have not tried a peanut butter and jam filled pancake yet, but just thinking about it now, I think I will next time I make pancakes, I probably will not try the BLT since I am not actually a great fan of raw tomato, but I would try bacon, lettuce and cheese.
To make my point clear I am not saying that eating a pancake with a sweet filling is bad, or that cinnamon sugar does not taste nice, rather they are infernally boring. So I am going to share some of my better experiments, and some of the fillings that my family has been having for a while, that are surprisingly tasty, and worth giving a try.
The filling I normally have, when too lazy to think up something new, is just a plain mince: onion and garlic fried with some beef mince spiced up with some tomato sauce/paste, worstershire sauce, a beef stock cube, salt, pepper, rosemary, basil and some chilli’s for the spice fans. It is also usually pretty good to add some vegetables: potato (cubed), carrots, peas, beans or basically whatever combination of vegetables that you like really, your choice there. Throw that on a pancake maybe with a bit of cheese or feta and you have a really tasty meal.
One of my favourites from when I was younger is actually a tuna mix. It is really simple, you will need an onion, a clove or two of garlic, salt and pepper, a can of shredded or chunky tuna, about a 125g can would do, a sachet of mushroom soup and you are good to go. Chop up and fry the onions and garlic in a little oil or butter, boil some water and mix up the mushroom soup in another container with about half or a quarter of the required water, since you want it to be very think. Put that in with the fried onion and garlic and then add the can of tuna, if it is in brine then remove the brine first. Add the salt and pepper to taste, and some herbs if you are that way inclined. By a similar principle I have also before made a really nice mix of bacon, fresh mushrooms and onions with that sachet of mushroom soup added in, it was actually also really nice.
The last one I would like to share is a dessert type one that usually has people frowning a bit, but once they try it they love it. My parent's favourite in fact. It is really simple all you need is a tub of yoghurt (choc chip works really well 500ml to a litre) and about 4 or 5 bananas. All you do is slice the bananas up, about half a centimetre think, and mix with the yoghurt. Nice and easy.
Anyhow, if you have some weird but good recipes for pancakes feel free to share them, I will probably even try them myself sometime. There are a lot of other fillings I want to try, and once I try them I will probably share the results.
Jon
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