A three-course dinner for Pancake Day

Here in the UK (and a number of other Commonwealth countries like Australia and Canada), the Tuesday before lent isn’t Mardi Gras — it’s Pancake Day. For no good reason¹, we eat pancakes on this day.

Normally, I make something fairly simple — a big pile of American style thick panackes or British-style thin ones (which are very similar to, although not quite, French crêpes). This year I decided to do something different and serve up three courses, all with pancakes done different ways. Here, then, is my Pancake Triple.

Appetiser: blinis with smoked salmon, cream cheese, green onion and cucumber. All credit here to my wife Danielle for the lovely presentation, including the genius idea of piping the thick cream cheese through a cookie press.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t source any buckwheat flour, so I had to use just plain wheat flour instead. They still came out good though.

Main course: galette complète with a salad of avocado, bacon, balsamic vinagrette, and goat’s cheese.

Dessert: crépes with homemade blueberry syrup and vanilla ice cream.

The syrup recipe is amazing and definitely something I’ll be making again. A few small notes. UKians should note that the “1 cup” of blueberries it calls for weigh about 100 g, which is about half of a standard supermarket punnet. If using fresh blueberries, go easy on the water. Leave it to stand briefly after simmering and it’ll thicken a little more — I found it didn’t form a skin. And don’t skip either the pectin or the balsamic.

All in all, this was quite a lot of prep and cooking to do on a week night but it certainly felt special. My friend Dave said that he made pancake cannelloni this year (exactly what they sound like: pancakes filled with ragù, topped with béchamel, and baked). I think they may be on my menu for 2013. —Rich

Allegedly, it’s to use up the rich foods that cannot be eaten while fasting for Lent but that would go off before Lent ends — butter, eggs and milk. But I cannot help but notice that animals will continue to produce these things during Lent. If you have a laying chicken or a dairy cow, you can’t actually eat these things up, because they just keep coming. ↩