Karin Elizabeth

Today I made oat & cottage cheese pancakes. I only have an “after” photo. No photos of the process. Because this was my first attempt at making them. I was sure it would amount to an epic fail. But as it turns out, the pancakes were not too shabby. Not too shabby at all. They had texture AND fluff.

Trying to eat mostly wheat free (because of a suspected intolerance, which is not an allergy) for two weeks is challenging, especially in the “getting enough fiber!” department.

Oats are very high in fiber, and while traveling in Scotland I responded very well to eating it, feeling much better without wheat. So yesterday I tried… oat porridge.

UGH. YUCK. NEVER AGAIN. I still shiver at the memory. My poor tastebuds. (And I tried to make it taste better. I tried so hard. But it’s the structure that bothered me. The porridge-ness of it.) There HAD to be a better way.

So I googled. And stumbled upon Cookie + Kate‘s banana oat pancakes. I felt glorious as I realized: “OF COURSE! OAT PANCAKES!” (Think Disney’s Alladin, “A whooole neeeew woooooooooooooorlddddd….!”)

Regarding cooking & baking, if I set my mind to something, I can usually get it done. My first risotto turned out beautifully, for instance. I’m less hesitant about trying new recipes and I tend to succeed. (You don’t want to know what the kitchen looks like afterwards though.)

But pancakes, I’ve always felt would be impossible. But that porridge, oh, brrrr, shiver, ugh. It was motivation enough to give the bloody pancakes a go. It couldn’t possibly get any worse.

I used Cookie + Kate’s recipe as a guideline for the basic “making pancakes out of oat”. I used intuition for the rest. I used oats, a bit of syrup, 2 eggs, the butter, baking soda, salt to make the batter as instructed by the recipe, and scooped the cottage cheese through when that was done. The batter was chunky and too thick (the first pancake was made of fail) so I added milk, which worked very well. I got about 7 pancakes out of my batter, I suppose it could have been 8 but I didn’t use all of the oats

I could have made them a bit thinner, I think, just a bit gooey-er (a bit more milk), but other than that I was very pleasantly surprised by the flavor and how well it all turned out generally!

I ate mine with a bit of syrup and butter, just the usual. I’m very eager to try different flavor combinations from here on out. I’ve already got my heart set on a brie & chilisauce combo…

Who needs bread, really?

I get a lot of exercise nowadays.. Enough to allow myself to be bad sometimes and give in to cravings. Today I craved fries for lunch. Hardly a healthy decision… But – they were made in the oven. That counts for something! (I’m not a fan of anything that’s been fried through and through, dripping wet with oil. Yuck.)

Oven fries it was today. And that white gob you see there is an adjusted form of common mayonnaise (fritessauce, we call this kind of mayo here) which contains less fat and is therefore less creamy (as in, less thick-salad-dressing-y), and tastes very well with fries. This is how we, the Dutch, typically eat our fries. We don’t dooooo ketchup: we dooooo fritessaus. Sometimes we add curry sauce and onions. Sometimes satesauce. The Belgians and some of us Southern Dutch, my mom and I included, eat it with a sour, chunky piccalilli. Sometimes we pile it with meat, sometimes with veggies. But fritessauce, well, that’s always going to be my favorite sauce to go with fries.