I’ve been trying to diversify my cooking lately. I got stuck in sort of a rut, in which I was still making good food but it was a lot of the same recipes over and over. I started by going into Google Reader and looking through all the posts that I have starred. There are a lot there from before I actually had my own kitchen, most of which I never got around to making. One of those recipes was this one, from The Way the Cookie Crumbles (I seem to get a lot of my recipes from there), for mandarin pancakes.
Mandarin pancakes are an absolutely essential part of mu shu pork, long one of my favorite Chinese dishes. When I was younger, I just wanted to eat the pancakes themselves and my dad would get mad at me because an order of the pork only came with 4. Well, now I can eat all the pancakes I want, and make the stir fry to go along with them. At the end of the pancake post is a link to this recipe for mu shu pork, from Use Real Butter (a new blog discovery for me).
Luke and I actually sort of tag teamed this one. The pancakes were a little labor intensive (and I was so hungry) so I had him get started on the filling while I made the pancakes. You can make them first though, wrap them in foil, and then do the stir fry. They warm up great in the microwave.
I pretty much always love the food that I cook. But a lot of times, the homemade version tastes a little different from the restaurant version, which requires sort of recalibrating my tastes. Not this one. This tasted pretty much exactly the way I remember, just a little better and fresher. The pancakes came out perfectly, paper thin. The stir fry had just the right crunchy texture and the light flavor that makes it a great match for hoisin sauce. Truly, fantastic.
1 Comment
October 28, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Awesome! I have never actually had mandarin pancakes except for the ones I’ve made, so it’s good to know that these are how they’re supposed to be!