Project (Scallion) Pancake

When my son was a baby starting on solid foods, I fed him plenty of good stuff like vegetables and fruit.  We bought our fair share of jarred baby food but as he got older, I also steamed fresh vegetables like carrots, squash, and sweet potatoes for him and fed him fruit like kiwi in hopes that he'd grow into an adventurous, healthy eater if he started off with a diverse diet.

You know...it didn't really work.  Once he realized there were other foods, he wasn't too keen on the kiwi and green beans anymore. My son is a fairly picky eater.  There are plenty of foods he loves to eat (like meat, for instance; and he loves salmon) but when it comes to fruits and vegetables, there's just a cozy group of those that he'll eat (some more willingly than others) as of now.  Because of that, we're constantly having a rotation of sweet potatoes, peas, carrots, potatoes, corn, avocados, apples, watermelon, and bananas.  Leafy vegetables, he is not a fan of.  Green might be his favorite color but that favorable opinion doesn't seem to apply to vegetables for some reason.

Somewhat surprisingly, he's always loved scallion pancakes.  I suppose these crispy pan-fried pancakes, dunked into a salty-sweet dipping sauce, pretty much renders the often itty-bitty amount of scallions hidden in them barely noticeable but I was nonetheless surprised when he first had them years ago at a restaurant and didn't insist on picking out every speck of green.  We used to call them "Chinese pizza" but whatever you call it, it's an appetizer that's hard to resist.

When I realized that scallion pancakes aren't nearly as difficult to make as I assumed, I thought it would be fun to make them with my now 8-year old.  If you'll indulge me, let's consider this the final trilogy in the "P" Projects - Project Pancake after Project Pizza and Project Pretzel.  I think I have a permanent little helper in the kitchen now so that these kitchen "projects" will hopefully becoming more everyday fun for us.

This project gave us another opportunity to play with dough.  No yeast this time - you need little more than all-purpose flour, water, and those scallions. We got a nice little workout kneading the dough.  After kneading and a little rest time (during which time we made a simple dipping sauce - a must), the dough changes from a stiff ball into a soft mound that was surprisingly pliable and easy-to-roll out.  

One recipe makes 8 small scallion pancakes, and you can freeze any you don't cook right away.  You make each by rolling a piece of dough into a small circle, topping it with scallions, and then rolling it up into a cylinder.  Then you curl the cylinder into a round, snail-like shape, flatten it, and roll it out again so that the scallions are embedded into the dough (see photos after the jump). It is time-consuming and I have to tell you that the rolling pin and I are not exactly close friends (we only see each other occasionally).  My little guy was a great helper but I took over the trickier part of the second roll with the scallions.  The Giants were playing the Broncos that afternoon so I let him loose after making the first few to enjoy the game while I continued to roll and roll these babies out...

For a few of the pancakes, I took some of the toasted sesame seeds I was using in the dipping sauce and added them into the pancakes themselves. The sesame seeds didn't make a big impact on the finished pancakes but it goes to show that you can add some other spices and ingredients to your scallion pancakes if you want to be adventurous.

I pan fried the scallion pancakes on a lightly oiled cast iron pan.  Rather than deep frying, this makes these pancakes a lot lighter - one of the reasons I love re-creating restaurant food at home.  Taste-wise, maybe deep frying makes for a more satisfying or "robust" scallion pancake but my fellas and I really enjoyed devouring this lighter version.  We stored extra pancakes in the freezer and took them over to impress grandma and the rest of the extended family about a week later during one of our family dinners!