Zucchini and Onion Pancakes
Now that the Season of the Zucchini is upon me, I need to find something to do with all these green and yellow zucchinis, and fast. Luckily, I have about a million and one vegan zucchini recipes.
And five hungry canines, all of whom love their veggies. They are like furry, yappy garbage cans, I swear. But I digress.
Sunday night, I tried experimenting with a newish recipe (if I've tried it seasons past, I've managed to erase it from the noggin): Zucchini and Onion Pancakes.
Behold the yummy veggie goodness!
Here's the original recipe, snagged from the internets somewhere (probably All Recipes):
Ingredients
3 zucchini
1 large onion
1 teaspoon dried oregano
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup butter
Directions
1) Grate zucchini and onion into a medium bowl, and drain off excess juices. Stir in the oregano and salt and pepper to taste.
2) Heat a frying pan over medium high heat and melt butter in the pan. When butter has coated the pan, arrange the zucchini in a flat layer over the bottom of the pan. Fry until golden brown on both sides, about 5 minutes per side. Serve warm.
Nutrition at a glance
Servings Per Recipe: 6
amount per serving
Calories 92
Protein 1.5g
Total Fat 7.9g
Sodium 82mg
Cholesterol 21mg
Carbohydrates 5.2g
Fiber 1.7g
As you can probably tell, I changed it up a bit.
For starters, I added some sliced grape tomatoes (a dozen or so), of which I have many. (A good quarter of my garden is tomatoes, methinks.) I'm not crazy about pepper, so I omitted that and tried to add some extra flavor via the tomatoes. And, um, I forget about the oregano, actually. Probably because my eyes were scorched from all that onion.
Other than that, I mostly followed the recipe. My zucchini are massive (that's not bragging,
that's a fact, yo), so I used one large green zucchini as opposed to three smaller ones. I used one onion as per the directions, but rather than grating it (which proved futile), I diced it. There wasn't much extra juice, so instead of draining it, I added some bread crumbs to thicken the mix up a bit.
Once the "dough" was done, I tried frying it in a pan with a bit of olive oil, as opposed to the recommended butter margarine. Big mistake. The oil made the veggie patty taste heavier than it should have. Don't get me wrong, it was still yummy, just *heavy*.
The other glitch I ran into on the first night was corralling the veggies into a pancake formation. It just wasn't happening, despite the bread crumbs I'd added. Even after it was done cooking, my "pancake" resembled a veggie-heavy omelet or perhaps (in Shane's words) a frittata. (My words: "Maybe. What the hell's a fritatta, anyway?")
When all was said and done, I ended up with a plate of fried veggies as opposed to a nicely browned pancake.
After making two pancakes, I had a fairly large bowl of veggie mix left, so I added some whole wheat flour and a bit of wheat germ to the mix and stored it overnight. The next day, more juice had separated from the veggies, so again I tossed in some flour to thicken the mix up.
When I tried making a pancake later in the day (this time with margarine instead of olive oil), sweet success! Yummy yummy zucchini, onion (and tomato) pancakes.
Personally, I think the pancakes are better fresh and hot; if you agree, you can store the mix in the fridge and cook as desired. Otherwise, make a ton of pancakes at once and pig out.
And remember, flour is your friend.