carrot and gram flour pancakes, hummous and salad

Batter

One of the rather too many cookbooks I've acquired recently is The Modern Vegetarian by Maria Elia.  On the very first page is a recipe for carrot and gram flour pancakes that I've been meaning to try out for ages.

So, today, I did.  It was really good!

It reminded me a lot of a Gujarati dish called "poodla" that my nanima (maternal grandmother) taught me to make.  It's interesting to me that a) a lot of dishes exist the world over in different formats and b) that they can taste so different in different contexts.

Pancakes

Spiced gram flour pancakes (with fresh coriander and chilli in the batter) seem instinctively to me an Indian flavour and I can imagine my namima knocking these out, "measuring" everything by eye, and serving them with natural yoghurt or tamarind chutney or green chutney (coriander, chillis and green apple.)  I'm quite tempted to do that next time. 

Pancakes with hummous

But, this time, I followed Maria Elia's idea and went for topping them with hummous and salad.

She suggests carrot hummous (basically normal hummous with roasted carrots blended in) but I decided that I didn't really fancy carrot and chickpea pancakes topped with blended carrot and chickpea as that seemed rather too much carrot and chickpea for me.  So, I just made my normal hummous (the classic way) which I think worked pretty well.

Pancakes and hummous and salad

I also didn't quite follow her suggestion on the salad because I had a few things to use up - I went for pea shoots, baby plum tomatoes, spring onions and feta with some black pepper and olive oil on top.  Yum.

Next time, I might try a blend of flour (nanima recommends 1/4 chapati flour 3/4 gram flour for poodla which might work nicely), adding in some spring onions, maybe courgette rather than carrots...?