Pancakes! Baked with onions, mushrooms, cheese, parsley and garlic

Pancakes baked with onions, mushrooms, cheese, parsley and garlic

Happy Pancake Day!

Pancakes are pure genius.  Want something sweet?  Have a pancake.  Want something savoury and stodgy and comfort foody?  Have a pancake.  Want something savoury and posh and delicate?  Have a pancake.  Want something spicy?  Have an Indian pancake.  Is there anywhere in the world that hasn't developed its own type of pancake?

Anyway.  My lovely husband loves pancakes like all sane human beings but has plans for the evening so we decided to have pancakes the night before.  Which is perfect because it means that I can write and schedule a post to go up on Pancake Day itself which is pretty cunning.

I used Nigel Slater's recipe for the pancakes themselves and stuffed them with a somewhat random mixture of things that I had in the kitchen:  fried four chopped onions, added some mushrooms and garlic, seasoned with salt and pepper and added in some grated cheddar and chopped parsley at the end, after taking it off the heat.

onion, garlic, mushroom, parsley and cheddar pancake filling

Then, made the pancakes.  I love doing things like this on the hob - watching the butter foam, having to speedily swirl the mixture, having to flip them over.  It's all great fun!

Pancake

Pancake

As each pancake was done, I put in the batter for the next and while that was cooking, I'd fill the cooked pancake with the mixture and put in a baking dish.  I went for folding the pancakes into quarters.  Mostly because that fit well into the baking dish I had - you could do it in any number of ways.

the first of many

starting to fill up!

Nigel Slater suggested adding a knob of butter to each pancake before it went in the oven but that seemed a touch unhealthy after all the butter that went into the pan to grease the pancakes so I just went for topping with grated parmesan.  Because obviously that is totally healthy.  Baked at 200 degrees C for about 10 minutes to heat through again and melt the parmesan on top.  Nigel Slater suggests baking filled savoury pancakes for 30 minutes but that would have been waaaay too long for these, they were perfectly done after 10.

Mmmmm.  These were lovely.  I love pancakes.  Not just for Pancake Day but nevertheless Pancake Day is an excellent excuse for a few!

Pancakes baked with onions, mushrooms, cheese, parsley and garlic

Pancakes baked with onions, mushrooms, cheese, parsley and garlic

Roasted aubergine with fried onion and chopped lemon - Ottolenghi recipe

Roasted aubergine with fried onion and chopped lemon

So, I've got Ottolenghi's Jerusalem cookbook out from the library at the moment - it is awesome, by the way  - and, inevitably, an aubergine recipe caught my eye..  It's funny, I clearly named this blog after aubergines but, honestly, I didn't realise just how much I cooked with them until I started posting and "aubergines" started looming so large in the tags list.  They are amazing, though - so versatile!  Anyway.  Anything that includes fried onions and lemon and aubergine is good for me..  

Ottolenghi has helpfully put the whole recipe in a Guardian article here so I won't bore you with the details but basically, you cut crosses in aubergines and roast them with olive oil, salt and black pepper on top:

The sacrificial aubergines with their flesh cut open

The sacrificial aubergines with their flesh cut open

I slid some garlic into the slits because it is tasty and I could (Ottolenghi refrains):

Black peppery aubergines with stealthy garlic slipped in

You then fry some onion with chilli and sumac and tasty things of this nature:

For a minute at the end you add in the feta:

And then you mix the chopped lemon flesh, chilli and garlic in with the onions and feta mixture and put on top of the roasted aubergines:  voila!  You can eat warm or at room temperature as you prefer.  It is quite an intense dish, so I recommend something relatively bland to go with it - some nice bread, perhaps.

Roasted aubergine with fried onion and chopped lemon

This may sound obvious but you really do have to like lemon for this dish to work for you.  Lots of recipes with lemon call for just a little twist of it but this one - with the whole chopped lemon in it - really requires you to love your lemons.  Luckily, I do.  I've always loved sour flavours, I was always That Child who stole the citrus slices from everyone's drinks.

Roasted aubergine with fried onion and chopped lemon