Recipe of the Month: Savory Spinach Pancakes

A week or so ago, while researching a new article on dorm-room cooking for college students, I happened upon this recipe for spinach pancakes from Snack Girl. It struck me as a good one to try for several reasons:

1. It looked pretty healthful, with plenty of veggies and whole grain and not too much of anything it's better to avoid.
2. It was reasonably quick and easy to make. Thawing and draining the spinach added one extra step, but after that it would be no more difficult than any other kind of pancakes.
3. There was nothing in it that we didn't like.
4. It didn't call for any ingredients we don't normally have around the house.
5. Finally, it was a veggie-centric recipe, which meant that at the very least, I could get a Recipe of the Month Post out of it.

The only difficulty was figuring out what to serve with it. Pancakes normally go with some kind of sweet syrup, but that didn't seem suitable for a savory pancake recipe like this. The only other type of savory pancake I could think of was latkes, a.k.a. potato pancakes, which are normally served with applesauce or sour cream. Since I don't care for sour cream, and since we had plenty of apples in the fridge, which Brian has mastered the art of turning into applesauce in the pressure cooker, we decided to go with that.

So Brian whipped up a batch of these, which proved to be plenty for the two of us. Although Snack Girl says her recipe makes only "7 small cakes," Brian was able to get more than twice that number out of a single batch of batter, so I assume his cakes were quite a bit smaller than hers. They looked more appetizing than the picture on her site, as well—small, golden-brown cakes with just a hint of green color from the spinach.

As for the taste, they were pretty good. Not extraordinary, but not at all bad either. One thing we noticed was that the flavor of the cumin was particularly pronounced, which made the cakes vaguely reminiscent of falafel. Perhaps a tahini sauce would actually have been the best accompaniment for them, but they went reasonably well with the applesauce. We also found that the flavor of spinach was not particularly noticeable. In fact, if I hadn't been able to see it, I would hardly have known it was there at all. This led me to suspect that if you left out the cumin and scallions, these would actually work just fine as a traditional breakfast pancake with syrup. So perhaps some time, we'll try Snack Girl's alternative idea to "add some raisins and nuts for a sweeter pancake with more texture" and see how that goes.

But even with no modifications, this recipe looks like a very useful addition to our repertoire. Since we normally have spinach in the freezer and scallions growing either in the garden or on the windowsill, we can always pull it out on those nights when we the veggie drawer is empty and we don't know what to cook. That's enough to make it a successful Recipe of the Month as far as I'm concerned.