Apple Pancakes

Breakfast for dinner, anyone? Or just looking for that perfect Sunday morning pancake recipe to serve to weekend guests or your sweetheart? However you choose to enjoy them, you can't go wrong with these delicious, hearty yet fluffy apple-filled treats.

As a tinge of chill begins to lend a crispness to the fall air, the leaves change colors in places where leaves change color (jealous!), apple-picking and cider house visits segue into hayrides and autumn bonfires, and your belly is ready to move past the salads and grill-outs of summer to the warm comforting foods of fall and winter... Go pick those apples people! Or just pick them up at the store, that's what we did. Apple orchards are probably not in abundance in LA.

Remember this cool contraption from the sauerkraut recipe? Gotta love it.

This is a pretty basic pancake recipe, but with some distinctly German touches - namely, the sour cream sauce and apple combo. It was so good that Tara has decided this sauce may well replace syrup in her life for all pancakes from now on. Due to dairy restrictions, she is thinking maybe a plain non-dairy yogurt might be a good replacement with coconut oil instead of butter? 

Sour Cream Topping

We decided to cut the sour cream sauce in half, which turned out to be the perfect pancake to sauce ratio. Unless you want to double the pancake recipe for a crowd or use the sauce for other creative purposes, we suggest you do the same. Also, with all the ingredients out in front of us, trying to decide how the honey would blend in to a cold sauce, Jen suggested switching to maple syrup (perfect for pancakes, right?) and it was brilliant! It blended completely and added a wonderful hint of maple flavor. Make sure to get the real stuff though! No Aunt Jemima, you know what we're saying? Well, you could try it but in that case we're not making any promises....

We attempted to bring the egg and milk up to room temp as much as possible so the melted butter didn't clump up. Oh, and check out the bit about the "rotary beater"?! Does anyone else remember those? It's little moments like this that remind us that these recipes were originally published in 1960. Pretty cool.

We used a whisk. Otherwise we mixed and griddled as directed, with Tara's master flipper skills evading that ultimate pancake tragedy of which we're sure we are all familiar. 

Soooo, we all loved them. They were simple to make and satisfying, sweet but not too sweet. We suggest you try them. Like, now. 

Get flipping!

Hot (or not) Potato Salad

German Potato Salad. This was inevitable. We've all tried it somewhere at some point and have opinions, right? Sometimes it's warm, sometimes not. Sometimes it has bacon, or is creamy, but most of the time it has a pucker-your-mouth vinaigrette that makes you rethink your days of American deli potato salad. Varying adaptations of this dish might even help to shape our ideas of German food in general.

If you've tried the right one, it's pretty hard to dislike.

We hope this blog is starting to open up ideas for a cuisine that you may or may not have tried before, and who knows? Maybe German potato salad is a new thing for you. If so, this recipe is a good place to start. Potato salad crosses international boundaries with endless variations, and who doesn't like it?

 

This variation has bacon. If you're into that kind of thing...

We were so impressed by the variety of pretty vegetables:

This was part of a larger meal, and we all loved it. If you like a more tart German potato salad, we might suggest cutting the sugar in half - this one definitely had a sweet edge to balance the vinegar. But for the love of God, make the bacon gravy. Sooo good. We used apple cider vinegar and were worried that it would be too much. Not at all. We promise, go for it.

Schnitzel Notes:

* We cut the smaller potatoes into quarters and the larger ones into chunks that matched, which reduced the cooking time. We brought the water to a boil with the potatoes in it and after 10 minutes at a boil checked diligently every minute until tender. It really is crucial to get this step right, too crunchy or too mushy and your potato salad is... well, you know.

* We didn't measure the parsley, just chopped up a bunch and threw it in - at least 1/4 cup. Extra greens never hurt anyone, and it helped make the salad very pretty. 

* Our bacon was fairly lean (for bacon), so we just left all of the fat in the pan to make the roux.

* Serve warm, room temperature, or cold.

(Not) Knackwurst In Beer

Ein bier, bitte!

Or two... One for the sausages, one to enjoy whilst preparing the sausages. This recipe for Knackwurst in Beer from Grandma's Cookbook resulted in quite possibly the most tender, flavorful bratwurst that any of us had tasted! We actually prepared them for guests (no, all of those brats below were not just for us), along with sauerkraut and kartoffelsalat. Do you think we remembered to take pictures of anyone actually enjoying the feast?

Silly fräuleins.

So sure, this is a bit more involved than just throwing some wieners straight from the package onto the grill.  But it's Oktoberfest, live a little!  Buy a whole bunch of sausages - knackwurst, mettwurst, bratwurst, whatever you can get your hands on - and invite the gang over for your own Oktoberfest celebration, wherever you may be.

We used this beer from Trader Joe's for the marinade:

And this bratwurst from Whole Foods:

...As well as some brats from their meat counter, but we won't show you the pictures of them in prep because, let's be honest, raw sausages just ain't pretty. But here they are grilling away on the barbie!

After grilling, they were all thrown back into the pot with the marinade to boil away.  We actually doubled the batch of marinade to accommodate all of the brats and tried our hardest, as the recipe suggested, to let the liquid boil down completely. This ended up taking much longer than anticipated, and we had a lot of hungry folks, so we eventually gave into our bellies' demands and pulled them off with a bit of liquid left.  And that was perfectly fine, we don't think they could have been any better.

The kartoffelsalat (potato salad) and sauerkraut pictured at the top will be  featured in upcoming Oktoberfest posts, so stay tuned!

Schnitzel Notes:

* Adapt this recipe to the amount of sausages required simply by making sure there's enough beer to cover them. We ended up with about 12 sausages and used 2 bottles of beer, with 2 cloves of garlic and 1 decent-sized onion. We originally planned on only 8 sausages and one beer, but were able to adjust on the fly.

* After marinating, we threw the brats on the BBQ until nice and brown, then transferred them back to the kitchen to simmer in the beer mixture.  Feel free to sauté them instead, and let us know how they turn out!

* We sliced up an extra onion, tossed it with a little olive oil in some tin foil, and grilled it alongside the brats to serve, as shown in the photo above. 

* Horseradish and German mustard, anyone?

Fried Potatoes

Guten tag und willkommen to Ms. Schnitzel!

We are keeping things simple today as we are busy preparing some fun and exciting content for our Oktoberfest posts. Busy, busy fräuleins! Check back for all things Oktoberfest from September 20th through October 5th.  

Following this recipe exactly results in deliciously soft and crispy, perfectly browned potatoes like you would find in your favorite mom & pop diner. We cooked them over medium-high heat and flipped them for the first time after about 6 minutes.  Using a mandolin to slice the potatoes made this recipe a breeze, but feel free to pare them as Grandma's Cookbook suggests.

 

We served the Fried Potatoes as part of a larger meal, with Breasts of Chicken Paprika (from the previous post), and they were delicious with the extra sauce from the chicken.  Next time we think we might try them with sautéed or caramelized onions added to the mix.  How could we go wrong with that?

 

Schnitzel Notes:

* We used organic yellow potatoes and they worked great, but feel free to try russets, red skins, or whatever taters suit your fancy!

* We left the skins on the potatoes - bring on those extra nutrients!

* The exact amount of butter that we used is kind of up in the air because we fried them in the same pan in which we seared the chicken in butter, and then just threw an extra tablespoon or two in as they cooked.  Our guess is that we used between 2-3 tablespoons when all was said and done.