Kitchen Adventure: Yam Pancakes

I was too tired to make this for dinner last night, so it became a ridiculously colossal lunch today. Half is in the fridge now. If you’re making this dish for one, don’t use two medium yams! Just one.

Anyway, I loosely based this delicious dish on this recipe for sweet potato corn cakes with garlic dipping sauce. You can get a beauty shot and a more precise recipe there. Here’s a rough look at what I did:

Chopped up a bunch of garlic and two red things which were basically red jalapenos. Pricked two medium yams (garnet yams, I think?) with a fork and microwaved until soft. Scooped out delicious yam flesh and mashed, then added whole milk and mashed again to get a loose, soft mixture. Added a bit of chickpea flour but probably not enough, and mixed again until I had a basically smooth batter. Added the garlic and peppers and mixed again.

Heated olive oil in a pan. Spooned the thick batter into the pan and cooked on high/medium heat until the bottoms came away from the pan easily, then flipped and cooked until browned. (This is a bit of a wishful-thinking description. The reason I should have added more flour is that the batter was a bit too yammy and gloppy, which made some of the pancakes hard to flip.) Meanwhile sliced an avocado and opened a can of black beans and a tub of sour cream. Salted the pancakes as they cooked.

Put the pancakes on the plate w/the avocado slices and poured some of the black beans into the pan with a bit of their liquid. The liquid sizzled away nicely and I added cumin and a bit of salt. When the beans were heated through I scooped them out onto the plate. That all got a couple dollops of sour cream.

End result: Totally delicious, way too much food. It was a bit easier than I’d anticipated but still took about a half hour to create, which is more than I like to spend on lunch, although I suppose in reality it’s two lunches of fifteen minutes each, which is a lot more reasonable. If I had more patience I would have bought and added a lime and fresh cilantro. Maybe curry powder in the pancake batter? And, like I said, more chickpea flour. And eggs.