Kitchen adventures: Pumpkinification

For some reason Whole Foods was selling lots of heavily marked-down Thanksgiving food last week. I grabbed a can of pumpkin for a dollar and proceeded to use it in black bean chili (not the first time I’ve had good results using a sweeter ingredient in my chili) and in delicious curry pumpkin pancakes, made with–those who know me can already chorus it–chickpea flour.

What I did: Sliced an onion. Mixed chickpea flour, curry powder, cumin, cayenne, and salt, in about that order. Mixed in water, a little bit at a time, until the mixture was smooth and loose enough to pour easily. Stirred in… a whole bunch of canned pumpkin, until the mixture turned orange and was thicker and more like cookie dough.

Melted butter in a skillet and spooned the batter onto it in dollops which I spread out a little with the back of the spoon. Fried the pancakes on high heat until they slid around easily when I tilted the pan, then flipped them. Fried the other side to a sort of leopard-spotted look. Turned off the heat, slid the pancakes onto a plate, and melted a tad bit more butter, then put the heat back on and fried the onions in the butter.

Results: super-great. Fragrant, slightly kicky from the cayenne and sweet but not too sweet from the pumpkin. The fried onions were the perfect topping; a couple fried eggs wouldn’t come amiss here either.

This can obviously be made vegan if you substitute your preferred oil for the butter.