Chinese Scallion Pancakes and Google Reader

I love my google reader page. It gives me the warm fuzzies. I want to curl up with it on the couch, a steamy cup of genmaicha tea in one hand and my browsing finger on the other. For the uninitiated, it is a web-based organizer of RSS feeds. In my line of hobbying, I follow a lot of food blogs as well as pop-culture and some educational feeds. My close friend Google Reader consolidates and organizes all of these feeds into one pleasant-looking interface. You can also share items on google reader with your google contacts. It is the mf bomb, people. I am telling you.

On a completely different note, a couple weeks ago I inspected a restaurant near Chateau Elan owned by this nice Korean couple. Seeing pounds of marinated galbi in her fridge, I asked if she would give me her galbi recipe. Of course she would! I am the health inspector, and restaurant owners are terrified of me. So I grabbed some short ribs from the local Super H and had a barbecue with some friends. As one of the banchan for the barbecue, I whipped up some Chinese scallion pancakes. My boyfriend and I had eaten these at Chef Liu's off Buford Hwy. Chef Liu's also has decent soup dumplings, but I don't have the time or patience for making soup dumplings at this point in my life.

The pancakes are super easy to make and the ingredients are simple. Some recipes use yeast, but I am not a baker and should not be encouraged to buy anything that is going to sit longer than a month in my little pantry.

Chinese Scallion Pancakes

2 cups flour

1 cup hot water

Green onions, sliced into thin rings

Sesame seeds

Kosher salt

Extra virgin olive oil

Sambal oelek chili paste to spread over pancake

Mix your 2 cups flour and 1 cup hot water until the dough is fully mixed and slightly sticky. Flour your rolling surface and your hands. Scoop a small handful of dough onto the floured surface and press flat into a circle. It doesn't have to be perfect, people, any circular shape will do.

Place a small handle of slice green onion and a sprinkling of sesame seeds onto the flat dough and press the ingredients gently into the dough so they will stick. Now roll the dough into a tube like a taquito, lengthening and forming it into a cylinder. Take the cylinder and curl it around itself like a snail shell. Press the rolled up dough flat. The snail shell you created should ensure that the pancake is relatively circular once you press it out.

Brown the pancake in a skillet on medium heat in about 1/3 tbsp of olive oil. For heat, spread a small amount of chili paste on the pancakes. The pancakes can by somewhat dry, so serve them with a moist food like scrambled eggs or soup.