The Best Thing I Ate Last Week (Week 2)

It was really a toss-up this week, with two really delicious contenders for the crown of best thing I ate last week. In the end, I think there is one that stood out more to me, but I don’t think I’ll reveal that until after I’ve described both dishes. That way each one gets its due, and there’s a new element of surprise to the article. Fun all the way around!

The two competitors couldn’t be much more different. In the near corner, we have a modified version of Chorizo and Potato Empanadas – a blend of spice, starch and sweet wrapped up in a crispy golden brown pouch. The modifications led to it not packing too much of a punch, spicy-wise, but the flavors really coalesced into a great tasting dinner. In the opposite corner is a batch of Lemon-Ricotta Pancakes – simple flapjacks made smoother and lighter with the addition of ricotta cheese, plus the zing of lemon, all topped with a dab of crème fraiche. It’s not a complicated recipe by any means, but it’s a fresh and unique twist on a breakfast staple. Which one was the best, though?

Chronologically speaking, the empanadas came first, so that’s where I’ll start. We’d been planning these for so long, but every time we decided to make them, we realized there was a lot of prep work and that we didn’t have the time for it. Finally this week, we got an early enough start - and it’s a good thing, too, since they took about an hour longer to make than we anticipated.

The ingredient that spawned this dish, to my recollection, was a batch of Farmer’s Market potatoes. Interestingly enough, the first potatoes we had were baby/fingerling types that I thought were too cute to mash and chop for the empanadas, so we had to go out and get new ones anyway. We ended up picking purple potatoes, which just look a whole lot more fun, have more antioxidants, and taste about the same as a regular white potato. In addition to that change, we substituted plain ground beef for the chorizo, which, I know, made them a little more bland. But we had a pound of ground beef sitting in the fridge that we needed to use up, and figured the spices would liven things up enough as it was.

The cooking process was very involved on these guys, and I won’t go into every detail, but here’s the condensed version. I cooked the beef with chopped onion, garlic and green onion, and mixed in lightly smashed potatoes, raisins, and broth while Stacia made a masa harina (fine corn flour) based dough. Both chilled for 30 minutes. I made lime-cilantro sour cream while Stacia rolled out the very crack-prone dough and vowed that she’d never make this recipe again. Since we don’t own a single cookie cutter, we then used a custard cup to cut out circles of dough, plopped filling mixture on it, and folded each circle in half into a pouch, hoping it didn’t crack too much. Egg wash with our new brush (very handy so far) and then into the oven.

The oven step is a little unique, since I believe the traditional way to make empanadas is to deep-fry them. We were a little concerned, but held to our motto to try the recipe mostly verbatim the first time, then modify if necessary. To our surprise and excitement, they came out crispy little pockets filled with a unique flavor sensation that, while maybe not worth the time and effort to try again, at least made for a tasty couple of dinners.

The Lemon Ricotta pancakes, on the other hand, were made entirely with items we had in the house, and was thanks to Stacia’s brilliance. The ricotta was leftover from last week’s squash blossoms, and the lemon we had from something or other, so all we ended up buying new was the crème fraiche. Now maybe you could argue we could have done without that, but it really was the perfect topping for the pancakes.

The cooking story isn’t too exciting for this meal, since pretty much all pancakes are made by mixing up a batter and cooking on a griddle. But it was kind of neat in that we first had to zest the entire lemon, using a handy microplane, and then juice the whole thing. We have some little plastic juicing tool, and I admit it did help quite a bit, but the real results came from me squeezing the hell out of the lemon until it was almost unrecognizable. Greg smash. Anyway, that, coupled with ricotta cheese, and your usual batter ingredients (eggs, flour) was pretty much it. We mixed it up and got the griddle hot.

Perhaps a little too hot, actually. We took turns making batches, cooking and flipping, and soon had a plateful of light, almost yellowy discs. The first ones we ate (which were the last to come off the griddle) were a little mushy in the middle, not cooked all the way through before the outsides got done. But as we worked our way down the stack, back to when the griddle wasn’t quite as hot, they had cooked all the way through and were delicate, flavorful versions of an old favorite. We ate them all in two consecutive mornings.

Both of these dishes were great, and perhaps each one was the best in its own totally different genre, but the title implies that there has to be one best meal, so here it is. I’m going to surprise everyone who knows me and go with the Lemon Ricotta Pancakes. I know, I’m choosing sweet over savory, and not picking the pseudo-Mexican cuisine. Very out of character. Well, the pancakes were not only equally delicious as the empanadas, but they were nostalgic, too.

You see, on our honeymoon in Sonoma two years ago, we ate breakfast the second morning at the restaurant at the Fairmont Sonoma Hot Springs Hotel. We hadn’t stayed there, but had been advised online that the Big 3 restaurant at the hotel had fantastic Lemon Cottage Cheese Pancakes. As peculiar as that sounded to me, we opted to give it a try, and it was great. It was a cool, crisp October morning in Sonoma, and we were heading up the valley toward the vineyards. We stopped at the Fairmont and started the day off with great food, smiling, chatting about the fun we’d had so far and had yet to come in the week ahead. It was a fantastic time, which was only enhanced by the delicious pancakes. Being able to even remotely replicate that atmosphere at home is simply awesome. When I think about it, it makes choosing a winner pretty easy actually.