Eggplant Pancakes

It’s Pancake Wednesday! Mixing it up this week with these eggplant pancakes with with roasted pepper sauce and fried eggs.

Okay, this doesn’t have the same effect for me as Pancake Sunday, but it did give me another idea for pancake Sunday for next time I host brunch.

This pancake comes from Moldova and is actually a savory pancake. Yeah. Weird. I don’t do that.

Before I talk more about this pancake, let’s talk about Moldova. Before this, I didn’t know much more about that little Eastern European country other than Eric Weiner found it to be the unhappiest place on Earth, chronicled in his book The Geography of Bliss (the happiest being Bhutan. Probably because they put butter in their tea). Moldova is a landlocked country situated between Romania and the Ukraine. Like every nation (perhaps other than the US), the cuisine of the people is influenced by the topography and geography there. While mostly continental, it’s just a hop skip and a jump from The Black Sea. The rich fertile soil in that area has made Moldova the perfect hotspot for wineries, and wine making is a large part of the nation’s exports.

As for the food, because that’s why I’m here anyway, Moldovan dishes utilize tons of vegetables, such as tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplant, cabbage, beans, onion, garlic, and leek and prepared in any number of ways- baked, steamed, pickled, salted, or marinated. All of these things listed above sound a lot like the foods of its neighbors and the influence of the Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Russia and Turkey is not lost.

It being summer, and Moldovan food consisting of not ice cream, I had a hard time coming up with something interesting to make. I found a recipe for an eggplant pancake, placinta cu vinete, on  Milk and Pumpkin and figured I could do something that combined this simple pancake recipe with other traditional Moldovan flavors. The result was ah-ma-zing and I may have broken a world record on how fast I shoved this in my face. Again, great brunch alternative or general alternative to the popular potato pancake.

Since the pancake itself doesn’t have much pizzaz, I roasted some orange bell peppers (savor the summer!) and pureed them with some goat cheese (duh) and lemon juice, coming up with a nice sauce for my pancake. I topped all of the above with a runny egg and some basil (since I’m going through egg withdrawal from the egg overload of last week). Bazinga!