FFWD Matafan

I'm sure I'm not the only one, but it's been another crazy week!  I'm hoping it will calm down in January, but this blogging schedule has been harder for me than I thought it would be.  I thought I would easily be able to post once a week for FFWD, and I'd probably post at other times as well.  I'm lucky if I get my FFWD post up by Sunday!  I'm definitely going to try harder, but it's hard because I do most of my cooking on Sundays, and then the work weeks get so crazy I have a hard time getting anything written up by Friday.  But anyway, on to the food....

We got our last CSA basket of the year on Friday and it was full of good stuff.  We got a 4.5 pound rutabaga - I've never even eaten rutabaga before, but I braised some with some of the turnips we got, roasted some with some more of the turnips we got, and mashed the rest up with a potato for a kind of mashed potatoes.  I was a little worried about it, but I actually enjoyed the rutabaga.  I still have some more turnips left, though.  I'm hoping to roast those tonight.  We also got a daikon, but luckily I learned that they store really well so I'm keeping that one in the basement for a while.  We got a napa cabbage which I used to make a big Asian-style salad with roasted peanuts and tofu.  We got some escarole which I made into an Italian soup with turkey meat balls.  And we got swiss chard.

The swiss chard would have been perfect for this week's Dorie recipe (chard-stuffed pork roast), but I don't eat pork.  So, since I completely missed last week I decided to make the Matafan everybody else made last week and serve it with a swiss chard frittata.  I wish I had read everybody's posts before I did my menu planning!  I thought the Matafan was going to be more like a potato latke, so I agreed when my husband suggested we eat pancakes for breakfast.  After breakfast I sat down to read everybody's blog posts, and noticed that several people said Matafans tasted a lot like regular pancakes.  It was hard to believe given the amounts of potato and flour called for, but you all were right!  I made them for dinner and they did taste a lot like regular pancakes.

Lots of Matafan

I don't think I'd make this recipe again.  I'm probably not a fair judge since it was my second time eating pancakes that day, but I really like pancakes and just didn't think these were that special.  I think I prefer my regular pancakes recipe (Emeril Lagasse's, actually) for breakfast, potato latkes for a dinner side dish, and the buckwheat blinis if I wanted something for an appetizer.  I was happy I got to use the food mill I bought a couple of weeks ago as part of an apple canning project (apple butter and apple sauce), though, and I also really liked the swiss chard frittata (from Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food) so it definitely wasn't a bad dinner, just probably not something I'll make again.

Our dinner

P.S.  Paul asked if the pomegranate seeds went with the pancakes.  I told him they were just necessary to make the photo look less ugly.  Eggs and pancakes definitely aren't the most appealing combination visually!