Tempting Kosher Dishes: Matzo Meal Spinach Pancakes

Ever wished you could take your kid’s favorite meal (pancakes!) and mix a lot of unwelcome vegetables in? Well, you’re in luck.

Spinach Pancakes

1/2 cup Manischewitz’s Matzo Meal
1 cup cooked or canned spinach
2 eggs
1-1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
1/4 cup water or spinach liquid
2 onions

Chop spinach fine, then add all other ingredients except onions. Slice onions and fry in any desired fat; then drop the spinach pancakes into the same fat with the onions and fry until brown.

While I’m a little grossed out by pureed spinach, I do like fresh spinach. This was bought nearly a week ago, but was still crisp and fresh while I chopped it up.

After a five-minute steam, it’s lost some volume and gotten soft. (Still tastes good, though!) Time to assemble the rest of the necessary ingredients as well!

The onions went into some butter to fry while I started mixing the other ingredients.

It starts out still looking fresh.

Then suddenly it looks frightening.

I’m sorry, spinach.

It wasn’t entirely clear whether the onions were supposed to stay in the fat while the pancakes cooked, or what. So I started off pushing the onions to the side.

That didn’t really look like it would work (the onions were starting to get burnt) so I moved them out and stuck to just spinach pancakes.

It took a few minutes per side, and the frying pan wasn’t very large, so this took a while. (I should have just used our griddle, which is about two burners long and could have done almost the whole batch at once.)

I liked these a lot, although on their own they were fairly plain. Good toppings included the cooked onions, thin slices of gouda cheese, and/or sour cream — any of these gave a little more flavor and depth to the pancake. Plus, they’re chock-full of spinach goodness! This is likely to become a standard spinach treatment in our kitchen — it’s easier than making a cream sauce, but more interesting than just steaming or sautéing.