Apple Puffed Pancake and Curried Lentil Soup with Tomato and Spinach

Readers, I'm sorry to say that Epicurious does not carry either of these recipes, which means that they were never published in Gourmet Magazine. It's been interesting to note which recipes are family favorites of the cookbook staff (like Ruth R.'s mother's pancake recipe), which ones were culled from other cookbooks (a lot of the ethnic ones) and which ones are from their archives.

Anyway, these were both great recipes so if you don't have the book and you absolutely must cook one or the other or both let me know and I'll include the particulars.

I made Apple Puffed Pancake for breakfast on Saturday morning for a special treat. I am generally a cereal/oatmeal girl, and even when I go out for breakfast I tend towards egg dishes. But O'Malley was with us and I thought it would be fun to do. I had something like this long ago visiting my friend Moira when she lived in Cambridge--her apartment-mate whipped it up for breakfast and I remember being quite amazed at the chemistry of it.

If you've ever made popovers or Yorkshire pudding the concept is exactly the same except you're adding apples that have been sauteed in butter, a lot of sugar, and spices. Think apple pie filling and you've got it. You use the same skillet on the stovetop and in the oven, and the filling puffs up gorgeously, then settles into itself within a minute or two of being out on the counter top. Dust with confectioner's sugar, and you've got a breakfast treat with hardly any redeeming nutritive features...but it's wildly tasty, so who cares? O'Malley loved this dish and ate most of it, I'm happy to say (which means I'm glad that I didn't eat most of it.)

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I made the Curried Lentil Soup with Tomato and Spinach at work when D. and his daughter H. were visiting. H. is a vege-fisha-tarian, and this was something I was able to produce with what I had on hand in the pantry.

Anybody who is or has been a vegetarian has probably had umpteen versions of lentil soup--I know I have. So what elevates this dish are two things--curry powder and lemon juice. The curry powder goes in at the beginning, and the lemon juice goes in at the end. A fantastic dish for a fall day!