Mushroom-Filled Blini

Blini are delicious stuffed with cremini mushrooms, those brown-toned baby Portobellos, or with wild mushrooms. Learn more at TwiceasTasty.com.
When my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon went live with the latest recipe, Mushroom-Filled Blini, one of the first reactions that I received focused on the mushrooms, rather than the thin pancakes I wrap around them. Although I wrote the recipe for cremini mushrooms, the brown-toned baby Portobellos that are easily found in most grocery stores, I ate delicious blini stuffed with wild mushrooms while traveling across Russia.

In my corner of Northwest Montana, spring mushroom foraging season is just around the corner. I recommend bookmarking this week’s recipe if you’ll soon be out hunting for morels, our most popular edible spring fungi. You can find more ideas for cooking your bounty in this blog post. It also links to a Flathead Beacon column I wrote in 2022 after interviewing local forager Dale Johnson, who offered tips for identifying and using your wild mushroom collection.
Learn to make Mushroom-Filled Blini

Beyond Pancakes

My family adores pancakes of all types, whether fried or baked. Get pancake recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
Say “pancake,” and Americans usually visualize tall stacks of round, freshly fried batter, dripping with butter and maple syrup and often made from a prepackaged mix. But every culture seems to have its equivalent, and many require so few, and such common, ingredients that they can be made straight from the pantry.

My family adores pancakes. My mom put together a cookbook of family recipes in 1990, printed on her dot-matrix machine and bound with plastic combs. It includes Linda’s Pancake Mix, a recipe from a family friend that features oats, corn, wheat, and powdered milk and was my mom’s go-to blend throughout my childhood. But it also includes Æbleskivers, Danish pancakes that remind me of holeless yeast donuts but are cooked in a special pan. They were my grandfather’s specialty; my sister inherited his pan, and my niece and nephew dip them in copious amounts of Nutella. My mom’s cookbook also holds recipes for Southern Spoonbread, a cornmeal-based baked “pancake” that’s closer to a soufflé and that we considered a dinner dish, and Dutch Babies, its flour-based breakfast counterpart that puffs beautifully, causing us all to claim a corner as it emerges from the oven. If I were to put out a new edition of Mom’s cookbook today, I would add crepes and their Russian variation, blini.
Learn to make Dutch Babies and Mushroom-Stuffed Blini