Silver Dollar Pancakes

Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I went to the International District again — my MLK Day tradition, now in its second year. This time I went with Daniel and Claire from the adoptee meetup. Three Korean adoptees walking through the ID on a holiday about justice, eating our way through a neighborhood that represents the Asian-American presence in Seattle. Daniel had japchae from a stall. Claire had tteokbokki. I had hotteok — the sweet pancakes, stuffed with brown sugar and cinnamon, fried until crispy outside and molten inside. We ate walking, standing, sitting on a bench by the Uwajimaya entrance, three Korean adults who were raised by white families and are now standing in an Asian neighborhood eating Korean food on a holiday about belonging. The irony and the beauty coexist.

After lunch, Daniel, Claire, and I went to the Korean bookstore in the ID — a tiny shop with shelves of Korean novels, textbooks, children's books, and cookbooks. I bought a Korean-language cookbook — entirely in Korean, no English — because I want to push my reading comprehension beyond menus and textbook exercises into real-world Korean text. The cookbook is a challenge. Every recipe requires translation, every measurement requires conversion, every technique description requires patient decoding. But the act of cooking from a Korean-language cookbook — of reading Korean instructions and producing Korean food — feels like the next level. Not just cooking Korean food in English. Cooking it in Korean.

At work, the platform redesign is in planning phase. I'm spending my days in architecture meetings and design reviews, the kind of high-level work that my promotion entitled me to and that I enjoy in the way that I enjoy complex puzzles: the satisfaction of finding the right structure, the right patterns, the right abstractions. But the work exists in a compartment. The Korean compartment — the cooking, the language, the identity, the birth mother research — is the one I think about on my commute, in the shower, at 2 AM when I can't sleep. The two compartments are not in conflict. They're parallel processes, running simultaneously, sharing the same hardware (me), and the hardware is handling the load.

Korean class: I'm in the intermediate level now, having graduated from beginner after the trip to Korea accelerated my learning. The intermediate work is harder — longer readings, more complex grammar, conversational exercises that require thinking in Korean rather than translating from English. I'm slow. I'm error-prone. But I'm in the intermediate class, which means I've crossed a threshold, and thresholds matter to someone who spent twenty-four years on the other side of every Korean threshold there is.

Saturday: Bellevue. Karen made her potato soup. I brought the first recipe I cooked from the Korean-language cookbook: dakjuk — chicken porridge, simple and comforting, made from a whole chicken simmered until the meat falls apart, the broth thickened with rice into a creamy, golden porridge topped with scallions and sesame oil. I told Karen I made it from a cookbook written entirely in Korean. She looked at me with an expression I couldn't read, and then she said, "You can read Korean well enough to cook from a Korean cookbook?" I said, "Slowly. With a dictionary. But yes." She shook her head — not in disbelief but in something more like awe. "You did that," she said. "You taught yourself all of that." I said, "I had help. Maangchi. Misook. Dr. Yoon. You." She said, "Me?" I said, "You gave me the cookbook that started it. Two Christmases ago." She remembered. Of course she remembered. Karen remembers every gift she's given, every meal she's made, every moment of mothering, because mothering is her life's work and her life's work is meticulous. "I gave you a cookbook," she said. "You built a life." Yes. She gave me a cookbook. I built a life.

I keep thinking about the hotteok — the way it was crispy and yielding at the same time, molten brown sugar hitting the cold January air, the three of us standing outside Uwajimaya eating something small and round that somehow contained everything. I’m not going to pretend silver dollar pancakes are hotteok. They’re not. But they share the same basic miracle: a small, round thing you can hold in your hand that turns out to be bigger on the inside than it looks. I made these the morning after I got home from Bellevue, after telling Karen about the Korean cookbook, after she said you built a life — and something about making a simple stack of small pancakes felt exactly right for a day when I needed to start from the beginning and work my way up.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 15 minutes | Total Time: 25 minutes | Servings: 4 (about 20–24 pancakes)

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup whole milk
1 large egg
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Butter or neutral cooking spray, for the pan
Maple syrup, fresh fruit, or powdered sugar, for serving

Instructions

Mix the dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt until evenly combined.
Mix the wet ingredients. In a separate small bowl or large measuring cup, whisk together the buttermilk, milk, egg, melted butter, and vanilla extract until smooth.
Combine. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir gently with a fork or spatula until just combined. A few lumps are fine — do not overmix or the pancakes will be tough. Let the batter rest for 5 minutes while the pan heats.
Heat the pan. Set a large nonstick skillet or griddle over medium-low heat. Add a small pat of butter or a light coat of cooking spray and let it heat until the butter foams and subsides, about 1 minute.
Cook the pancakes. Drop the batter by rounded tablespoons onto the pan, leaving about 1 inch between each pancake — you’re aiming for 2 to 2 1/2 inch rounds. Cook until bubbles form across the surface and the edges look set, about 1 to 2 minutes. Flip carefully and cook for another 1 minute, until golden on the bottom. Transfer to a warm plate and repeat with remaining batter, adding more butter to the pan as needed between batches.
Serve. Stack them high and serve immediately with maple syrup, a dusting of powdered sugar, or whatever feels right that morning.

Nutrition (per serving)

Silver Dollar Pancakes — The Small, Round Things That Carry a Whole World Inside