Our Amish neighbors and friends came to visit the other day and gave us an excellent idea for a summer dinner.

We refused to bow to the brutal heat and headed into the kitchen to make a favorite Amish summer dish, a Squash Pancake, inspired by but different from the Potato Pancake I used to eat at my grandmother’s house.

Maria and I jumped at the idea, all of the ingredients except salt and pepper are now grown on the farm – squash and green onions.

Maria did the mixing, I did the grating and simmering on an iron stove pan. We grated four squash into small strips and then used a tofu presser to drain the water out of them.

We added chopped scallions from our garden, two eggs from the roost, some seasoning, salt and pepper, and two teaspoons of corn meal (not grown here) to bind the squash strips together.

I molded them into pancakes, cooked them on a hot iron pan for four minutes on each side, and that was that.

They were every bit as delicious as the Millers told us they would be, and I will thank them for the recipe Monday when I bring my weekly floral bouquet up to their house.

It was way too hot to be cooking in a kitchen on a hot stove, but we love cooking together, and I thought the pancakes were a great success. We will work on some flavoring and some way of binding them more closely together. I’d like them to be a bit tighter.

But the recipe worked, and the pancakes were great. Sorry, Grandma.