Adventures in cooking: Chinese Scallion/Green Onion Pancakes - Going back to the roots and a diferent kind of pancake stack

I don't often make "traditional Chinese" food, most because well..I never learned it.  As a child, I would always spend hours watching my mom make all types of food - garlic sauteed vegetables (which is about a daily occurrence in my house), steamed fish, stuffed tofu, dumplings, you name it, my mom would make it.  However, I never really had the desire to learn it on my own, and the most I ever did was help her chop vegetables.  Chinese food is also really labor intensive, even though it's not always actually that difficult.  All dishes have some food that needs to be chopped or sliced or julienned, and cutting the meat was always an exhausting job because most Chinese dishes have meat with the bone attached. I am eternally grateful for work that my mom puts in every single night to prepare multiple dishes, prepping for dinner about three hours in advance every day, and now when I go home and visit, I am sure to help out however I can...also with the added benefit that I can start learning how some of my favorite foods are made. 

I have to say, I haven't made toooo much progress on learning how to make some of my favorite dishes, but I'm starting to get a better idea just from watching how things are done. Now that I almost never go home, I'm having a desire to learn more about Taiwanese culture and to go back to some of the foods I ate growing up.  I'm doing the best I can with some recipes that I'm finding on my own, supplemented with memories of how things were done with my mom, but I definitely have some work to do.

So on to the food.  I needed to make something traditionally Chinese/Taiwanese (yes, they are different, but they also share many foods) for an end of semester party for the students I teach English to.  I was absolutely stumped for days, as I wanted something that wouldn't be too difficult to make, would be universally liked, and would be unique enough to not be a standard menu item at a typical Chinese restaurant.  It wasn't until yesterday that I had the idea to make scallion pancakes.

I should also note that I tried to make a gluten-free version......and failed.  I'm going to try it again, changing up what I did next time, but the results were pretty hilarious.  The taste was there, even if the texture was completely off.  See the end of this post for some real failure :p