Sunday Morning Pancake Improv

First Published for Honest Cooking on September 13, 2011

I love to improvise with food. As I get more and more confident cooking, I use recipes less and less.  Because of food blogging, though, I had to return to recipe mode and get back in the habit of measuring, timing, etc., so that I can share food creations with others. 

But in my normal day to day life, I much prefer to just improvise.  I have a lot of fun going to the pantry, seeing what I have, throwing together without measuring, and seeing what happens.  So on Sunday, when I decided I wanted pancakes, I thought I would do an anti-recipe post and share with you the joy of cooking improve. 

The pancakes came about because I have a box of pancake mix that I got from a friend.  Since my foodie instincts won’t let me settle for pancake mix as is, I had to shake it up.  Since it is an “add water” style mix, that gives me a lot of options of flavoring by replacing water with other liquid ingredients. Plus, I am out of the usual pancake accoutrement–syrup, honey, jam–so I get to play around with adlibbing a topping. 

When I want to invent a recipe, two images come to my head.  If I am feeling very playful, I see a slot machine.  I pull the handle and see what ingredients lines up.  However, when I am trying to do more legitimate creating, I think about the ingredients I have in a matrix, then highlight compatible ingredients, and go from there.   

Here is everything I have at my disposal . . . 

I have several fruit options to brighten the pancakes.  Then, there are spices, cocoa powder, teas, and ginger ale to flavor the batter.  Lastly, confectioners sugar, peanut butter, yogurt, and brown sugar to make some kind of syrup.   

Here is one combination centered around kiwi . . .

For these, I make the pancakes with red tea instead of water and add ground ginger and crushed up raisin bran cereal.   For the syrup, I could melt some butter in a pan with brown sugar and a little bit of reserved tea to dissolve the sugar.  Reduce, briefly toss in kiwi, and serve pancakes with warm kiwi and a dollop of Greek yogurt.

Good, but this is a tangier, summery pancake breakfast, and I feel like something naughtier than yogurt and bran flakes. 

So, let’s go naughtier. . . .

I can add cocoa powder to the pancake batter as well as a pinch of salt and cinnamon.  Then, for syrup, I can melt butter and add brown sugar, cocoa powder, peanut butter, cinnamon, and some water and cook together.  Drizzle on pancakes and dust with confectioner sugar.

Better and naughtier, but I have to get lectures and readings together for Monday’s class.  Sleeping off a sugar rush isn’t really in the schedule. 

So, let’s try a happy medium between not too sweet and maybe more playful than naughty. . .

With my mandolin, I can make apple fries and in a bowl mix together ginger ale, pancake mix, ginger, and cinnamon.  Melt butter in a pan, cook the pancakes, put pancakes on some aluminum foil, and keep warm in the oven.  In the same pan, melt more butter and add brown sugar, peanut butter, ginger ale, and the apples.  Cook till syrupy.  Then, remove pancakes from the oven, put on a plate, drizzle with peanut butter and apple syrup.  Serve with cardamom black tea. 

If you want to know what that process looks like, it looks like this . . . 

What would you have done?

IHOP Calories Take the Hop out of My Step

Normally, going to IHOP is a rather happy experience. I take either a pile of papers to grade or something to read and indulge in creamy coffee, crispy hash browns, and syrupy pancakes. I know they are not healthy, but that is kind of the point, isn’t.

Saturday when I went, a new menu item took the hop out of my IHOP. Calories.

Pancake combos--880, 980, and 1030. The biggest pancake option, the “Ultimate Bacon and Sausage Combo,” weighs in at a hefty 1260. Then, if you go with the never-ending stack, add 490 calories extra per triple stack. Does that include syrup? If not, add an extra 100 for good measure.

I’m not someone who is overly conscious about calorie counting. There is a number I like to keep my weight at to stay healthy. If I go below, great, if above. . . well, it will balance out eventually.

Yet, seeing those calories written down made it hard to get the breakfast option I wanted, thought about in the car ride over, and inspired me to come to IHOP in the first place. Suddenly I found myself scanning to find the “Simple and Fit” options. In a nutrition driven focus, I looked over the things I wanted—caramel apple pancakes, chocolate chip pancakes, hash browns— and started thinking about “Healthy Grain” and “Granola” and, the most un-IHOP of all, “eggs substitute” and “turkey bacon.” I love turkey hot dogs and sausages, but bacon is sacred. What was this calorie awareness doing to me!

So, I got the “Simple and Fit 2x2x2:” two pancakes, two pieces of turkey bacon, and scrambled egg substitute. 400 calories.

It was good, fine even. But, it was missing the fantastic bliss of indulgence, knowing you are being bad and not worrying about how bad. Sure, I still got pancakes and bacon and eggs. I had coffee and graded my papers. It was just that the delicious tawdriness and naughtiness of the experience was gone.

I know America has gotten obese. When I heard about places posting calories, I was all for it. Yes, make people think twice about super-sizing their Big Mac combo. Yet, when faced with giving up a longed for moment of sheer gastronomical excess, I’d say ignorance is bliss.

When I go to Panera’s and Einstein, I like calorie perspective. In Subway, the knowledge that I’m not breaking the calorie bank gives me pride. I can give up a tall mocha for a skinny sugar-free vanilla latte; I don’t feel like I’m missing out. I can give up my fries for a side of vegetables; I could use the vitamins. But please, let me have IHOP pancakes with a generous drizzling of oblivious contentment. In giving up as much as I do for nutrition, please leave me this.

First Published for Technorati on Sept. 13, 2011 . . . http://technorati.com/lifestyle/article/ihop-calories-take-the-hop-out/#ixzz1YQNHaP00

Kathy's Restaurant

When I can’t get mom’s pancakes, I go to a local Staunton place called Kathy’s.  Unknowing people will hit Mrs. Rowe’s, which has a little more notoriety and does feature some mean pumpkin pancakes.  But, truth be told, Kathy’s is a better choice and the one that the locals go to.  I lived in Staunton for two years before anyone introduced me to Kathy’s, and I have always regretted the two years of my life when I could have been having breakfast there and wasn’t. 

I am not able to speak with too much authority on their non-breakfast items.  My friend Caroline, who introduced me to Kathy’s, ordered the grilled cheese on multiple occasions, and it always showed up dripping and gooey with cheese.  In the only time I ordered dinner I got a hamburger, which was suitably juicy and tasty, and a slice of cake, that was straight-forward, old-fashioned, moist and frosted yellow cake goodness.

Given that Kathy’s serves breakfast all day and they do it so well, I haven’t felt the need to deter much from that.  On my less pancake driven moments, I have had the French toast, which is awesome.  I’ve also enjoyed their grits with cheese (a southern girl’s breakfast food staple) with scrambled eggs and sausage biscuits.  I like to put the grits and eggs on the sausage biscuit to form a breakfast trifecta. 

But, most importantly, they have lots of gastronomically satisfying pancakes.  There are the traditional (buttermilk and buckwheat), the fruit topped (strawberry, apple, and blueberry, on top and inside if you like), and the decadent (chocolate chip and various roll combinations).  Then, there are the pancakes that set them apart from other pancake joints, and these are the meat pancakes.   You can get your pancakes, or waffles for that matter, with ham or bacon inside.  I tried the bacon ones and they are something to write home about.  The catch is that the bacon doesn’t really integrate into the pancakes and does have the effect of two pieces of bacon hiding under pancakes. 

The holy grail of Kathy’s is one of the meat pancakes not on the menu.  These are the sausage pancakes.  In these, there are little pieces of broken up sausage in the pancakes.  These are far more successful than the bacon because you are more likely for every pieces of pancake to have a corresponding piece of sausage, and that makes me happy.  I joked at the table once that I wondered if they would do a chocolate chip and bacon pancake; but, the table laughed and told me that was gross. Now, those two flavors are part of a flavor craze.  I was just ahead of my time. 

Kathy’s advertises as the restaurant that specializes in home cooking.  Although they can’t replace my mom’s pancakes, the certainly make a good effort. 

My Mother's Pancakes

There are lots of foods that remind me of home and my mom, but the food I associate most with her are pancakes.  They were never made from Bisquick or from a mix.  That was a sin in my house.  When I was kid, there were pancakes served with cartoons.  When I came home from college, pancakes were my reward.   Even when I come home to visit as an adult, you guessed it, pancakes. 

This weekend, my brother, his girlfriend, and her brother were visiting my parents in Roanoke.  Because I missed the Saturday festivities, I went down early Sunday morning to be there for the pancake ritual.  It is a great feeling, having all of us sitting in the kitchen, catching up, and waiting for fluffy golden circles to brown on the griddle. 

I wish at times that things were as consistent and stable as pancakes.  I once taught a cinema-therapy class on the “quarter-life crisis.”  One of the points of discussion is on how your sense of family and home change in your twenties.  It is hard that moment when your immediate definition of family has to redefine and transition to account for budding independence and new homes.  New people come in and that further creates a sense of old family and new family. 

I saw this for the first time last Christmas.  Christmas has always been the four of us.  Last Christmas, we expanded to the 6 of us.  This was our first Christmas of immediate family and new family and that made for a really wonderful Christmas.  But, one day, new families may call on commitments to old family and so who knows what Christmas will look like next December. 

 I am currently in the middle of transition debate.  With my job, I’m making decisions about whether it is time to move on, a choice that would involve leaving Staunton.  My relationship is also at a transition point because my boyfriend is himself making larger life decisions.  Depending on these choices, "you and me” may replace "us."   My brother is in a transition state of being between jobs and making series steps in his relationship with a very wonderful woman.   Because of all these things and more, life is full of with uncertainty, fluctuation, and change. 

With this ongoing feeling of change in the air, pancakes with family are important reminders.  They are reminders of home, tradition, love, and being together.  Whatever changes in the family and in each of us, there will always be pancake breakfasts.  I know whenever I have kids, I will bring them home to my parents and my mom will make us pancakes.  We will sit with syrup and applesauce, watch my mom's fine-tuned griddle action, and be reminded of family.

What food reminds you most of your family?