I have been meditating on what I need to do to improve my quality of life lately, and to all the guys out there, I have come to one very simple conclusion. Make pancakes (from scratch) for your better half on Saturday morning, and life is just better. It guarantees a good, if not great (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more) start to your weekend, and at the very least will get you some sympathy for whatever else it is that you were supposed to accomplish that weekend that fell through the cracks. I.E. What do you mean you didn't "insert your own chore/duty here", oh well those pancakes were delicious. As a side bonus, you also get to enjoy delicious fluffy pancakes to start your day.
Now, admittedly, even after much meditation and personal soul searching, I have still only solved 1/7 of a weeks happiness, but that is still better than any other blog I've ever read.
I'm going to give you a basic recipe that you can use a a jumping off point for your creativity, but I'll also put in some of my better combinations to see if they inspire you. As with many things, there are endless possibilities for pancakes, and most of them work pretty well.
BASIC RECIPE
2 Eggs
1.5 c Flour, ap is fine, but try whole wheat flour sometime, nice flavor
2.25 tsp Baking Powder
3 tsp Sugar
3/4 tsp Salt
1 c Milk
1 Vanilla Bean, scraped - I was not going to put this into a "basic recipe", but it makes all of the pancakes taste better, whether your adding crumbled bacon, or raspberries and white chocolate to your batter, so it's in there.
1)Sift together your dry ingredients
2)Break eggs into seperate bowl, and beat till frothy
3)Mix eggs with other wet ingredients, then mix into dry ingredients with a fork. Don't overmix, it doesn't need to be cake batter smooth, just mixed.
4)Cook over medium heat, in melted butter, 1 dollop at a time.
Now, on to some variations that have worked well for me
#1 The Bacon Pancake - Fu^$#*g delicious
Cook 4 strips of bacon till really crisp. Crumble into batter. Reduce milk in batter recipe by 3 oz, and replace with maple syrup
#2 Blueberry and Sour Cream
Replace 1/2 c of milk from the recipe with sour cream, and add 1 cup Fresh blueberries. I like to mash them up first, but it's up to your taste. The sour cream gives them a little tang that it, as Borat would say "NICE".
#3 Raspberry & White Chocolate
Stick with the same batter, but add 1/2 c white chocolate chips, and 1/2 c Fresh raspberries. Once I again, I mash, you don't have to.
#4 The Jack Johnson
Use whole wheat flour for these ones. Crush up 1/4 c of walnuts or pecans till very fine, and add to batter. Then mash 1 large, very ripe banana into the batter as well, and finish it off with the zest of an orange. This would be Danielle's (my wifes) favorite
#5 Mixed Berry Buttermilk
I do this one when I have just a few of a couple of different kinds of berries in the fridge, and want to use them up. Replace 1/2 of the milk in the recipe with buttermilk. Before mixing the buttermilk into the wet ingredients, pop it in the blender with a cup of mixed berries, and then fold the whole mix into the batter. Delicious flavor (tangy from the buttermilk and sweet mix from the berries), but also a good color for presentation.
#6 Pina Colada
I love this one, Danielle....not so much, but hey, to each their own right? Dice up 1 cup of pineapple very small, replace 4 oz of milk in the recipe with coconut milk, and 2 oz of the milk with sour cream. Follow the recipe the same as before. I use guava jelly on top of these instead of syrup, but do as you please.
Trust me guys, it's worth getting up 30 minutes earlier for a little marital (or non-marital, we here at stuff my sister can cook do not judge) bliss, or just a good excuse to laze around because you're both now too full of pancakes to be motivated to do anything much else.
And now, I leave you with a few amusing quotes about our topic, just because I think they're funny.
“The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves.” - WC Fields
“He who goes to bed hungry dreams of pancakes.” - Anon
No comments:
Post a Comment