Golden Rings of Golden Deliciousness

This morning I had a real pancake craving. When I was a kid, my mom always made extra-special Sunday breakfasts. Typically these were pancakes, eggs (scrambled), and bacon or sausage, washed down by a big glass of whole-fat milk. Of course, margarine and syrup were liberally applied to everything. Ahhh, those were the days, when ‘cholesterol’ was just a word (and not one I had ever heard of)!

Nowadays, I wouldn’t eat a breakfast like this even once a week (it’s mostly oatmeal for me). But once in a while, only pancakes will do. And today was such a day. Pancake recipes can be found in just about any cookbook, and they are easy and delicious.

For a staple-shopper such as myself, I’m certain to have the ingredients on hand. Lets take a look at a pancake recipe from one of my old stand-bys, Betty Crocker’s Cookbook (I have the 2001Ninth Edition). The basic recipe calls for 1 large egg, 1 cup all-purpose flour, 3/4 cup milk, 1 TBS sugar, 2 TBS vegetable oil, 3 tsps baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt, butter or margarine. These are all things I have; in fact, I think most people would probably have these things, too, even if they are not staple-shoppers.

So, right away I can see it will be very easy to satisfy my pancake craving, even if I don’t have a box of Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix sitting in my pantry. As it happens, however, I do happen to have pancake mix sitting in my pantry. It was part of a Christmas gift-pack that my in-laws sent us. Here it is June 1st, and I still haven’t gotten around to using it yet. (I really haven’t eaten pancakes in long time).

One of the other reasons I haven’t used it is because this gift-pack also came with vacuum-packed Canadian-bacon. My husband ate this right away (I don’t eat bacon, I like pigs too much) and became violently ill. This naturally made us reluctant to try the rest of the package’s offerings. But I guess that with the passage of time the sorrow of this unfortunate episode has dimmed somewhat. Plus, I am way too cheap to throw away a (probably) perfectly good package of pancake mix.

So even considering the age of the mix (6 months old) and the dangerous Canadian-bacon that tried to kill my husband, I still thought I’d give it a try today. I figured, what the heck, it was a preservative-laden powder (it really was, I checked out the ingredients), so it was no doubt safe for human consumption, even after six months of sitting in my pantry.

Per the instructions, I added 2 eggs, 2 cups of milk, and 2 TBS melted butter to the powder. I cooked them up in my frying pan.

I used to pretty good at flipping pancakes, but since I haven’t done it in a while I’m a little rusty. But still they were pretty round! I guess I just need a little practice. Also, I may have cooked them a tad too long, but they didn’t taste at all over-cooked.

And guess what, they were pretty good! Not the best I’ve ever eaten, but certainly good enough to satisfy my pancake craving. This made about 12 large- and medium-sized pancakes and four little pancakes. There were seven leftover, which I will freeze. I’ll just pop them in the toaster for future delicious breakfasts.

Here is a portrait of a delicious, Frugal breakfast: homemade, sorta-from-scratch pancakes, reconstituted dry milk in a gimmee-cup from a local burger joint, with a many times washed and re-used cloth napkin (so is the straw, I wash them in my dishwasher). Hamletta looks on in approval, because this is a bacon-free meal. Oh, by the way, the syrup was also from that Christmas gift package. It has been sitting in my fridge, unopened, for the last six months. We had maple and blueberry flavor (but it is very easy to make your own, if so inclined).

Well, it is now more than eight hours after eating this meal, and I feel just fine (other than the heavy, sleepy feeling that eating pancakes always gives me). So, I took a little risk, and it paid off handsomely!

Update: I actually wrote this post almost three weeks ago (on a Sunday) and haven’t gotten around to publishing it until now. In all that time those pancakes never made me sick, hooray. Also, I did freeze the leftover pancakes in 2-pancake portions. A few days after I wrote this I thought it would be a yummy idea to have pancakes for lunch. I took 2 frozen pancakes out of the freezer and popped them in my toaster. My toaster has a ‘defrost’ function, so I tried that. It didn’t work very well - the outside was sorta thawed out, but the middle was still frozen. An additional twenty seconds in the microwave did the trick. I think an even better idea (if you think of it) would be to put the frozen pancakes in the fridge to thaw out the day before you want to eat them (then pop them in the toaster).