Sunday, December 13, 2009

Pumpkin Pancakes and Whole Wheat Pancakes

Nutmeg requested this recipe and I forgot to give it to her. So now I will share it with you all. It's one of my favorites. They're so tasty that they really don't need much adorning. My favorite way to have them is just with apple butter. My husband, we'll call him Basil, is a pancake "purist" and likes it with maple syrup. Nutmeg found they were also good with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar. I found this on Recipezaar and slightly modified it.

Pumpkin Pancakes

1 cup flour (you can do all-purpose, half whole wheat half all purpose, or all whole wheat)
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tbsp pumpkin pie spice (I don't actually have this so I make about half of this amount cinnamon and the rest I make up with whatever pumpkiny spices I have such as nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and ginger. They all give great flavor.)
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
1 cup buttermilk (I almost never have this because I would never go through it, so I put 1 tbsp of lemon juice in a measuring cup and then fill it up to a cup with low fat or skim milk.)
1/2 cup canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
2 eggs
1/4 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
nonstick cooking spray

1. Whisk together your dry ingredients (first 5) in a bowl and set aside.
2. Whisk together wet ingredients (next 6, yes, in baking sugar is considered a "wet" ingredient).
3. Make a well in dry ingredients and pour in wet ingredients. Mix as little as possible, just until everything is wet. It will still be lumpy and that is OK! Just make sure you don't over mix it because then it will get tough.
4.  Using a 1/3 cup measuring cup, scoop batter and drop on griddle. Do not scrape out measuring cup for perfectly portioned, easy-to-flip pancakes. Cook on a griddle, if you have one, at about 250°F, using the nonstick spray as needed. Flip when pancakes are bubbly on top and puffy and dry around the edges. Only flip once!

Whole Wheat Pancakes

I've searched and searched for a good whole wheat pancake recipe that doesn't taste like warm whole wheat flour. I finally found one hiding in my handy-dandy Betty Crocker cookbook. Whodathunk? I adapted the instructions though so I'll go ahead and post it here. I think I improved on it. If you follow their instructions just to beat everything in after you've whipped up the egg, it's probably going to come out tough and then you'll run into the problem of it tasting like sawdust. Anyway, here's my adaptation of these delicious and filling pancakes:

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 large egg
3/4 cup milk (a little more for thinner pancakes, which I like so I added a couple tbsp more)
1 tbsp packed brown sugar
2 tbsp vegetable or canola oil
butter or nonstick spray

1. Whisk dry (first 3) ingredients together in one bowl, set aside.
2. Beat egg in another bowl. Add milk, sugar, and oil, mixing well.
3. Make a well in dry ingredients and pour in wet ingredients. Mix as little as possible, just until everything is wet. It will still be lumpy and that is OK! Just make sure you don't over mix it because then it will get tough. (I repeated these VERY IMPORTANT instructions in case you missed them the first time.)
4. Using a 1/3 cup measuring cup, scoop batter and drop on griddle. Do not scrape out measuring cup for perfectly portioned, easy-to-flip pancakes. Cook on a griddle, if you have one, at about 250°F, using the nonstick spray or butter as needed. Flip when pancakes are bubbly on top and puffy and dry around the edges. Only flip once! (Hey, I repeated this one too. This time because I'm lazy.)

Happy breakfast!
Rosemary

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Sweet Potatoes: From moderate failure to triumphant success

So I, like most everyone, decided to make a sweet potato dish for my thanksgiving dinner last week. And, trying to be clever and make stuff up ahead of time, decided to peel, slice, coat in olive oil, and roast the sweet potatoes on Wednesday, toss it together into a casserole that night, and basically just have to heat it up on Thursday. Which I did. After slicing and roasting them for an hour or so, I tossed in some brown sugar and let them sit until I got around to them again. At which point, I added a bit of orange juice and nutmeg and tossed the potatoes again. I then made a topping with chopped walnuts, a bit of flour, some cinnamon and nutmeg, and poured some of the orange juice/olive oil liquid from the potatoes in with it, and then sprinkled all that on in a layer over the sweet potatoes. Put it in the oven with the turkey when there was about an hour or so left before lunch and then was served with dinner. Tasted great...except...the consistency of most of the sweet potatoes was a bit chewier than I would like. Only a few were actually soft, and I have no real words to describe how off they were. Everyone took a few polite bites, but they were not exactly the star of the meal.

Faced with a nearly full pan of sweet potato "casserole" I decided to get inventive with my leftovers. I tossed the potatoes (it was generally easy to separate out the nuts) into a food processor and pureed them as best I could. Then I used it to make sweet potato bread. I generally followed the recipe for pumpkin bread in the Betty Crocker cookbook, leaving out most of the spices (since the potatoes were already flavored), and trying to balance out the liquid to flour ratio. One loaf disappeared that very night and the other one made it to work but was gone by the end of the day. So I'd say that whether or not your sweet potatoes turn out right, it's pretty easy to turn your sweet potato casserole into sweet potato bread - nuts and all.

Thyme