Rothikan Pancakes

Buttermilk pancakes with an egg in the middle and fresh mint orange refresher

The night before, I swore we would all go to The Morning Glory diner down the street from my apartment. I rallied the crowd, telling them it would be a bomb diggity breakfast after a longish night. Well, the next morning I woke up with a desire to cook and save some $ bills.

The idea for breakfast was organically conceived, I swear. No pigs in blankets, and no eggs in baskets. In my defense, I didn't even know that was a 'thing' when I first made the egg in pancake deal. I don't even have a name for it. I should... like... "sun in a cloud" cakes. No. In my receipie book they are "Rothikan Pancakes", which is an utterly fantastic name that was born only after serious consideration on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Buttermilk pancakes can be fluffy and light if you do it right. The secret? Do you want to know the see-cer-ret? Make the batter a little while before you serve (like 20 minutes). Leave the batter to rest in the fridge while you do other stuff. It will puff for you like an angel. My guess is that the gluten in the flour has a chance to relax so that when you put the batter on a hot griddle/pan the carbon dioxide bubbles from the Baking Powder have a more pronounced effect on the pancake. However, only do this if there's Baking POWDER in the batter. Baking soda's ability to leven a substance declines very soon after mixing (in other words, bake right away). However, baking powder has a double rise effect that will activate when heat is applied. I'm sure Alton Brown has a more detailed explanation... delivered in perfect diction and at hyperspeed.

While the batter was sitting, I peeled the first blood orange of my life. It was a little creepy... those tiny cellular sacs filled with blood-red juice. I think I yelped. 2 1/2 of those into the blender with about 11 big ice cubes and a handful of fresh mint. I hate to honk my own horn but it was pretty refreshing.

Pancakes:

• 2 cups flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 Tbs sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 3 cups buttermilk
• extra eggs for the "sun"

1. Combine all the dry ingredients (flour, BP, sugar, salt)
2. Combine eggs and buttermilk in mixer
3. Add dry to wet ingredients gradually and stir slowly
4. Heat griddle or pan on medium high heat

If you want to put the "sun in the cloud" follow the following:

1. Pour about a half cup of batter onto a warm griddle or pan (coat with something fatty like non-stick spray or butter
2. flip
3. Immediately use a spoon to cut out a small hole from the cake
Turn the heat to medium, crack the egg in the hole
4. Let it sit for a few moments, turn the heat down to medium-low
5. Cook for a couple of minutes on this side till the bottom of the egg cooks
6. Using two spatulas (one underneath the cake and one on top of the egg), flip the cake trying to keep the egg in place while flipping. Gather your wits, and do it quickly. I should have taken a picture of this for demonstration purposes.
7. Let it cook on this side for a few more minutes. Keep the heat low so you don't burn the cake while you're waiting for the egg to cook. Tip: I think it's way better if you keep the yoke runny.





Here's one last hint: if you're making lots of cakes, you might need to rinse the pan down inbetween say your 4th and 5th cakes. The pan usually gets too hot over time, oil burns and smokes, leftover pancake jiblets get burned, etc, etc. This makes the new cakes burn without fail, booooo. So if you 'wash' the pan occasionally, it solves this problem.

Sun in the cloud pancakes with iced mint blood orange juice on the side. That's a damned mouthful. Literally. Rothikan Cakes anyone?

Whole Hippy Pancakes (with peach rosemary sauce)

I've come to the conclusion that at every age in your life, you need the occasional weekend hot stack. When you're a kid and you go to IHOP, a pile of chocolate chip mickey mouse pancakes cures any case of the Sunday morning blues (derived from lack of cartoons and hours in church.) When you're a teenager, you're hungry all the time so... enough said. When you're in college, a healthy dose of buttermilk can take the edge off a hangover (usually), and bring enough people to the table to piece together last nights' adventures. After that, well, they're just caloric monsters for your ailing metabolism, but they make you forget about work so whatever. And I'll bet if you're 80 and eating pancakes, it'll probably be at a restaurant with your lifetime partner. And going out to breakfast may very well be the event of your day.... so here's to pancakes!

I use to make pancakes all the time, but hadn't in a while. So without further rambling, I give you Whole Hippy Pancakes with Rosemary Peach Sauce. They were modified from the original king of dank pancakes, the Harvest Grain and Nut IHOP imitation cake. Otherwise known as 'the heaviest pancake ever'.

I took out the nuts, kept the grain (whole wheat flour and oats), added some peach sauce, fresh whipped cream, and pure maple syrup. Not particularly unusual suspects, I'll admit. Topped it with slices of fresh peach, and washed it down with creamy local chocolate milk. Soapbox sentence: I bought the peaches, heavy cream, and milk from a farm market down the street, and they were all locally made. The egg came from my hens. Without the usual rant, the bottom line is that everything had a lot of flavor, and I supported my neighbor.

This is what the hen does when it's hot sometimes. Why it sits on the stone, I'll never understand. Anyway, it's an ingredient maker:

If you want to bring Whole Hippy Pancakes to your weekend breakfast table, here's how:

Order of Business #1: The Flapjacks

• 3/4 c. rolled oats
• 3/4 c wheat flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 c buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 1/4 c sugar (I used brown)

1. Grind oats in blender/processor until fine
2. Combine wet ingredients, mix well
   
3. Combine dry ingredients in different bowl
4. Combine wet and dry and stir
5. Use a healthy of dose of non-stick something to cover griddle or pan, because I omitted the oil from the recipe for a lighter cake.
6. Just in case you're a bad flapjack flipper: put the batter on the griddle, wait until the edges look firm and the middle isn't so wet looking, flip let sit for a minute or so, remove. Be careful to try and drain any oil that's browned, because it will burn subsequent pancakes.

OoB #2: Peach sauce

• two peaches
• rosemary
• honey

1. puree a peach and a half
2. add a girthy drizzle of honey
3. a heavy pinch of rosemary (if you can grind it, I think that would work better)
4. heat in a saucepan on medium low stirring occasionally
5. mixture should congeal a little bit
6. keep warm until pancakes are ready

OoB #3: Whip Your Own Cream

1. Pour a cup of heavy cream into an electric mixer
2. Whip on high until cream starts forming
3. Stop the mixer, sprinkle on a light layer of confectioners sugar
4. Continue whipping on high until cream gets stiff... you know, whipped.

Mix and match all your sides, or eat it plain, or drown it in maple syrup even if there's only a little bit left and everyone else still needs some.... it's fine, you can't help it sometimes.

P.S. Have you ever noticed how ridiculously small the 'handle' is on the maple syrup bottle? It's just silly.

Blueberries Are Okay.

I'm not one much for blueberries. I'm not one much for berries in general. Maybe it's the taste, maybe it's the texture, or the lack of juiciness. But really I think it's the fact that I have to eat 25 of them to get one serving of fruit. So what would ever make me want to bike to the orchard to pick these tiny fruits myself? The answer is Solebury Orchard's Apple Cider Ice. Imagine the most delicious apple cider you've ever tasted made into a slushie on a hot day. You'd be picking blueberries too.

So anyway, I have to admit that the fresh blueberries weren't all that bad, and they were exceptionally gorgeous. Again, the experience of seeing your fruit on a tree and then eating that fruit is about one-zillion times better than freezing your cutuckus off in the frozen food isle of a supermarket. I know I rant all the time about this, and eventually I will stop, but the more I visit supermarkets, the more I get really creeped out. You step into this giant refrigerator, and are greeted with perky flowers and a starbucks kiosk. Then you peruse isle after isle of food... from all over the world! The bright mounds of produce gleam like still life photos from the MOMA, and there's a looping thunderstorm in the leafy greens shelf.

I mean, I still buy the occasional avocado from Acme. But I came from work to find this fatty green treasure, whereas it came from CALIFORNIA. (And we grumble about the person who saunters in front of our car as we're hunting for parking spots!)

Anyway... blueberries, blueberries. Look how precious and perfect they are right off the branch!

Picking them was a pretty good time. Although I will say I felt strangely like a primate as I squatted and plucked ripe nerdles of fruit off a branch with my thumb and forefinger.

The next day, my berry pickin partner and I made some pretty dank blueberry crepes. Although I completely misunderstood how a crepe-maker is supposed to be used, they still turned out pretty well. Check it out:

CREPE BATTER:

3/4 cup all purpose flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 egg and 1 egg yolk

2/3 cup milk mixed with 2/3 cup water

3 tbs unsalted butter melted and cooled

BLUEBERRY FILLING:

three or four handfuls of fresh blueberries

4 Tbs of water

2 Tbs of packed brown sugar

1 Tbs of honey

Hand squeezed juice of half a small lemon

• Put all the blueberry filling stuff into a small saucepan and bring to a boil
• Turn down the heat and stir a few times
• Let this simmer until the blueberries break apart and turn into mush
• Stir occasionally as this happens to ensure it doesn't burn
• Let the water burn off the mixture and heat until it thickens slightly
• Keep warm until ready

For the CREPES:

• Throw the flour, salt, eggs, milk/water mix, and butter into a mixer or food processor
• Blend until smooth (pretty awesomely simple huh. I think you could do this with a hnad mixer on high if you don't have either of the other gadgets.)

Putting it together. There are a few different ways I've actually cooked crepes. I have used just a pan, and I have used a crepe maker. A crepe maker is easier, of course.

PAN:

• Pan on medium heat
• Brush with butter
• Pour a thin layer of batter into pan. You might not be able to pour only from the middle, you will probably have to pour in a spiral to get a large, thin, layer
• Cook until the top gets shiny and bubbles harden
• Slide out of pan onto plate

CREPE MAKER (the right way):

• Pour batter into provided dish
• Heat griddle until light goes off
• Invert the griddle into crepe batter dish to 'dunk' the face of the griddle in the batter
• Hold for a second
• Flip over and cook till the light goes out
• Remove with a rubber spatula when the crepe appears shiny by inverting over a dish

Crepes are great just with a little powdered sugar, with fruit, and cheese but IMO are best with all three. I'm not going to lie, I got impatient to eat and didn't bother to sift my confectioners' sugar. So unrefined, I know. I melted a little chocolate and drizzled it ontop as well. Lastly I experimented with white cheddar cheese in the blueberry filling and I've got to admit it was my favorite combination.

Grumpy Granola

It's 8:25am and I'm disgruntled. My nose is stuffed, my legs are achy, my head kinda hurts, I'm thirsty, and the rooster woke me up at 7am... along with the dumpster trucks that roar back and forth to the nearby quarry. Ugh.

It sounds like a hangover. But the sad part is that it's not.

The crisp morning air wasn't enough to snuff out my melodramatic woes. So I'm making granola. As I sit the air is filling with a sweet almond scent of golden goodness. ugh.

I'm hoping that this batch will come out particularly well. Mostly, because I want to write about it. And I'm mostly writing about it because I'm sitting here, the unhappy clam that I am, waiting to turn the granola every 10 minutes.

So this is what you need:

• 3 cups rolled oats
• a glob of molasses (~1.5 tbs)
• small palmful of brown sugar
• a capful of canola oil
• 2 tbs of some sort of nut butter (I used sunnutbutter- made from sunflower seeds)
• a sizable mound of honey (~1/3 cup)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp almond extract
• a pinch or two of salt

Okay then, you have all your goods:

• mix together molasses and brown sugar with a fork until well combined
• add oil, nut butter, honey, extracts, and salt
• combine well
• examine your black substance and realize it resembles a mini BP oil spill, reflect on thisfor a moment, thank god you're not a sea turtle or sperm whale, and move on
• Mix well into rolled oats. This will take a few minutes of stirring and chopping with some sort of big spoon. You'll think it's too dry, but it's not... just keep mixing until everything is well coated.
• Spread out onto a big cookie sheet and bake at 350 for 25 minutes
• Every 10 minutes, take the sheet out to rake the edges in to the middle, and redistribute the granola around the tray.
• Voila! You have vanilla almond granola. Stir in any dried fruit you'd like. I stirred in black currents. Cherries or golden raisins would work really well too.

At 25 minutes I taste-tested and it had an amazing flavor. But I wanted it a teensy bit more crunchy. I put it back in the oven. This was a bad idea. I ended up baking mine for 31 minutes (instead of 25 like you should), and now it's too toasted. Adding to my grumpiness.... ugh.