Thursdays Are For Cooking

Buttermilk pancakes

Well, since it’s getting around that time of year, the idea that we should watch calories when we can burn them off throwing snowballs at each other from behind the walls of our snow fortress just doesn’t go over too well, especially with kids. So I’m reposting the buttermilk pancakes recipe – the old-fashioned thing where you have to make them from scratch instead of throwing the frozen stuff into the microwave – and adding that you can serve these with sausage of your choice or nice, crispy bacon. Whatever you do, make sure you’re using real maple syrup, not that stuff that looks the part but tastes like cardboard.

We had a dusting of snow here last week, but nothing – not even a light rain sprinkle – so far this week, and yet, we still want the real stuff on our plates, don’t we?

Buttermilk Pancakes

1 ¼ cups sifter all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 beaten egg

1 cup buttermilk

2 tablespoons of salad/corn oil, melted shortening or bacon fat

– Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt.

– Combine egg, buttermilk, and corn oil/bacon fat. Stir thoroughly

– Add to dry ingredients, stirring until the flour is moistened. The batter will be LUMPY and THICK.

– Cook on a hot griddle or in a skillet, but be sure to “grease” the surface first!!!

– Let one side cook, then flip ONCE ONLY!

Should yield four pancakes. I managed to get 4 plus one small one.

You can either melt the butter you’re going to put on this stack, or just put it between the pancakes in the stack.

Serve with heated (real) maple syrup and some good breakfast sausage or nice, crispy bacon, and this will keep your kids and grandkids happy and likely to ask for more. And if you’re going to make popcorn, get the loose popcorn at the store, use corn oil in the popper, and use a real popcorn popper, instead of using the mircowave stuff. There is a huge economic benefit when you compare the cost of the bag of microwave popcorn to a stovetop popper with about 1/8 cup of popcorn kernels that will fill a good-sized bowl. The stovetop popcorn costs less per use than the bagged mircowave stuff.

What’s for lunch on Christmas Day? How about some bean soup? That white bean soup recipe I posted last week should do the trick, with lots of crackers and chips and whatever else The Horde of Children will eat. I’d add some cornbread to that, too, as a filler. Then send them back outside to scrape the ice and snow off the car windshields and build a snow fort and starting lobbing snowballs at each other.

That’s the way we used to do it…. back before things went wierd on us.

Might be a good time to start a discussion on stocking up and being as self-sufficient as possible. The price of food is becoming ridiculous and we need to be thinking ahead. It’s the reason I post recipes that let you make food from scratch, instead of buying boxed stuff out of the freezer at the store. I have no idea where things are going to go. None of us do. But we can at least be as resourceful as possible. If you’re going to cook from scratch, things like stovetop biscuits are in online videos now. And – well, let’s have a good family gathering and holiday and look ahead. It has been worse than this. We aren’t in another Great Depression yet.

Category: Cooking, Economy, Holidays