Cornmeal Pancakes with Warm Cherry Sauce

The featured cookbook right now is Ancient Grains for Modern Meals, which I bought a few months ago.  I haven't made too much from this book, but I flagged a few to try over the next few weeks while it's being featured.

Today I decided on the Cornmeal Pancakes with Warm Cherry Sauce.  Why?  I wanted breakfast, and I had a bag of cherries in the fridge that were hanging on by a thread and I didn't want them to go to waste.  Plus I love things with cornmeal.  I had a great cornbread french toast once at the place we sometimes go to brunch on the weekends - I'll have to remember to recreate that sometime.  So I decided to make the cornmeal pancakes.

They really came out great.  I enjoyed them as well as the warm cherry sauce.  I halved each cherry to remove the pit (with all my kitchen gadgets, I surprisingly do not own a cherry pitter) and cooked them with honey, orange zest, and cloves to make a delicious sauce, thickened with a bit of cornstarch.  I multiplied the recipe by 1.5 because I had 3 cups of cherries instead of 2 to use.  I have about 2 cups left that we'll have to find another use for (cherry yogurt maybe?) but I'm not too worried about that.

I didn't have any buttermilk, so I used yogurt thinned out a bit in its place.  I think it worked out just fine - I didn't notice any significant difference, but I would also like to try it as written.  I would also love to try the cornmeal pancakes with blueberries.  In fact, I could see making a similar kind of sauce with blueberries... maybe with some cinnamon instead of cloves and lemon instead of orange zest... yum!

Heidi's Multigrain Pancakes

It's been a while since we've really cooked.  I find it easier to feel motivated in the beginning of the day, so I went with breakfast.  Heidi's Multigrain Pancakes from Super Natural Every Day - served with fresh local strawberries, sliced.  The leftover whole wheat, oat, and rye buttermilk batter made us a few Monday morning waffles.

Rose Bakery's Classic Pancakes (with a little twist)

The featured cookbook for March and April over at the 101 Cookbooks Library is Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery.  I was going to sit this one out... until I found a list of the recipes in the book.  Hazelnut Brownies, Ricotta Pancakes, Maple Syrup Scones, Brownie Cheesecake, Raw Muesli, Cheddar Cornmeal Scones, Quinoa and Pepper Salad, Coconut Custard Slices, Honey Granola, Courgette and Millet Risotto, Oat and Coconut Cookies... Within minutes I had ordered it from Amazon.

I was determined to make Sunday morning's breakfast from this book, but being the poor planner that I am, didn't choose a recipe until I woke up and was already hungry for breakfast.  I sprung for the Classic Pancakes, because who doesn't have the ingredients for pancakes, and I decided I would use some thinly-sliced honey-spiced peaches from last summer's peach canning frenzy to sweeten them up.

Right from the start, I decided to make some changes.  First, I used half whole wheat pastry flour.  I can't justify to myself using only all-purpose flour in any recipe when it is so easy to substitute better-for-you whole grains.  Then, as I made the batter, I discovered that I had been moving too slowly, and my melted butter had turned back into tiny little solids after I added the cold milk - I should have mixed it right away, but I was too busy making my coffee.  Oops!  I tried to get them to re-melt but eventually just decided to finish the batter as-is and hope it worked out.  I'm not sure if it worked out the way the recipe intended, but our pancakes came out fine!  The batter was super airy, like the Hazelnut Muffins and Millet Muffins - I think it may have had something to do with the butter, but maybe not.  As a result, though, the pancakes were super thick and did not spread very well.  (This worked out for us later when we went to put the last two pancakes in a rectangular container, and they actually fit pretty well because they hadn't spread to the sides of the round pan!)

While the first side of the pancakes were cooking, I thinly sliced the honey-spiced peaches and laid the slices neatly on the uncooked top side of the pancake.  When I flipped them over, they caramelized a little bit.  It added the perfect amount of sweetness for me.  Although this pancake recipe was good, it was not amazing - and the amount of butter makes it more of a special-occasion recipe.  I probably will not make it again, but only because there are so many other pancake recipes out there to try.

Wild Rice Flour Pancakes

When I made the Mixed Mushroom Soup the other day, I made wild rice to go in it instead of barley specifically so I could make this Wild Rice Flour Pancake recipe from Super Natural Cooking.  That's how I can tell I really want to make something - it lives in a dusty corner of my brain, waiting for something to remind me of it - I don't forget about it until I'm flipping through the book again.  The head notes of the mushroom recipe suggested wild rice as an alternative to barley (and I am kicking myself a little for not going with barley, after the lemon-barley stuffing from Thanksgiving, which was delicious).  So I cooked some up in my pressure cooker (by "I" of course I mean "Ken" because I am still a little bit scared of it exploding and I need supervision), and I portioned out amounts for the soup recipe and this pancake recipe.  Then I put the rest in freezer bags, 2 cups each, and popped them in the freezer for another time.  I turned the small bit of uncooked wild rice into flour to make these pancakes the next day.

These pancakes stayed with me for quite some time.  I cooked the wild rice and flour one day.  The next day I made the pancake batter and a few pancakes.  The next day Ken made the rest of the pancakes, and I ended up finishing the last ones maybe 5 days after they were cooked.  (And they were still good!  There's nothing wrong with leftovers!)  I don't typically add to things - I don't add salt, I don't add butter, etc. - but a tiny sliver of butter to melt on these was pretty crucial.

I'm not sure I'll be making these often since they turned out to be a bit of a hassle, but we'll see.  Now that I have wild rice flour already ground up and wild rice cooked in the freezer, they may make a repeat appearance in my kitchen.  If I remember, I'll probably make half a batch, because even if I had frozen a few (and my poor freezer is a bit overloaded at the moment) I think this recipe made a few too many for two people.

Pear and Buckwheat Pancakes

I have been wanting to try something with buckwheat flour since this post on 101 Cookbooks.  I bought the flour to try that recipe but haven't gotten around to it yet.  As I was thinking about what to make for dinner with the minimal ingredients I have on hand (due to not having cooked in a long while since baking is my thing right now) I got to thinking about breakfast for dinner.  I peeked in the fridge and saw the buckwheat flour.  Hmm.  I looked around a little more and saw two pears.  Hmm.  Didn't I see this somewhere?  I went to The Book (if you've read ANY of my posts in the past two months, you know which book) and there were the Pear and Buckwheat Pancakes.  What a coincidence.

This was an easy recipe.  You just grate in the pears, right over the bowl so that the juices fall in, mix wet into dry, and make as pancakes.  I, however, am bad at pancakes.  This was not always so.  Once upon a time I could flip a pancake and it would work out just the way it was supposed to.  Now, for some reason, they are always falling on top of themselves.  You would think I would have gotten better, not worse, but oh well.

The pancakes tasted good.  They were nice and moist.  The buckwheat flour has a strong taste, but the kind where you keep taking another bite trying to really figure it out.  The recipe calls for a honey butter to be poured over the pancakes, which I would love to try sometime, maybe for guests, but I felt it was too indulgent for something I was eating right at the stove.