Staff of Life
By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / December 12, 2008
I have been cooking pancakes a lot lately. Really, you need them every meal if you are avoiding wheat flour bread from the Evil Empire. Last Sunday night, these buckwheat pancakes were a great hit, served to arriving guests on a plate I kept refilling with fresh pancakes. I could make about eight 4 or 5 inch pancakes at a time in a lovely very heavy skillet. Accompanied by shredded roast chicken in a beautiful bowl, chopped green onions and with both Hoisan and salsa on the side, arriving guests ate the pancakes almost as soon as they hit the platter. No washing necessary afterwards as they had also eaten their plates! Buckwheat pancakes are thin and flexible and delicious, like corn tortillas used to be. This of course was before Nixon re-engineered the farm program to maximize bushels, accidentally minimizing taste, destroying the protective lands along the rivers, and totally eliminating nutrients from half the food supply.
Remember when Mexican restaurants gave out corn tortillas instead of chips?? Back then, tortillas were delicious They were still delicious in Mexico for awhile after that, before we also drove their farmers and their diverse corn crops off the land as they could no more compete with the billions of dollars in federal subsidies our industrial farmers receive annually, anymore than our own farmers could.
So I am cooking with the ancient grains that have proven their worth over time. Not the recently developed ones whose only achievement is large numbers of bushels per acre, combined with an almost total lack of any benefit to human consumption, beyond calories. And in this country, even the poor do not need calories.
Remember, an excellent buffet needs a fresh hot bread. The crowning touch.
Buckwheat Pancakes
• 2 cup buttermilk
• 2 eggs
• 6 tablespoons butter, melted
• 2 teaspoons maple syrup
• 3/4 cup sorghum flour
• 3/4 cup buckwheat flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
Directions
1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, eggs, syrup and melted butter.
2. In another bowl, mix together sorghum flour, buckwheat flour, salt and baking soda. Pour the egg mixture into the dry ingredients, holding back a few dry tablespoons to make sure you get a thin batter as flours vary in absorption.
3. Stir until the two mixtures are just incorporated. Add a little more flour mixture if it needs it.
4. Heat a griddle or large frying pan to sizzling, and place 1 tablespoon of butter, margarine or oil into it. Let the butter melt before spooning the batter into the frying pan, form 4 inch pancakes out of the batter. Once bubbles form on the top of the pancakes, flip them over, and cook them on the other side for about 3 minutes. Continue with this process until all of the batter has been made into pancakes.
5. Then sit down and have a lovely meal.
I love all kinds of pancakes; these sound super good.
One thing I love to do is to remember that the term does mean ‘pan cake’, so I often will make up my favorite ‘sweet’ cake (rather than savory), and do them in the skillet. My husband loves the double chocolate cake served with sour cream on top; cinnamon sprinkled on top – and some shaved chocolate.
I also learned I could take my 8 inch cake pans; make up my normal buttermilk pancake mix; use a mixture of olive oil and melted butter to really oil the pan (bottom and sides), and then fill the pan only as high as you’d ladle out the pancake on your griddle. You bake it at 350 until it’s done; in a good-sized oven you can get 6 pans on one rack (I prefer not to use two racks and try to bake too many at a time), and that way you can do your stove-top ‘fixings’ while the ‘cakes’ are inside.
I like to do this when feeding a ‘group’, because I’m making 6 at a time; don’t have a griddle or skillet that big, and they are yummy and stay warm longer.
I also love the tortillas, and my daughter-in-law who came from Mexico taught me how to cut them into triangles (like cutting up a pie); then to fry them in 2 parts butter/1 part olive oil; drain, and shake them up in a bag with powered sugar and cinnamon (or granulated for a slight change; or even brown sugar and cinnamon for an even different result).
It’s sort of like the way my mom used to take left-over pie dough; roll it out thing – butter it, put on cinnamon and sugar, then roll up ‘jelly-roll’ style. Once it was done, she cut it into little 1/2 inch ‘bite-sized’ biscuits. Then we’d put a little honey on top and enjoy.
What’s great about pancakes is they are so versatile and let you use up ‘left-overs’ in creative ways.
I love to make up buckwheat batter and corn-bread batter; mix them together, and before you put them on the griddle, grab up some corn that you might have left over; any white-meat chicken – dice the chicken up and stir the corn, chicken, and a bit of pimento into the batter.
Mix equal parts orange marmalade, honey, and maple syrup – warm, and put on the top of those ‘main meal’ cakes.
Another good one is using left-over ham; finely diced green peppers, and whatever left-over fresh pineapple you have – finely diced, and this makes a great ‘main meal’ too. Serve that with fresh home-made applesauce that you make up ‘chunk-style’ – super good.
Being from a German household, German potato pancakes are still my favorite, and we serve those with sour cream and apple sauce as well.
Wow, typing this had made me hungry; wish I was home so I could hit the kitchen, but so glad you made this a feature today because I’ve jotted it down for when we get home.
I like this Friday Foodie Fun Day Richard has started.