boilingwater | Entries tagged with breakfast

This recipe is adapted from The Vegetarian Epicure and is our go-to recipe for bread warm out of the oven. It's also very straightforward and doesn't require any particularly fancy ingredients.

Preheat the oven to 375° F.

1¼ cups: white flour (unbleached if possible)
¾ cup: cornmeal
2-3 tablespoons: sugar
5 teaspoons: baking powder
pinch: salt
1: egg
1 cup: milk
2 tablespoons: melted butter

Sift together the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl.

Beat the egg into the milk, add it and the butter to the dry ingredients (separately — you get butter globules floating in your milk if you add the butter to the milk-and-egg mixture).

Spread batter in a buttered 9-inch pie plate or oven-proof frying pan (e.g. a one-piece cast iron one) and bake 30-35 minutes, until the top starts to brown near the edges.

This bread is at its best right out of the oven with butter, but it will still be nice the next day. It is excellent with baked beans and coleslaw, or on its own for breakfast.

I've sprinkled grated cheese on it before sticking it in the oven, mixed garlic, roseamary and/or chopped onions in, and done it up plain; it's a good base for improvisation.

Cross-posts: boilingwater, my journal

Pancakes aren't always as simple as they look. The keys to doing them well include a nicely-heated pan (water droplets should bead and scuttle around, not puddle or disappear in a puff of steam) with a thin layer of something like canola oil (I use a paper towel to smooth this around and keep a thin coat). My family loves pancakes, and here is a very simple way to take PC (just-add-water) Extra Fluffy & Complete mix and turn it into something "GOORMAY".

For a hungry teen and her dad, I used 1.5c mix and 1c. water. To that, I added:

2 blocks (2oz) bittersweet chocolate, chopped very fine -- just go at it with a big chopping knife like you're slicing thin slices off a teeny loaf of chocolate. It should fall apart nicely. If not, chop-chop-chop with the blade in a rocking motion.
1t cinnamon (the family likes this, but you could use less or leave it out if you dislike it)
1t vanilla extract (to compete with the cinnamon, halve if you don't use the cinnamon and you don't want to taste it strongly)

I cooked these 3 at a time on a cast iron pan and it made 11 decent-sized pancakes (if I'd had a steadier hand and hadn't slopped some big, it would have been an even 12).

The syrup was:
1 block bittersweet chocolate chopped fine and added to...
1/2c table syrup (they eat so much of this, we can't afford to use the real stuff) heated in the microwave
...then stirred until blended. If you have to re-heat this, use a low heat. Kiddo said she could happily eat the syrup straight (or on toast or ice cream).

The results?