Ditch that Bisquick

When I was a kid Saturday mornings meant cartoons for the kids, newspapers for the adults, and breakfast together as a family.  Now that I'm all grwon-up and married, Saturdays mean getting up early to let the chickens out, have breakfast with my hubbie, and enjoy a leisurely reading of the paper with a cat on my lap. 

Or is that have breakfast with the cats and read the paper with my hubbie in my lap?

Pancakes are so riduculously easy that I don't know why people make them from mixes.  I used to make the Alton Brown mix but never remembered to print out the mix directions, so it took us more time to look them up than it would to just make pancakes from scratch.

I've had this cookbook for nearly 10 years and had never made these multigrain pancakes.  The "multigrain" aspect always turned me off because they sounded heavy and dense.  But for some reason I decided to make them today.

I'm so glad I did.  G-man said to me, "wow, these are really fluffy".  And he didn't even know that they were different.

Since you can see the recipe above, I won't re-type it.  Basic instructions are to mix the dry ingredients in 1 bowl, mix the wet ingredients in another, then combine right before making.  I use a small soup ladle to make similarly-sized pancakes, adding blueberries to the uncooked side before flipping.

A note on this recipe: it will seem very thin.  I nearly added extra flour to it but stopped myself.  Turns out it didn't need the extra flour after all.

You don't want to make the batter then let it sit longer than a few minutes because you'll activate the baking powder too soon, resulting in flat flapjacks.

G-man slept really late today because we were out WAAAAY past our bedtimes visiting friends, playing dominos, drinking wine, and having mad fits of giggles last night.  OK, the drinking wine and giggling was just me but OMG did I have fun.

This morning I got the pancakes ready to the point right before you mix the wet & dry ingredients and just left it on the counter until he stumbled into the kitchen.  You could prep the recipe the night before if you were so inclined but it does whip together very quickly.

Personally, I think that pancakes are naked without blueberries.  I don't think I'd even had blueberry-less pancakes until college, when I looked at the pale imitations of breakfast with confusion: where were the berries?

Now we're talkin'.

I've decided this is my new go-to pancake recipe.  Nearly 2 hours after having these I still feel sated, not like when I have pancakes made with all-purpose flour and feel hollow an hour later.  Try them: you'll like them!