Celebrate a Wedding with some Pancakes

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“‘Oh, my! I wisht – I wisht we had a cake.  I wisht we had – a cake or somepin.’ ‘I’ll set some coffee on an’ make up some pancakes,'” Ma said.  ‘We got sirup’ ‘Oh, my!’ Mrs. Wainright said.  ‘ Why – well.  Look, I’ll bring some sugar.  We’ll put sugar in them pancakes.'” From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The family has gotten a little flush from a few weeks’ worth of good cotton picking, they are living in an old boxcar which they share with another family and they are about to celebrate a wedding – with pancakes because that’s the best they can pull together.  It’s incredible how ready they are to celebrate just anything and share what little they have in order to make the occasion as special as they can.

Pancakes (A Half Recipe)

1 cup flour

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp sugar

1 cup milk

2 tbsp melted butter

1 egg

Mix everything together in a bowl and if you forgot the egg the first time, as I did, you can mix it in after.  You don’t want to overmix your batter though, there should be small lumps, they’re delicious.  Heat a skillet over medium heat and spread some cooking oil around it (or butter, as you choose, or lard, if you think you can stand it).  When the pan is evenly heated, start pouring out your pancake batter.  I sometimes tend toward the whimsical myself and so I made my pancakes look like a bear and a dinosaur (I don’t know why the dinosaur head looks like the head of the Alien in the Ridley Scott movies – it was a fluke).  The trick to making good pancakes is not to let them burn but also not to try and flip them too soon.  You want to wait until a good number of bubbles have started to appear on the top, and then you want to test your pancake’s flippability by checking whether you can get the spatula under it easily, if it sticks at all, it’s not ready to be flipped. Serve hot with “sirop” and butter, if you’re feeling decadent, and enjoy!

I prefer real maple syrup.  As I’ve said before, there are certain things that you just can’t skimp on and we grew up with real maple syrup as a staple in our home.  Real maple syrup aside, this was a super cheap meal, since everything was in my kitchen already.  I had two critter shaped cakes for dinner and have enough batter leftover to make some for breakfast tomorrow.

There are an infinite number of ways you could jazz this up, and that’s not including pancake shape competitions, so let your imagination run wild.  I thought of adding crumbled bacon (or candied and crumbled bacon?) right to my batter, but the bacon was going to take too long to defrost and I was hungry.

Bacon, Biscuits, and Gravy and Ma Gets Her Hands Dirty

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“She moved back to the stove and dumped the big pan of bulbous biscuits on two tin plates. She shook flour into the deep grease to make gravy, and her hand was white with flour. For a moment Tom watched her, and then he went to the door.”  From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I hadn’t known that you could make gravy out of the grease left after cooking bacon. I guess because America is so fat conscious, (what’s that you said, McDonald’s?  The Quarter-Pounder is on sale?) we view this as being a thoroughly unhealthy meal, but it sure did taste good.  Tom Joad agreed as he wolfed down his first home cooked meal in 4 years.

Biscuits and Bacon Gravy

Drop Biscuits baked according to your favorite recipe (I always consult The Joy of Cooking for this one)

1/4 lb of bacon 

About 1 tbsp of flour

About 2 cups of liquid (milk, or water, or a combination of the two)

Salt and Pepper to taste

Cook the bacon and remove to drain on a paper towel.  While the grease is still hot, whisk in the flour and cook for a few minutes, you are basically making a bacon grease roux.  Slowly whisk in your liquids and salt and pepper and cook until you achieve the desired gravy thickness.  This gravy will be lumpy anyway, so I crumbled up some bacon to add a little flavor and crunch. Split your biscuits in half and ladle your gravy over them.  Add some bacon to the plate and you have your own tasty little heart attack waiting to happen.  

I only made a quarter of my bacon, because I live alone.  If you made the whole pound, you’d want to increase the flour and liquid accordingly.

A few notes about saving money.  There are all kinds of generic brand foods that are just as tasty as the name brands.  There are also some foods you just cannot skimp on.  I have learned that coffee is one and boxed macaroni and cheese is another (Annie’s is good, but Kraft is “the cheesiest.”)  I probably had learned and forgotten that bacon is also something you never want to skimp on.  I fell for the tricky “Sale $3.99” sign this time and regretted it as soon as I opened my package and saw that my “side meat” was almost entirely side fat.  Lesson (re)learned.  You can save a lot of money buying generic foods and cooking with bacon grease instead of throwing it out, but don’t torture yourself.  Spend that extra dollar and get the good bacon.