Comunidad Health Foods

Tuesdays were special days in my house. Growing up, one of my grandmothers lived with us, and she would always be awake when I crawled out of bed at the crack of dawn. The rest of the house was fairly quiet at 6:30am, but she would always be downstairs at the kitchen table, sitting peacefully. Somehow, some way, Tuesdays came to be slightly different. Instead of eggs or Fruit Loops or the occasional french toast, on Tuesdays, there were pancakes. For the first 18 years of my life, virtually without fail, I ate pancakes for breakfast on Tuesday. They were always Aunt Jemima, though they came in various shapes and sizes - sometimes they were shaped like Mickey Mouse heads, other times they were dinosaurs, and sometimes they were just plain circles. They always had a little butter smeared over them and a near half-gallon of Aunt Jemima Syrup poured on top. They swam in store bought sweetness, and Tuesdays were the best days of the week.

Since I started college, Pancake Tuesdays have started to become antiquated, a thing of my past that only now and then makes a reappearance. It wasn't a conscious decision. I didn't stop liking pancakes or even stop eating them as I delved further into nutrition. When I was living in the dorms, I ate breakfast in my room, meaning I ate breakfast bars, fruit, yogurt, or cereal. Sometimes I would heat up some oatmeal in my microwave. I never went to the dining hall, and by the time I got my own place last year I was so out of the habit of taking the time in the morning to prepare and cook the batter (not that it takes a long time), it just didn't happen. 

I miss Pancake Tuesdays. I might even start them back up again (though with an 8am summer class and another 8am Tuesday/Thursday class in the fall, they may need to be lunch or dinner pancakes). But until I make that leap back into my childhood traditions, I can at least share with you a recipe for pancakes on a Tuesday, even if I made them and enjoyed them on a Wednesday night for dinner before I came home for the summer.

These are not your average pancakes - they are worlds away from the Aunt Jemima mix. You see, these are bread pudding pancakes. Yes, as in you use stale bread to make these bad boys, which makes them just about the most filling comfort-food pancakes you could possibly think up. These are the monster trucks of the pancake world, but only in the best of ways, because they are also fantastically delicious. My only complaint, which is hardly a complaint at all, is that halved I should've gotten about 3-4 pancakes, and instead I got 5 absolutely enormous ones that were so thick the centers didn't fully cook. I should have made them into smaller circles and then exercised some self restraint by saving some for later. I mean, two of these suckers could probably fill you up, and I proudly packed away all 5. And then couldn't think about food for the next few hours. The recipe listed below is the halved recipe, adjusted to serve 2 people.

I made some changes to the original, including sneaking just a teensy bit of my banana liquor into the batter (shh!), and I will definitely keep this recipe in mind the next time I have some old bread that needs some creative attention. The best thing about these pancakes is that although they are wonderful with more traditional sweet accompaniments (I personally layered them with warm cinnamon applesauce), I can imagine them being irresistible with savory additions - vegetables, pesto, cheese. Because they're heftier than a regular pancake, they can take the intensity. They can support these fuller, savory ingredients. Just, you know, leave out the banana liquor if you're going this route.

Serve with fruit compotes, syrup, roasted vegetables - or just eat them as they are, which is equally tasty!

I love breakfast food. I could (and often do) find myself craving something designated "for breakfast" throughout the entire day. I like to think that it's a twisted form of the Russian within me. I've heard that in Russia, there's no actual designated "breakfast foods" (this is where the twisted form of Russian comes in); rather, they just eat whatever they want, essentially. It's interesting to see how different breakfast can be cross-culturally, and I think it's refreshing to see a culture that acknowledges the arbitrary nature of time-specific recipes. Just as they might have, I don't know, beet salad and vodka for breakfast (I may be way off here, but you get the gist - they aren't eating cereal simply because it's morning and that's what you do), I find myself wanting to have pancakes for dinner and cereal for lunch. It's fun to turn food conventionality on its head sometimes. Kind of like eating dessert first, but that's a whole other topic...

Because of all of this, every so often I plan breakfast for dinner. A little while back, I did this with pancakes. Now, I don't know about you, but I was raised an Aunt Jemima girl. Those pancakes are tres bien, and as they are among the few processed, packaged mixes of any kind of food that I can still eat, it somewhat pains me to leave Aunt Jemima behind in search of my own, from-scratch version. But, being that I can't leave things well alone, search I do. This journey becomes increasingly disheartening each and every time I try a recipe and discover that it, well....sucks. I am becoming ever more frightened that I am incapable of making a from-scratch pancake as good as dear old Aunt Jemima.

These pancakes are not bad. They don't burn or have any kind of off flavors. They do taste like pancakes, and they turn a relatively acceptable color. The problem that I have with them is that they are quite literally, as flat as a pancake. And I like my pancakes very un-pancake like in that regard: fluff is key. I like restaurant pancakes that come out as big as your plate and as thick as, well, a thick and fluffy pancake. Maybe I did something incorrectly and this recipe isn't supposed to yield surprisingly thin pancakes, but I have too many pancake recipes to try to give any one of them a second chance. One strike, you're out, and I move on, determined to find my Aunt Jemima equivalent.

Because I didn't approve of the pancakes, and because I didn't change a darn thing about the recipe (to my knowledge), I'm just going to direct you to 2 Make Ends Meet, where you can find the original post. It's entirely possible that I did something careless, since her pictures look adequately fluffy, and it's also entirely possible that there are readers out there who would really enjoy a thinner pancake. They did have a nice flavor to them. So, don't be discouraged by what this jaded pancake critic has to say, at least not without checking it out yourself.

Still, the fruit and yogurt puree I threw together with it was pretty good, if not a little pungent from an accidental overload on the extracts I used. I will definitely use greek yogurt next time to thicken it a little, but overall, it was very nice.