Tag: brunch

In need of brunch

A rainy housebound day like today means baked goods. So we are doing a recipe for pancakes that only needs 1 cup of flour.
One of my favorite recipes is from “The Breakfast Book” from Marion Cunningham. Perhaps one of the most talented cooks to grace our planet. I found a lovely version for you adapted by @shunalydon, one of the best pastry cooks I know, over on the KQED.org website. Check it out here.

Pancakes are good hot. I don’t like them cold This recipe will make enough for 4 people. If you have leftovers, you can easily reheat them in the toaster or toaster oven. (As with all baked goods, I suggest staying away from the microwave.) A bit of butter and jam or maple syrup and you have a morning treat on its own or served besides eggs, bacon, fruit, ham, whatever you wish to eat and perhaps a nice mimosa or gin fizz on the side. If you must eat them cold, make a sandwich with them at 2 am with nutella-type spread and marshmallow.

Easy ingredient list:

  • Flour
  • Baking Soda
  • Salt
  • Eggs
  • Melted butter
  • Buttermilk

Okay. Wait. Buttermilk? Excuse me, this is 2020? You expect a normal person to have BUTTERMILK?

Sigh. Honestly. No. No, I don’t. Even food geek me, doesn’t have buttermilk in my home, but that’s a different post…

You have three things you can do:
1) “Sour” your milk, by adding 1 tsp vinegar (I preferred distilled wine or apple cider for this due to flavor) or 1 tsp lemon juice.
2) or you can “invest in a dried Buttermilk product. Sound gross? It’s actually not. Not at all. Hopefully easy to get, this buttermilk powder can be mixed with lukewarm water and get your great pancakes.
3) Use regular dry powdered milk (instant is fine) with water and vinegar
As you can see, #2 is the route I took.

Just mix the buttermilk powder into lukewarm water and we are on the way.

The pancakes were just fluffy enough and just flavorful enough. And we were done and cleaned up in less than an hour.

Mission accomplished for brunch-y things.

Spring Saturday Brunch

I’ve been blessed the past couple of weeks with getting Spring brought home.

In the “old days” of a few years ago, it would have been me up at the crack of dawn to get to a market to pick the best of Zuckerman’s asparagus and sneak over to see if Berkeley Bowl had ramps or morels. Since starting to truly cook seasonally, those are the signs of when Spring has sprung. Already the spring onions will have arrived and the tiniest, sweetest radishes are around and soon there will be rhubarb from many vendors (my favorite from Happy Quail farm) and then some Eclair strawberries from Yerena and Tomatero will finally surface.

But for now it’s glorious asparagus both pencil thin and fat and sassy. The latter of which today got served steamed over whole grain English muffins with two plump Glaum eggs on top and a hollandaise that handsome put together for us.

The side there are apples stewed with rum and saffron and some allspice which was just fine with a bit of the hollandaise, indeed, it was an all together scrumptious meal washed down with coffee from Alchemy Collective.

And since you asked, our eclectic table is a 1880s parlor table desperately in need of a refinish topped with Chilewich mats and adorned with Bodrum linens. The mugs are unique, turned for us at Lightwave pottery studio on Kauai.