Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hr 25 minutes
Ease: 2
Taste: 7
Leftover Value: No leftovers
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Down the Drain
Recipe: Edna Mae's Sour Cream Pancakes
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 15 minutes
Ease: 1
Taste: 8
Leftover Value: No leftovers
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep in the Strainer
Breakfast for dinner is one of my favorites but I try to reserve it for days where I have absolutely no idea what to make for dinner. And though it is a loved dinner choice, it is not the simplest.
Alright, it's simple in the fact that everything basically revolves around the frying pan, but it's one of those things where everything needs to happen at once. By the time the bacon is done frying, the eggs should be set, the pancakes should be flipped, and the potatoes just about finished frying.
I need my food to be hot when I put it on my plate, so I've taken to making breakfast in shifts and putting the finished parts into a warming buffet tray so that my head isn't spinning at trying to handle five different elements at once.
I started this particular breakfast-for-dinner with the basic breakfast potatoes. PW starts them off by having them bake in the oven for 45 minutes. At first I thought this was an awesome idea because I assumed it meant less time in the skillet.
Don't you hate when you're so impatient to chop up hot potatoes that the skin tears off?
No? Just me?
Alright, I'll keep working on the patience issue.
So, the whole baking-ahead-of-time thing didn't make much of a difference. I still found that to get the perfect crispiness to these potatoes, they had to sit in the skillet for a good half hour.
I've been able to obtain the same crispiness with potatoes I chopped and sent directly to the pan without having baked first.
The one thing I liked about these potatoes was the onion. Diced onions are fried in a little oil before the potatoes go in. PW says that you can take them out and add them after the potatoes have fried a little or keep them in. She says, "...I happen to like the onions to get all dark and burny, so I'm going to leave them," At first I thought she was crazy, but I decided to do it too. Now I totally get what dark and burny means. It means tasty.
They were good, but the baking wasted time that I don't have. This is why I rated them Down the Drain.*
*In looking for the recipe link, I noticed that PW has several other potato recipes on her blog, so I'm assuming she has perfected these since the publishing of her first book.
Now the pancakes.
These pancakes are ridiculously easy. The batter can be whipped up in under a minute.
The problem is that more than half of the batter consists of sour cream.
I'm going to give you a minute to process that.
The timing for when to flip the pancakes was all off--as you can see by what appears to be two pancakes at the back of my pan. No, that is really one pancakes that didn't flip properly because 1 to 1 1/2 minutes was no where near long enough for the pancakes to set.
PW says that the batter should make 12 pancakes (one pancakes using 1/4 cup of batter). My batter produced only seven pancakes, another thing that made my skin crawl because that meant that there was approx 2.75489 tablespoons of sour cream in each pancake. Yikes!
I really did enjoy these pancakes though. But before I tell you why, let me tell you the last reason I hated them.
Look at the above picture.
The two pancakes look decent, right? Nice rounds shape, inviting golden color spread across, and what appears to be an average thickness.
Wrong. On the thickness part at least.
After sitting for a few minutes, these pancakes flatten out like a....err, well, pancake. But flatter.
My beef with this is that it makes me want to eat more. But I know what is in these pancakes! Gobs and gobs of fattening sour cream!
Alright, now that I got that off my chest, let me tell you how wonderful these pancakes are. Only a 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla is mixed in, but it shines through in every bite. Despite their wicked thinness, the pancakes are moist--perhaps sour cream has something to do with that--and sweet enough that they almost, almost, don't need a fountain of syrup poured over them.
I really can't wrap my head around using sour cream as the key ingredient though. So these pancakes will be reserved only for special occasions.
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