Recipe #60 and 61: Breakfast Burritos and Linguine with Clam Sauce

Recipe: Breakfast Burritos
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hr
Ease: 3
Taste: 4
Leftover Value: Did not save leftovers
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Down the Drain!

On Christmas Eve morning, only six recipes remained in my recipe challenge. To say I had high hopes in completing on Christmas Day is an understatement. I managed to trick myself into believing I was Super Woman until around 3:00 pm when I decided I would have to be content with finishing the day after Christmas.

Jonathan wanted to see the new Annie movie, so Joel and Mallory graciously agreed to go with us bright and early* to see it.

*Bright and early as in 10:00 am.

PW's Breakfast Burritos were the natural choice to make for them for breakfast considering the 12 eggs it uses would have been a complete waste to make for only Hubby and myself.

Even with using frozen hash brown potatoes (which PW allows you to do, promise!), this recipe still took a solid hour to make. This is mostly due to the process of assembling the burritos, rather than chopping as was my issue with Migas. By the time I finished wrapping each burrito, I was a burrito wrapping pro.

The taste of the burritos was just okay. It wasn't something that I would ever request someone to make for me, or something I would ever desperately crave enough to make it again myself. It does, however, work as a nice on the go breakfast, considering that each of my movie companions ate theirs as we headed out to the theater.

While I will more than likely never make them again, I will say this, if you are the kind of person who orders the breakfast burrito at McDonald's, this might be an at-home healthier solution for you.

Recipe: Linguine with Clam Sauce
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 30 min
Ease: 3
Taste: 9
Leftover Value: No leftovers!
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

We had about an hour and a half to kill before heading to my parents' house to start our Christmas Eve festivities. While I had hoped to make PW's Potato Skins, Chocolate Cake and Linguine with Clam Sauce, I gave in to my human limitations and decided that I could only make one.

I had been on the fence* about the Linguine with Clam Sauce from the first time I saw it in the book. I have never had clams before, and the description of how Marlboro Man (PW's husband) reacted to this meal when she first made it for him hurt more than helped my preset opinion.

Note: There were actually only a few recipes in the book I felt this way about. More about that in the final summation!

Knowing this might not be a recipe I would love, and also knowing it might not be a recipe Hubby would even be slightly interested in, I made it as a light lunch. My brother, Joel, and his wife, Mallory, will pretty much eat anything I cook--they aren't picky at all, and they flatter me with praise, so it's nice to have them around.

Frying the clams was the worst part of this recipe. My entire kitchen smelled like a seafood market.

After the clams and garlic fried for a little together, a white wine cream sauce is created. This cream sauce is so divine it made me completely forget about whether or not I liked clams.*

Note: I think I do, but I'm still not sure.

I plan to make this substituting chicken for the clams, and occasionally, without any meat at all!

Mallory, who loves clams, said that when she makes this (because she loved it so much) she will use half the amount of noodles so that there will be more clams per serving. She's certainly right. If you want a lot of clams per bite, the recipe calls for too much pasta for this to happen.

My favorite part of this recipe was that from start to finish it took less than a half hour. My second favorite part was that within another half hour the pan was empty because the entire meal had been devoured.

Recipe #10 and #11: Potatoes and Pancakes

Recipe: Basic Breakfast Potatoes
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.