breakfast, breakfast, breakfast

Now that it's getting cooler outside, a more substantial breakfast is nice once in a while. An opportune moment for the Committee to report that it has discovered a very good basic recipe for blueberry pancakes —

While we were in Maine I noticed blueberries growing in several spots around the cabin, but most of the berries had been eaten by birds or deer before we arrived.




Hurry up and grow!
A vacation in Maine would not be complete without blueberry pancakes; fortunately the market had some nice berries. I don't make pancakes often enough to look at a recipe and know whether it's likely to be a winner or not, but this recipe for blueberry griddle cakes from Saveur appealed to me instantly because it makes pancakes for two. Perfect. The resulting pancakes were pretty close to perfect, too. They were very basic, which is how I think blueberry pancakes should be — no distracting vanilla extract, and a confident balance of salt to sugar to keep them from turning out too sweet.


If you are going to blog your own pancakes or otherwise commemorate their existence, be aware that they are one of the more maddening foods to photograph. My lens got steamy, and then of course the butter started to slide away; my friend helpfully jabbed it back into place but in several of the photos his fingerprint is prominent enough to permit forensic examination. An adorable illustration à la Kokblog or Lobstersquad is definitely the way to go.




On another morning at the cabin I wanted to make something but realized that we had no eggs, no milk, and not much of anything else — we did, however, have oranges, flour and butter, and that was enough to make delicious, citrus-y biscuits from this recipe, which accompanied an interesting article on community cookbooks in the December 2002 Food & Wine. I made these biscuits once before using grapefruits, as the recipe calls for, and those were great too, but the ones made with oranges and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar were even better.




They turned out ginormous and fluffy because there was no biscuit-cutter at the cabin and I used a large drinking glass instead. They're best eaten while still warm (and accompanied by strong, very very hot coffee) but they reheat well and the leftovers were still good a couple days later.