Adventures in Cooking: Holiday Breakfast Edition

[melack]

People often look at me and don't realize what an adventurous guy I am. "Oh, he's no threat to the status quo," they'll think to themselves. Wrong. I am an envelope-pusher. I go to the store and buy a box of envelopes just so I can push them. Not just any regular store, I'm talking about Costco-sized envelope boxes. This is not a metaphor. I literally do this. It's an excellent strength-building exercise for going out into the world and stretching boundaries, which is my real passion. This adventurous streak has now spilled over into my cooking. This morning, as the sights and sounds of the Christmas season danced in my mind like so many circus vagrants, I decided to put these feelings into food form.

What better way to stretch the boundaries of cooking than to try something new with pancakes? Everybody loves pancakes. They tell you otherwise, they're most likely a circus vagrant trying to grift you out of your life savings. Pulling open the refrigerator door, I struck gold. Heavy, fattening, overly-spiced gold: Eggnog. I could use eggnog in pancakes to make.... Eggnog Pancakes! This breakfast would be perfect, I thought to myself. Not only does it appease the mighty Christian god, but the seven-headed hydra beast god of breakfast foods! This would be the breakfast equivalent of the Handshake in Outerspace that proved to be the solution to the Cold War.

But how? Easy. Substitute milk for eggnog in the directions. Now, I may be adventurous, but I do recognize a risk when I see one. For that reason, I decided to cut the recipe in half. Mankind may not be quite ready for eggnog pancakes yet. I'm not trying to rush headlong into a minefield of potentially devastating flavor quite yet. So instead of 2 cups Bisquick, 1 cup milk and 2 eggs, it would be 1 cup Bisquick, 1/2 cup milk and but a single, lonely egg. I mixed these together and soon discovered the result of these three ingredients bears a striking resemblance to the viscosity of partially-dried cement. I added a bit of the old 1% and the mix was ready to go. Heated up the griddle, poured two pancakes. I was feeling good.

Time to flip. OH GOD! NO!! I guess eggnog doesn't really lend itself very well to easily-flippable pancakes. It's probably because a single half cup of the stuff weighs about 37 pounds. That's okay, I just scooped the messy abomination of cuisine off the griddle and took more care with the next pancake. There we go. Flipped like a dream, just took a little bit of muscle.

Soon enough I had a pile of pancakes on my plate ready to eat. Yeah. Eat. Hmm. I hadn't really thought about this part yet. I was looking forward to the fun of mixing eggnog into the recipe, but I had forgotten that I would actually have to eat these monstrosities. Well, what do they taste like? Basically, they taste exactly as you would imagine. Pancakes with eggnog in them. No strange conversion during the cooking process. They taste completely and totally like pancakes with eggnog in them. But how does that taste? Well, not good. But add enough maple syrup and you can't really tell the problem anymore!

I think I'm gonna get that last sentence tattooed on my bicep. It works on so many levels.

FINAL VERDICT: REGRETTABLE

[wombat]

Oh, I have so been there. But at least you pulled a nice long post on a slow night out of the jaws of defeat.

[side_show]

See, all Canadian food is labelled in both French and English, and on the French side, Eggnog is labelled "Lait de Poulet."  I kid you not.  Chicken Milk.  There are varied reasons why I've never liked Eggnog, and this is one of them.

[AugustWest]

See, all Canadian food is labelled in both French and English, and on the French side, Eggnog is labelled "Lait de Poulet."  I kid you not.  Chicken Milk.  There are varied reasons why I've never liked Eggnog, and this is one of them.

Wow.  That's certainly understandable.

[CortJstr]

See, all Canadian food is labelled in both French and English, and on the French side, Eggnog is labelled "Lait de Poulet."  I kid you not.  Chicken Milk.  There are varied reasons why I've never liked Eggnog, and this is one of them.

Kudos to Smells for definitively answering the "rose by any other name" question.

[melack]

It took me far, far too long to realize why they would call it 'Chicken Milk'. It's got eggs in it.

Let's just say my original thought involved pulling on tiny chicken nipples.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Last year's Christmas breakfast was a smoked salmon and potato casserole.

This year's will probably be a savory bread pudding with ham and cheese, and some nice cinnamon rolls with a marscapone icing.

[theinevitable]

goddamn, I want some potato and salmon.

also: my uncle makes Breakfast Burritos that are Of the Gods. good lord, these things are amazing.

I am going to go eat one, not made by him, right now.

[wombat]

This year's will probably be a savory bread pudding with ham and cheese, and some nice cinnamon rolls with a marscapone icing.

Mmm. I think you need to tell me your address.

[Sub_Topical]

This weeks culinary expeditions:

Pot steamed chicken w/ a reduced tomato/honey sauce with prunes, baked honeyed carrots and couscous. Garnered from a persian cookbook. Results: tasty but explosive within 12 hours (date/prune reaction mode).

Pizza? 8" pyrex with seasoned ground round pasted in to form 1/2" crust replacement on sides and bottom. Innards filled with green pepper, onions, mushrooms, olives and covered with mozzarella. Baked at 350 for 40 minutes. Very tasty with no backlash as of yet. Like a tasty meat pizza.

So basically 50/50 success this week.

ALSO: The Mayor could sell tickets to that Christmas breakfast.