I'd recently read a recipe on the WholeFoods site for simple pancakes that had me drooling in anticipation. Always a sucker over "Breakfast for Dinner", I'd planned on fixing this recipe for Oatmeal-Apple pancakes for dinner Saturday night along with some delicious Pederson's Uncured Apple Smoked bacon that was - catch this - on special at Wheatsville with a members-only coupon.
Not since the oxymoronic jacket craze of the late 70's early 80's has the term "members only" evoked such a (positive this go round) response from me.
At Wheatsville, as if shopping there is not reward enough, you get all sorts of rewards for being a member. One of which is this cute board in the front of the store with pink coupons (at least this month they've been pink- I've no idea if they change colors) giving members additional savings off the already lower Wheatie pricing. Anyhoo - BACON. Natural bacon on discount. Need I say more?
I gathered the short list of ingredients for the pancakes, threw them into the blender as instructed, and fired up my skillet. We were not only going to have breakfast for dinner but we were going to have by golly pancakes with syrup and bacon. WooHOO, baby!
Only. The pancakes turned out way way too much like the unleavened bread they pinch off for communion at my church. Which is to say, thick, evocative of old style school paste, and I had to seriously fight the little voice in the back of my head that kept saying "the body of Christ broken for you - with syrup" as I chewed my dinner.When I pressed my hub for his opinion later, he agreed that whatever those were, they were not his idea of what pancakes should be.
We did both eat the full complement of pancakes per plate. They were not inedible. They simply weren't anything at all delightful to throw into an otherwise guaranteed to please combination of maple syrup and bacon.
I used McCann's steel cut oats as a starting point. Perhaps if I used more standardized oats the texture and flavor would have been more what we expected. I've had those oats around for a while. Can they go bad? Other people tried the recipe and rated it with 4 out of 5 stars. Since you pulverize the oats in a blender to make the batter, I didn't figure using McCann's would be a problem.
For us, a swing and a miss. Given any choice I'd (much) rather eat pancakes made with that out of the box quick batter. If I am going to get a cake that dense and chewy, I think I'd prefer something savory.
The bacon, on the other hand, was so good that even though I had plans to use the remainder of the bacon for a BLT lunch the next day, my husband begged and cajoled and finally convinced me that he should get just ONE more slice for being such a good sport about the oatmeal-apple Nopecakes. How about you? Ever tried a recipe you were sure was going to be a winner only it wasn't?
