Kosher-Style Pork Cracklins

I love to make pancakes and enjoy making whole wheat and gingerbread pancakes. This recipe gives you really yummy normal-looking pancakes with blueberries in them! Blueberries are so easy to break, and if you just break one, the juice will turn the batter a less appetizing blue-gray color. So in this recipe, you just drop the blueberries into the batter once it's already cooking! It makes the pancakes look normal on top, but with blueberries inside and showing through on the bottom.

I loved how this recipe uses everything that you probably already have on hand (except for a lemon and blueberries). No special trip to the store just to buy buttermilk! This recipe took longer than all my other recipes, but it was well worth the extra effort. These were 5 star pancakes according to my Grandma. We halved the recipe, and it was just perfect for two!

I also learned how nice and easy it is to cook pancakes on a griddle. The sidebar article highly recommended the BroilKing griddle and West Bend as a second choice. The article mentions uneven cooking, and just like my Grandmother warned, one side of her griddle did not get quite as hot as the other side.

• Best Blueberry Pancakes (Cook's Illustrated, p. 20. No dates on this issue! Sometime past 2003. It is a darker red with pears on the cover. Amy gave it to me, so may not even be from this year.)
• Bacon cooked by Grandma
• Honeydew melon sliced by Grandma

It's extremely icy and snowing in Austin, and the weather will probably last a few days. I planned out some meals and made some last minute shopping trips, so we are cooking and eating to our tummies' delight.

Mmmm... pancakes! I especially enjoy them when they are not your typical plain buttermilk pancakes! Over Thanksgiving, I discovered a recipe for "Multigrain Pancakes Worth Eating" in Cook's Illustrated. Sweet!!

My big concern was trying to figure out the order in which to make the pancakes and the topping, as they both required a bit of attention and time. Jay solved the problem by making the pancake batter while I worked on the topping. I think in the future if I was cooking alone, I would make the batter first, and then the topping, leaving the topping on low heat while cooking the pancakes.

These pancakes are fantastic. I'd even say they have topped my formerly favorite gingerbread pancakes from The Omelettry! The topping was excellent, too. I used walnuts instead of pecans, though. I'm also not sure if I was supposed to put them in the topping or just sprinkle on top. The instructions simply said "Serve with toasted nuts."

The most interesting ingredient in the pancakes is museli!

• Multigrain Pancakes Worth Eating, Apple, Cranberry, and Pecan Topping (Cook's Illustrated, November & December 2006, p. 14)