recipe archaeologist (west virginia: polly's pumpkin cookies)

I mentioned on Facebook last weekend that I hit the ultimate jackpot when I went to our weekend Flea Market here in Page County. For a whole quarter, I got a recipe tin with a few handwritten recipe castoffs, some clipped recipes from women's magazines, and a couple snippings from a local newspaper.

I was hooked. Not only did I love the loopy, scratched handwritten recipes on the stained and worn recipe cards, I loved the ephemera I found with them. Thank you notes. Newspaper articles.

It was too much for my nosy, former reporter self not to dig deeper.

I started with the newspaper clippings from The Moorefield Examiner.

Moorfield is about an hour and 45 minutes away (a huge flood happened in 1982. A civil war battle happened in 1864. Union troops defeated Brig. Gen. John McCausland thanks in large part to McCasland foolishly splitting his troops' camp into two across the south branch of the Potomac River. Oops...)

The piece I found (complete with an Apple Cake recipe) gave me a couple clues once I fired up the Googles.

Wasn't too hard to find McCoy's Grand Theater (now a museum). Next step was the Bruce Dern film "Smile," which I've never heard of.

Thanks to the movie reference and an incomplete event announcement right below, that puts us at about 1975 in our kitchen archeology dig so far.

Oh, I forgot to add this thank-you note given to our mystery chef that actually gives her a name. Bear with me...

So....we have a name. A town. A time frame. And thanks to another thank-you note, we had a church reference.

Google did the rest of the work for me.

Turns out Polly is alive and well in Moorefield.

A sprightly 78-year old bridge master, she's still winning local tournaments as of last year and celebrating each Sunday at the local Presbyterian church with her husband George. I'm leaving her last name out on purpose, of course.

If the math is correct, much of the collecting she did in the recipe box I found happened in the mid-to late 70s...when Polly would have been about, oh say, 37-ish? (I can relate.) In the tin recipe box I found, it's all pumpkin and oatmeal and peanut butter cookie recipes. There's one for a peach pie, too.

I like her style, ya'll. Sugar and carbs and carbs and sugar. I imagine Polly's a sweet thing at heart...

I figured, given the season and our proximity to Thanksgiving, I'd include Polly's recipe for pumpkin cookies. It was a little incomplete, so I had to guess the oven temperature and the time. And the actual steps to the cookie making, but, you know... it worked out fine in the end.

Thanks for the head start, Miss Polly.

Polly's Pumpkin Cookies

1 and 1/4 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. shortening
2 eggs
1 and 1/2 c. canned pumpkin
2 and 1/2 c. flour
1/2 t. salt
4 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. cinnamon and nutmeg
1 c. nuts
1/2 c. raisins

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Combine sugar with shortening and eggs.

Add pumpkin and mix well.

In separate bowl, sift flour with baking powder, salt and spices.

Fold into pumpkin mixture and combine. Add in nuts and raisins if desired.

Drop by spoonful onto ungreased baking sheet. Bake 12-15 minutes and send out some good vibes to our new friend Polly while you wait.

...happy eating...

stuff of life: buttermilk pie

I never appreciated living in Austin while I had the chance.

I mean, it didn't help that I was 11 years old and not keen on appreciating much (other than my wicked scooter and the ice cream truck), but still. I lived in Austin. Had parents who loved to eat at the original Threadgill's and I'm pretty sure I pouted every time I was there because they didn't have chicken nuggets or an ice cream truck.

But they had buttermilk pie.

And now, my family has buttermilk pie.

It's a southern thing and now that we're out of Alaska, it's a family thing.

It's delicious, despite my first attempt browning a skin on it waaaay too quickly. The trick is to cover the top of the pie with a bit of foil for the first 30 minutes...similar to tenting a chicken.

Happy eating, ya'll!

Buttermilk Pie

Ingredients:
1 10-inch pie shell unbaked
3 Cups Sugar 1/4 C flour1/2 lb (2 sticks) butter, melted 6 eggs1 C buttermilk2 Tbs water1 Tsp lemon juice1 Tsp vanilla extract


Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350.Whisk sugar and flour into melted butter, then add eggs one at a time.Add liquid ingredients.
Bake for at least one hour or until filling is set in the center of the pie.

Pour filling into pie shell (I always seem to have extra filling that I bake in a dish)Place shell on cookie sheeet in preheated oven.

Feeding a Family of 6 for $10 A Day: Week 1

We decided to give serious cash dieting a try this month. I'm out of work once May ends and that's terribly frightening. Add to that, we have a big family who likes to eat at regular intervals. I mean, like, often.

The rules aren't too difficult around our house when it comes to food. We eat meat, though we've cut way back. Gluten shows up more often than some would like. Sugar sneaks in. So does serious carbs. We're a work in progress is what I guess I'm trying to say...

The key to eating well on the cheap is menu planning. (Barf.) I hate planning. I hate budgeting. But when my husband and I don't do this sort of thing, we do this funny "race to outspend" each other until the last dollar has flown the coop and there's still eight days left in the month. Enter my  month-long challenge to feed my family of six on $10 a day.

I give myself a break when I already have something on hand and don't beat myself  up too much and don't add it to my total. I will let you know where the item was on hand. I also live in a part of Houston where grocers get away with charging us a lot more for our food than in other parts of town. Stinks. But I'm too lazy to drive through the traffic to save 10 cents on a gallon of milk. So the point is...you might actually get away with spending EVEN less if the grocers in your neighborhood don't suck!

Week One Menu

Saturday 5/4/13
Breakfast: Blueberry Yogurt Spinach Smoothies (need a recipe? see HERE ) ($1.50)
Lunch: Grilled Ham and Cheese Paninis ($3.20)
Dinner: Chicken Enchiladas ($3), Re-fried Beans ($0.56), brownies (had a mix on hand)
Total: $8.26


Sunday 5/5/13
Breakfast: French Toast ($3.50)
Lunch: Tacos ($1.45)
Dinner: Barbecue chicken ($3), cornbread ($0.50), green beans ($0.76)

Total: $9.21

Monday 5/6/13
Breakfast: Blueberry Yogurt Spinach Smoothies ($1.50)
Lunch: Mixed green salad ($1.75), grilled chicken ($2.10) with avocados ($0.50)
Dinner: Zatarain's Red beans & rice ($1.79), green beans ($0.76), applesauce ($0.93)

Total: $9.33

Tuesday 5/7/13
Breakfast: Blueberry Yogurt Spinach Smoothies ($1.50)
Lunch: Mixed green salad ($1.75), grilled chicken ($2.10) with avocados ($0.50)
Dinner: Turkey Meatballs ($3), Gravy ($0.15), Egg Noodles ($1)
Total: $10


Wednesday 5/8/13
Breakfast: Blueberry Yogurt Spinach Smoothies ($1.50)
Lunch: Mixed green salad ($1.75), grilled chicken ($2.10) with avocados ($0.50)
Dinner: Pancakes! ($1.75)

Total: $7.60

Thursday 5/9/13
Breakfast: Blueberry Yogurt Spinach Smoothies ($1.50)
Lunch: Mixed green salad ($1.75), Feta Omelet ($1.75)
Dinner: Grilled Cheese ($2.25)  and Soup ($1.60)
Total: $9.35


Friday 5/10/13
Breakfast: Blueberry Yogurt Spinach Smoothies ($1.50)
Lunch: Sandwiches ($1.25), Pretzels ($0.60), Green Apples ($0.45)  and Peanut Butter
Dinner: Homemade Pizzas ($6)

Total: $9.80

crowded kitchen: super yum paleo brownies

i'm not the best at this ancestral diet thing, but i'm trying. the hard truth of the matter is that in the thick of things, i'm not above shoving a fistful of flour in my mouth when nobody is looking just to cure that carb hangover thing i have going on. but like i said, i'm trying. (pay no mind to the white flour stains all over my clothes...i'm TRYING!)

my husband is really good at sticking to things. that's probably how he never ends up with disgusting chinese food orders...he knows what he likes, decides on something, and sticks to it. straight and narrow type of guy, that one.

we're in this paleo thing together these days. me because i'm sick of eating fake food in hopes of tricking my body into losing baby weight. him because he has huge jiu jitsu goals for 2013 and he needs primo fuel for the things he's going to ask his body and mind to perform. (sure wish i had goals that lofty...i'm pretty much just sick of my jeans unzipping themselves every time me and my stomach sit down. darnit.)

he loves brownies. he also loves snacks at night. and sometimes after a long day of sticking to his diet, the man will down a bowl of chocolate ice cream drizzled in peanut butter and we can all assume that doesn't exactly help the cause. (kind of like me and the flour, right? and by flour, i hope we all know i mean corn chips, crackers, bread or whatever else flour has made in my house.)

so here's a recipe i found on nomnompaleo. it's amazing. and i had almond flour on hand for just such an occasion. it'll probably be my go-to recipe from here to eternity, honestly. it's tasty. it's complex. and it's paleo...though i'm not sure how the sugar plays into the ancestral part. just nod and smile like i did, ok??

i also found a coconut macaroon recipe that i'll try out tomorrow. you're excited, aren't you!?

super yum paleo brownies

ingredients:
3/4 cup almond flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup chocolate chips (or use 7 oz of baking chocolate if you wanna!)

directions:
1.heat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix the flour, salt, cocoa, and baking powder in a large bowl and set aside while you do work, son!
3. In the microwave, melt 1/2 cup of the chocolate chips and the butter. I set it for a minute and kept my eye on it. Seemed to do the trick and I didn't burn it. Huzzah!
4. Mix sugar, eggs, and vanilla in a bowl.
5. Slowly add chocolate and butter to the egg mixture, making sure to go slowly to not cook the eggs with your hot chocolate sauce.
6. Combine wet and dry ingredients and pour into prepared 8 by 8 dish. Sprinkle remaining chips on the top and press into batter.
7. Bake for approximately 30 minutes.
8. Do your best not to eat the whole pan of brownies before your husband comes home from lunch. Especially important if your 4-year old witnessed you bake the brownies. He'll rat you out.

...happy baking!...

crowded kitchen: blueberry and spinach yogurt smoothies

i love this smoothie in the mornings and find the versatility comes in handy when i'm low on produce....which is every two days, it seems. (my kids must be part fruit bat.)

the kids love this as long as they don't notice me sneaking the spinach in, and with smoothies, you have the luxury of sneaking good stuff in without all the fuss. (i liken it to hiding the dog's pill in hot dog--same idea.)

Depending on what I have around for add-ins, I toss in a bit of chia seed powder, flax powder, mean green powder, coconut oil, or even miralax when the Boo won't poo. (Was that TMI? I'm sorry...)

If I'm low on blueberries, I use frozen strawberries. Or raspberries. Or peaches. It's an endless matrix of fruit and hidden superfoods, folks.

Blueberry and Spinach Yogurt Smoothie

1 individual carton of greek yogurt (I love the coconut flavored, but will use plain, too)
1 to 1.5 cup milk, depending on preferred consistency
1 cup of frozen fruit
1/2 cup spinach leaves
Honey, to taste
Chia powder (optional)

Blend, hide the vitamins, and serve.

Nice...

crowded kitchen: slow-cooked chicken tikka masala

Do  you ever come across a recipe at just the right time? One that reaffirms faith in your own cooking?

I had a rough morning in the kitchen and despite a surprising and freeing revelation I finally came to, it was still rough. I haunt Nigella Lawson's web site like some sort of stalker.

 I have this notion that if I lived in London or if she somehow inhabited the apartment above ours, we'd be besties. We'd ride bikes with tassles and playing cards in the spokes. We'd have a secret handshake and she'd totally let me eat all her leftovers.

So I had high hopes when I printed out her "Clementine Cake" recipe and boiled five clementines in their own skins for TWO HOURS. I chopped and swirled them (skins, piths, fruit, and all) around once or twice in the blender and made a cake of them with six eggs and a couple cups of flour. Some sugar, too.

Let me just state for the record that I must have a palate about as sensitive as a concrete slab.

I just don't appreciate certain flavors and the whole having chunks of peel and pith residing in your cake (on purpose, even!) just sorta made me resent this cake that nobody would eat. Not even me. Some people love this cake, as evidenced by the MILLIONS of blog posts raving about the recipe.

I, however, did not.

Add insult to injury? It was such a dense, heavy mess that it ripped my trash bag from the lip of the trash can, forcing me to dig around in the dirty egg shells and coffee grounds to retrieve it. Ugh.

But then redemption came after watching Gordon Ramsey trek across India and eat fire ant chutney and curse at street vendors with flamin' hot curries. I found a recipe for the one of two dishes I've ever tried at an Indian food joint.

 I will eat Chicken Tikka Masala and I will eat Panak Paneer. Period. I've yet to spread my culinary wings. I know, I know.

Thanks to Table for Two, I rediscovered my love for this dish. It's complicated in terms of what I normally cook, but the flavors were incredible in the final product and so worth having to search the spice shelves for the obscure and obselete garam masala. Who knew I'd had it all along? It was fate, ya'll.

My amounts differ from Table for Two, but that's ok. I think that's the fun part about food blogs. The recipe lives on forever in many, many forms!

Slow Cooker Chicken Tikka Masala

Serves 6 to 8

Ingredients:

Package of boneless, skinless chicken tenderloins (my package had 10 and it was perfect)

1/2 of large onion, diced

3 cloves of garlic, minced

1 T fresh ginger, minced (thanks to a juicing experiment gone wrong, I had this on hand!)

1 (29 oz) can tomato puree (in future, I think I might cut back to about 2/3 of the can to balance the "tomatoy" acidity in the dish)

1.5 c plain yogurt

2 T olive oil

2 T Garam Masala

1 T ground cumin

1 t paprika

Salt, to taste

3/4 t cinnamon

3/4 t ground black pepper

1 to 3 t ground cayenne (I omitted this part)

2 bay leaves (I splurged and bought a package...first time EVER using bay leaves)

1 cup heavy cream (next time, I'll up it to 1 and 1/4 cups)

3 T cornstarch

Chopped cilantro or parsley to garnish

Directions

In a big ol' honkin' bowl, combine everything minus the chicken and the bay leaves.  When thoroughly mixed,  put the sauce in a your slow cooker, add the chicken and coat with sauce, top off with bay leaves and let cook. 2 to 4 hours on high, 4 to 8 on low...all depending on your appliance. (Mine is waaay off and it only took about two and a half hours on high.)

It was a hit with then entire crew and all we were missing was naan. Travesty, right? Next time I'll be sure to hit up a local joint for some bread...Lord knows I'm not patient enough to spend six hours making the stuff.

...happy eating...

crowded kitchen: turkey meatballs with gravy

Not too long ago I made beef meatballs and served them on mashed potatoes. I'm certain it was after reading part of the Pioneer Woman's cookbook (Oh, I love her.) The point of the story is that it didn't go over well with my family. Was it the mashed potatoes? (Too much of a midwest thing?) Or was it the meatballs? (I'm not all that great at them yet.) Either way...fail.

Taking the leap a second time with a failed dinner is not for the faint of heart in my house. But I'm kind of crazy like that and I found another recipe from Better Homes & Garden for meatballs made in the slow cooker with a turkey gravy. Though, instead of mashed potatoes, I cooked wide egg noodles and doubled to gravy to make sure there was plenty of sauce to spare. Success!

My slow cooker is kind of a problem child and "high" really means "burn the crap out of your food," while "low" really means "high with a side of extra high," and "warm" means "your best option."

I hope yours behaves better.

Happy eating!

Slow Cooker Turkey Meatballs with Gravy

meatballs:

1 to 1.5 pounds ground turkey
3/4 cup bread crumbs
1/2 chopped onion (fine)
dash garlic salt or season salt
dash pepper
2 eggs (optional--I didn't have eggs that day and it worked out fine. But eggs are nice if you have them!)

gravy (I doubled this to make sure we had enough):
 packet of turkey gravy
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 cup water

directions:

combine meatball ingredients in large bowl and assemble into 1-inch balls. pan fry them to brown all sides. drain. place meatballs into pre-heated slow cooker.

in medium bowl combine gravy ingredients. pour over meatballs. cook on high for 4-5 hours (slow 6-8 hours) or until done. serve over pasta, mashed potatoes, or in your favorite sandwich vehicle.

crowded kitchen: easy peasy lemonade pie

Now, Boy Wonder and I know for a fact that we didn't invent this recipe. It's everrrrryyywhere (seriously.) 

But, that said...why have we never heard of it until today? I happened to be looking for birthday ideas for the baby girl and this recipe came across our radar. So thankful it did. 

We have an obsession with lemons 'round here. And pie. Lemons and pie. Obviously, we're suckers for dessert.

This little beauty is no bake and uses a store-bought graham cracker crust. So easy...the 8 year old did it all by himself. 

Boy Wonder's Easy Peasy Lemonade Pie

ingredients:

1 (6 oz) can of lemonade concentrate
1 can of condensed sweetened milk
1 tub of frozen whipped topping

Give the ingredients a good half hour to thaw and soften. Mix lemonade and milk. Fold in whipped topping and pour into graham cracker pie shell. Refrigerate at least 2 hours. Try to share with your family. It'll be tough, but try.

Crowded Kitchen: The Acai Mustache Maker (Smoothie)

I was reading an article yesterday and laughed my @## off at a commenter when they said that our sport (jiu jitsu) is known for a few things--acai bowls and cauliflower ear being chief among them.

It's true, and while cold weather and other assorted factors have kept me off the mat lately, the recent drop in temperature and rampant release of flu bugs makes me rethink the benefit of working a little more "jiu jitsu lifestyle" into our winter. Sure, we don't have the beaches the other schools have in So Cal (yes, I'm jealous), but we've got the sunshine. The blinding, eyeball-burning sunshine (which in Alaska in January usually guarantees that it's well below zero and into the negative digits. Blah.)

We love our local Acai Alaska shop, but the problem is that we just might love ourselves into the poorhouse if we frequent it as much as we'd like. They're not cheap! (For good reason, I know. But still...)

Costco had a special on Acai juice today (two smallish jugs for about $7.50). Can I get a "hooray?"

Hooray!

So, in honor of our half-frozen homage to the jiu jitsu lifestyle, here's a quick Acai smoothie that boasts all the superfood benefits of acai, bananas, and blueberries.

Acai Superfood Smoothie

Blend until smooth:

1 banana

1 cup frozen fruit (we used blueberries)

1 cup Acai juice

1/4 cup water (or more, depending on the consistency you like)

It passed the "Boo" test, too...hence the name "mustache maker." The boy sure loves his "smoomies."

Enjoy the day!

Crowded Kitchen: Nanny's Ginger Crinkles

My trip to Texas this month was better than I could have imagined. Good times with my dad and my son. Good food. Hella sunshine. A chance to spend time with my Donna Lynn after a five year absence. Sleeping in my old bed.

And note cards? Recipe cards to be exact.

This year I've slowly become fascinated with cooking. And baking, though the results are mixed and vary, depending on whether I accidentally skip over the "baking soda" line in the ingredients.

In my dad's house, I was pawing through the old bookshelf and stumbled across three recipe boxes FULL of my mom's recipes, handwritten on index cards. Here's the thing about finding these...for years, my mom had the most beautiful handwriting. She had such pride in it, that she did her best to pass it on to me, even if it meant making me re-do my sloppy homework. (Oh, how I cursed her then!)

In recent years, since her diagnosis of the brain disease, her ability to write in the neatly rounded print has dwindled, and often times, when she's quickly jotting notes, I have a hard time reading it. But these recipe cards, well, they tell a story. Not only do the contain all the things I grew up eating, they show the progression of a brain disease of sorts, along with highlighting my mother's fascinations--cranberries, biscottis, cranberry biscotti. You see where I am going.

To make a good find even BETTER, one of the boxes I found had a different penmanship all together. Can you tell where this is going? Oh yes, the motherlode of all recipe boxes...my grandmother, Margaret. Nanny is a woman after my own heart. She devotes precious little space to nonesense like main dishes and vegetables. No, my grandmother gets down with the baking. Muffins. Breads. Biscuits. Cookies. Candy. Pies.

I sat on the phone with my mom on a recent Sunday afternoon reading off the recipes and getting whatever stories went with them. Hermits are Pop's favorite cookies. Penuche is Nanny's favorite candy. Anything with raisins in the recipe was definitely made for Pop. The god-awful sounding things in there like "Cabbage Casserole" and "Minced Clam Lunch" were from an era when Nanny was religiously shedding pounds with Weight Watchers. (Phew!)

Nanny's penmanship is classic cursive they must have taught back in school. It's slanted. It's tightly spaced and feminine. Her s's are perfect. Her f's are elegant. And her recipes? Fantastic.

My mom has made ginger crinkles before. I remember them well, so when I found Nanny's recipe...well, I had to. Consider these my new favorite cookies. And they went well with the boys, too, so I can talk myself into them more often. After all, molasses has a lot of iron, right?

The magic thing about this is that I never grew up close to Nanny. She and Pop always lived on the opposite coast as me, but something happened during that first attempt to cook from her recipe. I learned to trust.

I squinted at the recipe card a few times when I didn't see butter. I saw a whole lot of oil. A lot of the recipes were different than what I'm used to out of today's magazines and recipe Web sites.

"Are you sure?" I asked nobody in particular.

The card was stained and worn. It had obviously been used before, and obviously the results were good if the baker came back to the card time and time again. So I trusted. And I used the nearly one cup of oil. And it was good. Earthy and spicy and crunchy and sweet. So good, I wanted to share Nanny's recipe.

This discovery lit a fire under my butt. I wanted more family recipes. I want them in a book. I want Pam's buckeyes and Dee's peanut butter cookies. I want Cheryl's pie recipes, instructions for my mom's rustic apple tarts, and I want the stories that go with them before nobody wants to tell them anymore. I want my kids and Jeff's kids and Brandy's kids and Justin's kids and Carissa's kids to have this piece of our far-flung, odd, and beautiful family, too.

And I'm working on it, people. :)

Ginger Crinkles

2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
1 egg
4 T molasses
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/4 cup sugar for coating

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix oil and sugar thoroughly in large bowl. Add egg and beat well. Stir in molasses. Sift dry ingredients to oil mixture. Make walnut-sized balls and cover in sugar. Put on ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 15 minutes. Do not overbake. Cool on rack. Store cookies in tightly covered container. Makes about 3 dozen.

Crowded Kitchen: Gingerbread Pancakes from Omlettery West

I was thinking a lot about my mom today. Partly because of wedding stuff she's totally being awesome about...but mostly because I was being a chicken about calling in on the status of my manuscript and TOTALLY asked her to pretend to be me and bug the editorial assistant for me. She was so game for it, too...

My mom was in the food section of the newspaper once. It was the Austin American Statesman (God Bless America, that is a GREAT newspaper), and she wrote in to the food writer requesting a top secret recipe from our favorite breakfast joint.

If there was ever a poll on which city has the best food, Austin would win my vote hands down, and I didn't even live in that city very long. I actually get homesick for Texas when I think of Austin food, and I grew up (for the most part) in El Paso.

Anyhoo...

The woman responded to my mother in the Sunday edition (it was sometime in the 80s...back when newsrooms were staffed with real people who wrote real columns and loved their jobs) and gave her the coveted Gingerbread Pancake recipe. As recent as a few years back, I remember seeing that yellowed old clipping in the midst of my mom's recipe collection (no, she's not the most organized about that stuff...ahem...Mom...)

(That photo to the left is said Burnett Road Omlettery.)
In my pumpkin pancake post a couple weeks ago, she chimed in about those gingerbread pancakes and how she missed that recipe. But you know what? Google is rad. Way rad. And I found the version of the recipe from Omlettery West (which claims to be different from the one on Burnett Road, where we ate, but big deal. Someday we'll know the difference and we probably won't even care!)

So in honor of her, here is:

Debra's Gingerbread Pancakes (Totally from the Omlettery, though, ok?)

Gingerbread Pancakes
Ingredients:
3 eggs
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup brewed coffee
21/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon ginger
1 tablespoon nutmeg
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted

Method:
Cream eggs and sugar together. Stir in buttermilk, water, and coffee and set aside. In a separate bowl sift together remaining dry ingredients.
Stir egg mixture into dry ingredients, then mix in melted butter.
Add more water or buttermilk if necessary, but batter should be thick.
Cook until done on a lightly greased hot griddle or in a heavy skillet (turn once when bubbles appear on upper side and start to break).
Pancakes will be thick and cake-like in texture.

Makes 8 to 10 five-inch pancakes.

Oh, and here's a picture of my mom. She's cute. The handsome chap with her is Boy Wonder. He's rad, too. They're a lot alike.