Oatmeal Pancake Recipe with Candied Brown Sugar

A first post had to happen sooner or later, so get ready for a mediocre story about my breakfast. I woke up this morning and like any other Saturday morning, wanted pancakes. I have shit for groceries, so I had to cobble something together with the little bit of food that exists in my cupboards. It was either canned tuna pancakes or oatmeal pancakes. I decided quickly on the latter and added some quick oats to my food processor, measured out some flour and GOT BUSY putting the dry ingredients together and combining with the wet ingredients. I didn’t intend to have candied brown sugar at all, but a little idea cropped up in the brain while the batter was resting and I was preheating my cast iron skillet.

As a last-minute decision, I opted to attempt a brown sugar syrup/reduction type thing, fucked it up and had a happy little accident when all was said and done. I over reduced the reduction, probably because I was talking to my cat about what a good morning she seemed to be having, and the result was a crumbly, delightful topping that brought the whole thing together with a nice crunchy texture. I will likely never be able to reproduce these results again, so I’m glad I documented the occasion.

The pancakes themselves were less sweet than a straight forward, all flour recipe, which I really liked.  As evident by my steadfast use of sugar-free syrup despite NOT being diabetic, I don’t like to go overkill on the sweetness (or the calories if I can avoid it). The oatmeal really brings out a whole-grain, wheat flavor that, at the very least, makes it feel like you aren’t pouring sugar into your body in alarming quantities.

It was truly a morning of wonder and endless possibilities as a hoodie I had recently ordered was delivered while the batter was resting. I had received one of those stupid “sorry we missed you” slips on my apartment building door yesterday; few things elicit silent rage like approaching my courtyard and seeing the white paper tacked to the window from a distance when I return from work after a long day. Hey, we all have problems, mine just happen to be both quite banal and benign and I’m thankful for that.

That said, the hoodie is great. I have the exact same one in another color, so I knew I’d love it. Fuck, life is good, right?

It’s about time to start throwing some batter into the fire, as they say and it’s nearly noon. It’s around this time on the weekends I start to crave a beer and since I had already downed a few cups of coffee and had just emptied a Key Lime LaCroix, I took my killer brunch-for-one up a notch with the champagne of beers: Miller High Life. Low on calories, not on flavor, brah. So crisp, so clean.

Beer’s flowing, music’s bumping and I’ve got these little batter babes on blast in the skillet and snapping pictures. Did you know it’s hard to take pictures of food making while you are also the one making food? I had this quick revelation while stirring the reduction and suddenly lifting my spoon hand to hold my camera steady to my face resulting in a caramel coated spoon being stuck in my hair, but at least I got a good picture. I did not repeat the same mistake with the spatula full of pancake batter; you live, you learn.

After staging photos of the finished dish, I ate them all while siting on my kitchen floor in about one minute. I hadn’t planned on housing the whole batch, but got carried away as one does when you haven’t eaten anything that morning aside from a small handful pulled from a large three-pound feed bag of plain (WHY) m&m’s my dad snuck into my bags while visiting at Christmas that has taken me months to put a dent in. So now it’s past noon and I’m staring down a stack of facking pancakes that turned out way better than I imagined and shoveled them all into my maw.

After a beer and mass quantities of pancakes making their way to the base of my belly, the trip to the gym I had planned on for the afternoon slowly faded from my Saturday itinerary. Guess I’ll have another beer, spin some vinyl and compulsively clean my apartment.