Look, I’m going to level with you. These are pretty pictures I took last weekend, on a Sunday morning, after I’d made coffee for myself and read the Sunday New York Times and decided I wanted some breakfast. In the refrigerator, I had leftover English Porridge from April Bloomfield’s cookbook, with its great salty sweet kick. Instead of heating it back up, I thought: “What if I turn it into pancakes? Oatmeal pancakes?” Seemed reasonable enough.
Here’s the oatmeal, cold out of the fridge:
I didn’t really follow a recipe; I just whisked in two eggs:
Then added about a cup of flour, some salt, and some baking powder:
Here’s what my oatmeal pancake batter looked like:
It was wet but I figured “pancake batter is normally wet” so I didn’t worry about that. Then I heated some butter in a non-stick skillet and got busy. I scooped the batter into the hot butter with an ice cream scoop:
I flattened the pancakes with a rubber spatula and flipped them after a few minutes:
They look pretty, right? I acknowledge that. As Craig’s mom would say, I got “a good do on them.”
Here they are on a plate, topped with lots of good maple syrup:
You would think this post has a triumphant ending: “I improvised oatmeal pancakes and they came out better than if I’d followed a recipe!”
Instead, though, here’s what happened: I cut into a pancake and the inside was chunky, mushy oatmeal gunk. Like, it didn’t become a solid pancake, it was like a mushy oatmeal-filled pancake.
Which, actually, didn’t taste half bad. Maybe if I advertised them as “oatmeal-filled pancakes” I could rave about them. But who wants an oatmeal-filled pancake? No one I know.
Still, I ate them and enjoyed them. But I wouldn’t make them again. And you probably don’t want to make them either.
