Just 10 days out to Thanksgiving, by far my favorite holiday because all that’s expected is a fully-flavorful meal and being together with family and friends.
At the same time, I know from my own experience that laying down a Thanksgiving dinner for those same family and friends, especially if it’s your first time around, can be stressful. The goal here is to provide straight-forward stress-relief, which you can access by:
clicking this link or the tab above labeled Thanksgiving Help for a Thanksgiving dinner planning and timing guide and uniquely easy to follow step-by-step picture book recipes that show how to make roast turkey, turkey gravy, mashed potatoes, bread stuffing, apple pie, and fresh whipped cream and more.
getting your own first-of-a-kind Stress-Free, Quick & Easy Thanksgiving Dinner video/picture ebook for $2.99 (it’s extraordinarily affordably priced, especially these days, to make it as widely accessible as possible). Click this link to a short video trailer about the ebook. The ebook itself is available at:
Last post showed how to make scrambled pancakes, which are really just modified scrambled eggs with pumped up flavor (flavor rules!) and nutrition.
This post shows how to take those scrambled pancakes from simple to exciting…
…using only “commonly” found ingredients, like those shown below. I put commonly in parentheses because ingredients that might be common to me – or anyone else in particular – might not be common to you. As always, what you see below are only suggestions to stir up your imagination and give you a sense of technique. Use any added ingredients you want to take your scrambled pancakes from simple to exciting.
With your portion of scrambled pancakes in a bowl either fresh off the stove or warmed in the microwave oven, start topping with a good spoonful of peanut, almond or any nut butter (to make your own in advance, click this link), a good spoon of jam (honey or maple syrup), and 1-2 tablespoons of yogurt (I like non-fat Greek yogurt for its flavor and potent protein content).
Add your choice of quickly rinsed fresh fruit. I’m using pitted fresh cherries (in the winter, from Chile – killer flavor and crisp crunch!) and blueberries.
Add any dried fruit – optional but something I always do. I’m using chopped dried dates, but you can substitute with raisins, dried cranberries, dried prunes – you get the idea.
Finish off with a good shot of kefir, whipped cream or anything you like.
And that is all there is to taking easy, completely improvised scrambled pancakes from simple to exciting, also by improvising to satisfy your drive for full on flavor.
As I mentioned in the last post, that you see above just as is powered me through the 40 mile bike ride shown below at a decent pace – no problem at all, except for keeping up with Josh, Greg and hammer-fast Juan.
The other day I wanted something a little different for breakfast with flavor and substance to power me through a good late winter Hickory, NC, group bike ride. Here’s what I came up with. I call it scrambled pancake because I used most of the ingredients I use to make a fruit pancake but scrambled the batter like scrambled eggs.
These are the ingredients that I mixed in the bowl you see at the bottom of the picture below.
Those ingredients and rough proportions are (no need to measure precisely: with these ingredients, your result will turn out great): 2 eggs, dash of salt, good shake of ground cinnamon, about 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1 big tablespoon of each: ground flaxseed, cooked quinoa (the red grains in the square container above the butter), cooked steel cut oats (the white grains in the square container between the vanilla extract), and a handful of raisins.
Of course, as an improvised recipe, which is just a guide, and I was using what I already had in the fridge, specifically regarding the quinoa and steel cut oats. I can imagine you don’t have those – and possibly not ground flaxseed also – ready to grab and go. No problem: just substitute any or all the grains above with any favorite cooked or ready to eat grain, like cold oat cereal, granola or wheat germ. Your imagination is your only limit.
Here’s how to cook what you’ve mixed.
Add about as much butter as you see above to a frying pan warmed to the same temperature needed to make scrambled or fried eggs. Add and spread the batter, and give the pan a good back and forth shuffle like you see in the last picture above to “encourage” the batter not to stick to the pan surface.
After a 1-3 minutes, when the bottom of the cooked batter looks lightly browned like the top photo above, use a spatula to turn the batter. Don’t worry about trying to turn it all in one piece. (I tried doing that myself – and failed with a smile). Then use the spatula to break and turn the batter, like you would do to make scrambled eggs, until it is cooked through as shown below.
You can then scoop what you’ve cooked into a bowl and add whatever you want want: maple syrup, honey, jam, peanut or any nut butter, yogurt, whipped cream – anything. Next post, I’ll show what I added to make what you see below that easily sustained me for 40 miles on the bike, no problem.
This piece is really about improvising on the fly to meet the flavor you want at a particular time. Here’s an example. This morning I woke up wanting some chocolate in my coffee. I love those two flavors together – and wanted to brew them together as easily as possible.
I pulled these three ingredients together – easy: cacao powder (you can substitute that with cocoa powder – the two are quite different), sugar (I’m using coconut sugar, but any sugar will work) and salt.
To make 4 “cups” of cacao coffee (4 cups = 12 ounces of coffee in my coffee machine), I added 1 piled teaspoon of cacao powder, 1 teaspoon sugar and a dash of salt directly into the coffee carafe.
I put the carafe in the coffee maker and brewed. For added help to make freshly brewed coffee, click this link for easy to follow “Great Coffee Made Easy” picture book directions.
When the coffee was just about done brewing, I mixed equal parts half and half and coconut water and warmed them for 50 seconds in the microwave oven. (I added coconut water for just a bit of added flavor and added potassium to prep for a good crunch on the bike.)
As soon as the coffee finished brewing, I stirred the cacao mix, poured the hot cacao coffee to together with the freshly warmed half and half and coconut water, and…
…added a good shot of freshly made whipped cream, which you can learn how to make very easily by clicking this link.
Next post: what I ate with the cacao coffee to ride 40 miles at a good pace without feeling hungry at all along the way.
Last post showed how to microwave oven cook quinoa. Like rice and pasta, quinoa, with it’s nutty flavor and snap-and-pop texture is incredibly versatile
Here’s one of my favorite fast and flavorful quinoa meals: microwave cooked quinoa Alfredo, Read more »
Want fuel move your body: prep for a good ride on the bike, run, workout, or to feel fully alive to start your day? Oatmeal’s a great favorite of mine – packed with complex flavorful carbs and fiber, and both those attributes can be well enhanced if you oppose them (i.e. supplement them) with protein or healthy fat.
More about opposing real soon. But first, click the picture above to learn how to cook oatmeal as quickly and easily as possible and that means cooking it in the microwave oven.
The most important tip regarding spinach is that the less you cook it, the more you retain its flavor, texture, and terrific nutritional value – high in the oil soluble vitamins A, E and K and water soluble vitamins B2, B6 and C as well as rich iron and magnesium content. There’s just no comparison between quickly cooked fresh spinach and spinach that’s been cooked to a very distasteful mushy mass. (My favorite source for spinach’s nutrition and health benefits is The World’s Healthiest Foods: http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=43)
The second most important tip: to avoid an unpleasant crunch on the sandy soil spinach grows in, always give fresh spinach a Read more »
Years ago I put together what I thought was the most stress-free roast turkey picture book recipe available. That recipe produced terrifically tender results because it required roasting the turkey at consistently high heat (450℉/230℃) mostly with the bird in a breast-side down position. Leaving the the turkey breast-side down for most of the roasting time protects the more delicate breast meat from direct heat and also allows the fat in turkey’s legs and thighs to baste the rest of the bird naturally by gravity. That technique, though, has two significant drawbacks: high heat roasting works well only for turkeys weighing up to 15 pounds and consistent high heat roasting temperature creates a lot of smoke in the kitchen. Read more »
The toughest part about roasting butternut squash, if you want it in cubed shaped pieces the way you see above, is removing the outer skin as shown in the picture below. After removing the skin (I recommend using a tougher vegetable peeler than the weak and worthless one you see here), roasting is the easiest, most flavorful way I know to prepare butternut squash.
It’s all about not giving up, being flexible, and staying calm – and, you bet, that’s sometimes a lot easier said than done. And while some cooking mistakes are better to walk away from; burned chocolate is a great example – here’s an example of a cooking mistake that turned out tasting great.
I’d recently intended to make a mixed berry fruit pancake that was supposed to look like this…
November 15th, 2021 
