Pancakes are kind of like dessert, only it’s a main course and you eat it in the morning. So therefore, since these guys paled in comparison to the dessert I did make this week, and since whole wheat pancakes are much more applicable to this blog than Peach-Cornmeal Upside Down Cake, Whip It Up is getting pancakes this time.

My friend Tasneem came to visit (more like “blew into town”) and said “Tomorrow for brunch we need to make these whole wheat pancakes I found on CooksIllustrated.com.” Cook’s Illustrated Dot Com is the best $19.95 I spend all year. It’s like a giant database of amazing stuff from America’s Test Kitchen. Everything is tested within an inch of its life and a lot of it is pretty easy to make.

So while Tasneem slept peacefully on my couch on Saturday morning, I made these pancakes, and she ate them.

Whole Wheat Pancakes
(copied faithfully from Cook’s Illustrated. I didn’t need to change a thing)

Note: I used my powdered buttermilk blend instead of going to the store to buy regular buttermilk, and it was fantastic.

(Cook’s Illustrated’s pithy comments begin now:)

1. Mix dry ingredients in medium bowl. Pour buttermilk and milk into 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Whisk in egg white; mix yolk with melted butter, then stir into milk mixture. Dump wet ingredients into dry ingredients all at once; whisk until just mixed.

2. Meanwhile, heat griddle or large skillet over strong medium-high heat. Brush griddle generously with oil. When water splashed on surface confidently sizzles, pour batter, about 1/4 cup at a time, onto griddle, making sure not to overcrowd. When pancake bottoms are brown and top surface starts to bubble, 2 to 3 minutes, flip cakes and cook until remaining side has browned, 1 to 2 minutes longer. Re-oil the skillet and repeat for the next batch of pancakes.

WIU data:

• Was the recipe easy to follow: You mix one thing and then add another. It could not be easier.
• Did the dish taste good: Delicious, topped with some FOR REAL maple syrup. (The People should never ever buy FOR FAKE maple syrup).
• Would you make it again: I want to make it every day.

I gallantly avoided a Martha-esque alliterative post title here folks. BECAUSE I AM TALKING ABOUT SUMMERTIME SANDWICHES.

After a delicious score from my local CSA of cherry tomatoes and onions — and knowing I had an ass ton of pesto in the freezer — I thought I’d throw together some sort of sandwich for dinner. Also, because I am a little bit sassy, I thought I’d attempt to roast a red pepper.

Now hold on The People, hear me out. I’ve always loved roasted red peppers while hated paying six million dollars for them packed in glass jar filled with oil. I mean how impossible does it sound to roast a red pepper? I sure as shit don’t have a roaster — or whatever.

But imagine my surprise when it turned out to be the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.

How to roast a pepper

1. Turn your oven on to the “broil” setting, it’s like turning your stereo to eleven
2. Put the pepper on a pan of some sort
3. Put the pan in the oven on the top most rack
4. Wait until the pepper looks charred and blistered (like a zombie), about 4 minutes or so
5. Turn the pepper over
6. Wait some more
7. Fin.

I lied, there is one more step. If you like crispity peppers simply peel off the skin — it should slough off as if it had been exposed to a nuclear blast. If you like softer peppers (which I do) throw the pepper(s) into a paper bag and wait until they cool a bit. That is it! They taste awesome! So easy! Hurrah!

After that bit of culinary triumph the sandwich was facile.

Delicious open faced sandwiches

Seriously, this is play it by ear. Here are the critical ingredients:

• Fresh mozzarella, like the kind marinating in what looks like dirty bath water
• Tomatoes
• Bread

I got some nice bread from ET’s which I then covered with a judicious amount of pesto from the freezer (note: olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder would be great too). Then I sliced some of the fresh mozzarella, onions, tomatoes, the roasted red pepper, and layered them up.

Add some fresh basil too, if you’re feeling like it. Ooo maybe some black olives. See, what I’m saying is follow your heart.

WIU Data

• Was the recipe easy to follow: Yes because I made it up. I’m telling you people: roast a red pepper right now. It is so easy and you will feel like a genius. Also this type of fresh vegetable and cheese sandwich is easy, filling, and good for you. It is The People’s Trifecta.
• Did the dish taste good: Heck yeah. Nothing beats tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella on a hot day. Nothing.
• Would you make it again: Duh. I might even make it again this week if I don’t run out of tomatoes.

I canceled my Amazon Prime membership yesterday, and it was a sad day, yet a happy one. I’m so committed to trying to save money that I actually banned myself from buying any cookbooks. DVDs and CDs were banned long ago, novels I can get from the library, but cookbooks…I can’t have enough. I figured Amazon Prime enabled me too much, so I canned it. I’d be more upset if I hadn’t really discovered the magic of…

FOOD PERIODICALS!

Here is why I’m convinced they help you save money on groceries:

1. You pay maybe $15 a year (and you can be smart about waiting for a good renewal price to come along) to basically get a cookbook delivered to your house every month. I got a lot of my new periodicals through weird rebate offers (read the fine print) and with my Delta SkyMiles that I will now never use because I need about five trillion in order to get a flight out of it.
2. The issues are timely, so that means they will most likely involve a lot of seasonal produce, which both reminds you what that month’s bumper crops actually are and inspires you to make delicious things out of it.
3. If you’ve been a subscriber for a few years, you can sort through all of the corresponding back issues for that season. This is fantastic for holidays, summer, any month, really. I sort my food magazines by month - all the Januaries, then all the Februaries, and so on.
4. Getting something new in the mail has a refreshing psychological effect on me, I don’t know about you. I am more likely to make recipes from this month’s issue of Everyday Food than I am from the actual Everyday Food cookbook I have. I honestly believe that my various fun food magazines that get delivered to my door save me from going out to eat due to severe cooking ennui.

So which ones to get, you say?

I have gone through a bunch in my time. I’ve gotten Martha Stewart Living for years, canceled recently because I got tired of articles about napping and attaching grosgrain ribbon to my pillowcases, then figured out I could get two free years from Delta. It has some good recipes but isn’t quite for the people. Martha’s smaller, simpler, cheaper, wonderful publication, Everyday Food, is my favorite. And I’m not the only one.

Cook’s Illustrated is fantastic because, while some of the recipes can get labor intensive, they explain everything to you thoroughly, and because they keep telling you the science behind everything, you are becoming a better cook through understanding the process, and will be able to improvise more later on. They also rate ingredients and equipment and have saved me money on many a thing for my kitchen.

I did some research on health-themed magazines and settled on EatingWell. Cooking Light and Prevention are also supposed to be good, but something about both of them gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I used to get Gourmet, and it’s just not for me. It’s interesting reading about people who make soy sauce milkshakes or whatever, but I need to be shown something simple yet interesting, so that I will be motivated to go to Kroger and spend a little money on ingredients. I have enough fancy cookbooks to give me years worth of material when I want a complicated project.

Any good periodicals (or ways to get them cheaply) to pursue or bad periodicals to avoid?