Hash Browns and Pancakes

Even though it was a Saturday, I woke up early and got started on breakfast. Last night's chicken fail left me pretty hungry. And I wanted to make it up to Sarah with a nice breakfast. This, I thought, would be a good opportunity to use a Christmas gift I got from my mother-in-law, a double burner skillet pan. To best utilize the extra real estate that this skillet pan would provide, I decided that I would make some pancakes and some hash browns.

Typically, Sarah and I go out for breakfast on the weekends. The Grove Restaurant is my usual spot. It is a reasonable facsimile to a New Jersey diner, which makes me happy. And they have breakfast sandwiches and Diet Coke, which makes Sarah happy. The servers there are nice and recognize us. The owners are Russian, I think, and it's a family business. The hostess is usually one of the daughters of the family, depending on which of them isn't pregnant.

When we eat breakfast at home, it always consists of some eggs, turkey something, potatoes, and a bread. Lately, we've been making some really nice biscuits from scratch. But today was skillet day. And I was going to make pancakes.

Thing is, I do not know how to make pancakes. Fortunately, we had some Bisquick. I looked at the box and decided to halve the recipe. I hate it when there's a ton of pancakes left over. It seems like such a waste. If you cut the Bisquick recipe in half, it makes six small pancakes, which is a good amount for two people.

To go with the pancakes, I decided to make some hash browns. For something as conceptually basic as shredded potatoes, there are a lot of recipes out there. I ultimately decided to use a box grater to shred the potatoes. I used a couple of medium red potatoes. This was a bad idea. When they hit the shredder, they turned into a wet mush. I even tried to dry up the potatoes a little bit by squeezing them in a paper towel. But it didn't really help. I think it was a starchiness thing. The potatoes just never really crisped up like I wanted them to. They looked good though.

Turkey something is also a breakfast staple for us. This time, I made turkey bacon. Other times, we have turkey kielbasa or turkey sausage. Sarah likes the turkey something. I have grown accustomed to it.

I would rather just have regular breakfast sausage patties. But making breakfast sausage patties just seems too annoying of a breakfast activity. I make the turkey bacon in the microwave.

Making breakfast is something I love to do. But whenever I make a big breakfast, it only validates the fact that I should never work in a professional kitchen. It's just breakfast, but it drives me insane. I think it's the challenge of trying to get everything cooked and plated at the same time is what gets me. I like hot food. Getting everything ready at the same time so that it's all hot is difficult for me, for some reason.

We sat down to eat the pancakes, and they were decent. A little dougy. Since we don't really eat pancakes, we didn't have any syrup. Instead, I took out all the random jellies that we have in the fridge. Sarah has a tendency of, when she travels, she comes back with some sort of jam. We had pancakes that day with blueberry jam from maine, apple butter from iowa, and smuckers strawberry jelly from the store. And peanut butter.

We used to have some sort of boysenberry jelly, but I think I threw it away.