Breakfast the Mrs Heather-worth's way

It's no secret that Dave and I love breakfast. We eat breakfast for breakfast and we eat breakfast for dinner - lunch is really the only meal where we actually eat normal food on a consistent basis. Eggs and toast, waffles, french toast, pancakes, cereal, oatmeal, granola - we love it all! But eating locally and making things from scratch has resulted in taking a step back to examine what is in the food we WERE eating and then figuring out how to make it ourselves. For instance, pancake syrup. Ever read the ingredient list? That ever faithful diet menace, high fructose corn syrup, is FIRST ON THE LIST! Yikes! And pancake mix? I don't even want to talk about that ingredient list. Yuk!

So this week, we decided it was time to try our hand at syrup. We got a recipe from Dave's mom who made it routinely when he was a kid...

1 c. granulated sugar

1/2 c. brown sugar

1 c. water

1 tsp maple flavoring

Combine both sugars and water in a saucepan. Bring to boiling. Lower heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes. Add maple flavoring. Allow to cool completely and store in air tight container (we used an old syrup bottle - can you tell?)

Now it didn't turn out as thick as I thought it would be but maybe I didn't boil it long enough. Does anyone know? It sure does have a nice flavor though, it was super easy to make, incredibly cheap, and it made the house smell fantastic!

Of course then we were just FORCED to make something to go with the syrup (that sucks, right?). So I made some of my whole wheat and oatmeal pancakes. I start off with the quaker oatmeal recipe here, but I use whole wheat flour instead of white, and I use 1-1/2 c. whole milk instead of 1-1/4 c. skim. The batter comes out really thick and doesn't really spread on its own when it hits the hot pan, but I manually spread it out a bit with a spatula and it turns out just right.  

So those are my favorite flapjacks. Dave likes the more traditional ones.  We haven't tried it yet, but we're going to go with Alton Brown's recipe for instant pancake mix (how can you go wrong with Alton Brown? I mean he was the one who first told me to use a heating pad for my yogurt incubator). Did you check out that recipe? Looks pretty good huh?  

So that's the latest and greatest for breakfast at Mrs. Heather-worths. Let's dig in!