Sunday morning pancakes are a veritable tradition around here. My favorite pancake recipe is adapted from my mom’s dirty, won, old Betty Crocker cookbook. I make the basic buttermilk pancake recipe then add blueberries and cinnamon.
Dry ingredients
Today I decided to try out Martha’s Blueberry Cornmeal Pancakes (Martha Stewart Living June, p. 24 – would someone PLEASE ask the folks at MSLO to get all the magazine recipes up on their site?? There’s no link for you on this one unfortunately, but if you need the recipe, email me).
The first crisis was that the daughter ate all the blueberries I had bought for this. So off the store went Mr. MarthaAndMe. The recipe calls for a pint. He came home with one of those little half pint containers. That was ok though, since the kids don’t like blueberries in their pancakes, so I made half with and half without.
The recipe is straightforward – cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, egg, milk, buttermilk and melted butter. This batter is very wet. The first batch I made was without blueberries. The pancakes I am used to making firm up very nicely and flip easily. Not so much for Martha. I put the first batch on (sans blueberries) and when I went to flip them they were wet and heavy. One ended up on the floor. I managed to pick up the big pieces and the dogs happily cleaned up the rest.
Clean up crew
The second batch had blueberries and they held together a bit better. These took a looongggg time to cook though, I think because there is so much liquid in the batter. We waited and waited and waited some more and finally they were done.
I forgot to mention that Martha says to serve these with Orange Maple Butter (butter, OJ, syrup, and orange zest) as well as syrup. That was quick to whip up 
while the pancakes were cooking (and cooking and cooking).
Ok, now for the taste test. These were great! I have to admit I was totally unsure about the cornmeal in the recipe but it was a really interesting flavor to add to it. They reminded me a bit of Paula Deen’s Hoe Cakes (which I adore). I thought I was going to miss cinnamon, since I always add cinnamon to my blueberry pancakes, but I didn’t even think about it. The orange maple butter added an interesting layer of citrus flavor that I really liked.
Thumbs up on this recipe!
Posted by Brette Sember 
The steaks grilled up nicely and the marinade gave it a nice flavor. I think I would probably add some herbs to this next time – maybe some thyme. I would also use more garlic and more lemon juice. It just needs a little something extra. It was good, but not fabulous.
So there I was on a Friday night, making cream puffs. I’ve never made cream puffs before. They were a little more complicated than I expected. First you cook sugar, water, butter and salt and then you add flour and cook it again. Once that’s done you beat in eggs. You know it’s ready when you can touch it and take your finger away and a string follows your finger. I was worried it wasn’t going to work, but it did. It was quite similar to Gougere, an hors d’oevres I’ve made often.
on the baking sheet. Piffle. I just used a spoon. And really, that worked out quite well. The recipe says it makes 10 but I was able to get 12.
the next day. They did get a tiny bit mushy I think, so eat them the same day if you can.
I folded the whipped cream with the curd and voila! Lemon mousse. I filled the cream puffs with the mousse and was getting ready to put the blueberry sauce on them. My son asked me not to put sauce on his. My father overheard this and asked for me to do the same thing for his.
The first step is to cook onions, garlic and spinach. I bought frozen spinach so I didn’t have to wilt my spinach. The recipe calls for a white onion, but I had some red onion hanging around so I used that up.
You lay out a sheet, brush it with butter, then put another sheet on top. It’s not hard to work with if you are careful when moving the sheets of phyllo since they can rip.
Once you’ve got it sealed shut, you cut some diagonal slices on it to make it look pretty.
I went to a craft store and bought ink and rice paper. I had a little brush already. I took it with us. We caught a lot of fish, but since bass season has not started yet, we couldn’t keep those big fish. We did catch a lot of little sunfish though and we kept some to eat for lunch. One of the fish we set aside for the print.
ink on it and pressed the rough side of the rice paper onto it (hoping that was the right side!). The first one wasn’t great and I quickly learned to use a very light coating of ink. The next few turned out really well. I am definitely going to frame one and hang it up at the lake.
I want to try this again with a really big fish once they are in season and we can keep them, so I left all the supplies at the lake. I’m going to buy some other colors of ink so that I can do a multi-colored print as well.
Once everything was cooked, I assembled the sandwich and the salad and we were ready to eat.
have taken it once we cut it into sections. I am not usually a fan of onion and pickle on sandwiches, but I went with it. This sandwich was good. However, I think the chicken needs to marinate in the mustard mix longer than half an hour. I didn’t really taste mustard at all. I liked the onion and pickles on the sandwich. Martha has you spread creme fraiche on the bread instead of mayo. There was not much noticeable difference, I didn’t think. And in fact no one noticed it was not mayo. I do have to say, I don’t care for sandwiches on big hard pieces of bread like this. It’s just too hard to bite into. I would enjoy this much more on a roll.
And finally, the tomato salad. This was good. Nothing wild or exciting, but good. I often make simple tomato salads like this in the summer. I expected the garlic pieces to be more flavorful, so that was a little disappointing.
First I boiled the potatoes, then I started creating the hash. First step was to saute the chicken, then the potatoes. Take those out and cook scallion, jalapeno, and then corn kernels. I liked cooking the corn – watching the kernels get brown and listening to some of them pop. Next you add cherry tomatoes, then stock, seasoning and chicken. Add the potatoes back in at the end. It seems like a quick dish but in reality it took quite a while to cook all the separate parts. My corn took much longer to cook than the recipe said.
It was also good reheated the next day. I wasn’t thrilled with how it looked – like a pile of food on your plate, but it had nice flavors.
I made Martha’s strawberry shortcake cookies. This involved cutting up lots of strawberries into tiny little pieces which wasn’t too enjoyable but I dealt with it all right. Some of Martha’s descriptions of what the dough should look like at certain stages was a little misleading and she had me a little nervous when she told me I was supposed to have coarse crumbs and I really didn’t. I kept going though and everything turned out fine. They took a really long time to bake – almost half an 
hour – but I didn’t really mind that. They tasted more like a biscuit than a cookie. Maybe a little more sugar could have solved that problem? Overall they weren’t terrible and I would probably make them again.
said they needed whipped cream. They were really an interesting cookie that did not taste at all like a cookie.
she had not. So I took one cookie out and left it the car and photographed it when I got home!
Martha and Me 