Pancakes for Thanksgiving

    2020 has been a challenge by anyone's standards.  We had planned to roast half a turkey that we had bought from a local farmer in October.  Harvest would have made cranberry sauce, or our friends would have brought some.  We would have made mashed potatoes with the potatoes we grew this year.  I would have baked homemade rolls and cooked a vegetable, and someone would have a brought dessert, or more than one.  Wine would have been part of the celebration as well.

    Of course, the usual feast and the number of guests were reduced because of COVID.  And reduced.  And reduced again.  We were down to two guests; then one.  To our distress, that last guest was diagnosed with COVID and went into hospital the day before Thanksgiving, so we decided that we would wait to have Thanksgiving until she was well again when we would truly have something to be thankful for.  

    That left just the two of us.  With a broken wrist to contend with (read the next post to find out about that), I was going to be useless in the kitchen, so we decided on waffles and latkes for dinner instead.  This turned out to be a fine idea, and by sheer coincidence our meals that day were all based on the theme of pancakes.

     Harvest started our day with homemade crumpets.  Crumpets, as some of you may know, are a form of thick pancake baked in a ring on a hot griddle.  When done properly, the batter is full of air bubbles which pop to form little craters which are perfect for holding butter.  Harvest has made these before, but they've never come out quite right.  However, she found a recipe from Warburton's, the largest maker of crumpets in the UK,  and decided to try it.  They were wonderful!  They reminded me of the crumpets I had eaten as child, and my English dad would have been delighted.  Harvest served them with honey butter.  Delicious!  I don't know how many she made, but they were gone by lunchtime.

    By dinnertime, after a couple of rounds of Mah Johngg which Harvest is teaching me,  I started firing up Milly, our wood cookstove, so that she would be good and hot by the time Harvest was ready to cook the waffles and latkes.  Harvest made the latkes with potatoes and onions from our garden and eggs from the chickens.

The secret to good latkes is to grate the potatoes, dump them into a cloth, and squeeze out the starch.

     

    Now, it wouldn't be Thanksgiving if there wasn't some glitch in the kitchen.  I had put the waffle iron on the stove to heat too early, and the oil on the waffle iron began to smoke.  While we didn't have huge clouds of smoke billowing through the kitchen,  there was enough that it required us to open the windows, and I waved away at the smoke one-handed with an L.L. Bean catalog while Harvest finished preparing the latke mixture.  We were lucky: it was above freezing outside, and the heat from the fire in the stove made the kitchen pretty comfortable even with the windows open. 

    

    Despite the interruption, the latkes were done perfectly.  Cooking on a wood cookstove is a wonderful experience, and there will be future posts to tell you all about it.  We accompanied the latkes with sour cream and applesauce.  I laid the table with the good Spode china and our fancy silverware, lit the oil lamp, and we sat down to a simple but tasty meal.  

    And what happened to the waffles, you might ask?  We decided to save them for another day.  One can only handle so much cooking this year.