Kara & Justin's Brunch Special

After watching the "Brunch Village" episode of Portlandia, we had a craving for marionberry pancakes.  Fortunately, we'd receved half a pint of blackberries in our share, and we had the pancake ingredients on hand.  It may seem complicated, but it's actually quite simple to whip up pancakes from scratch.  We combined components of 2 different recipes, and came up with our own that we're going to share with you:

1 cup flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
3 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
dash nutmeg
1 egg + 1 egg white
2 tbsp canola or vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup blackberries

Mix your dry ingredients and wet ingredients in separate bowls.  For your wet ingredients, give them a good whisk so they get airy and frothy.  This will help give you light and fluffy pancakes.

Once your wet ingredients are well mixed and frothy, add them to your dry ingredients, and mix thoroughly..

Then add in your berries.  We quartered our blackberries so they'd be more evenly distributed throughout our pancakes.  If you don't have blackberries, use whatever you have on hand, blueberries, pecans, chocolate chips, bacon...whatever you like to have in your pancakes.

Now you're ready to cook up some pancakes!  Get your pan nice and hot.  We used a combination of canola oil and butter to grease the pan.  Then just spoon your batter into the pan.  We went for large pancakes, but you can make them any size you like.

Since we could only make 2 at a time, we turned the oven on to warm (about 170 degrees), and popped our cooked pancakes into the oven to stay warm while we cooked the rest.  This full recipe made about a dozen big pancakes.

Fortunately, the pancakes freeze well, and we have some leftover for another weekend.  If you do freeze your extra pancakes, you can simply reheat them in the oven or microwave.

We served them up with some sausage links from our share, and a big cup of coffee. It rivaled any brunch you could get at your local farm-to-table bistro, without waiting in lines, leaving the house, or changing out of our lazy pants!