Currant Cottage Cheese Pancakes

Blueberry pancakes are an iconic breakfast staple, sacred Americana, hazy dream of cold cereal eaters everywhere. But blueberries bleed into tart, black puddles. They sog out pancakes that you were very careful to fluff. And they don’t go all that well with maple.

Deborah Madison, who’s best known for her vegetarian cookbooks, came up with a better idea in The Savory Way, her book dedicated to better home cooking with readily available staples. Tiny dried currants, when plumped up first in hot water (or something stronger) and added generously to a batter, do very good things for a pancake. They thread and disperse seamlessly into the cakes, adding moisture and subtle winey sweetness without spilling out of their skins and flooding the crumb like a sloppy-drunk blueberry would. (For the solution to sloppy-drunk blueberry pie.)

Cottage cheese and sour cream give the pancakes even more delicate buoyancy. (Even if you don’t understand cottage cheese as a snack, you will understand it in pancake form.) Madison suggests serving with powdered sugar and lemon, but a good smear of salted butter is another fitting option.

Makes about 20 (3-inch/7.5cm) pancakes

1 cup (145g) dried currants or raisins

1 cup (225g) cottage cheese, dry-curd if possible

1 cup (230g) sour cream, plus more to serve

5 large eggs

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 teaspoon grated lemon zest

Several gratings of nutmeg

1 tablespoon sugar

1 cup (125g) unbleached all-purpose flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

Butter, for frying

Confectioners’ sugar and lemon, for serving (optional)

1 Unless the currants are soft, cover them with very hot water and set them aside to plump while you make the batter.

2 Whisk the cottage cheese and sour cream together; then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Stir in the vanilla, lemon zest, nutmeg, and sugar; then add the flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir gently to combine without overmixing

3 Melt a tablespoon of butter in a wide frying pan and, when it’s hot, drop in the batter by the spoonful. Cook over medium heat until browned on the bottom, then flip once and cook until lightly colored on the other side.

4 Serve the pancakes with confectioners’ sugar and a wedge of lemon, plus extra sour cream if desired.

Potato Scallion Cakes

It’s not hard to find sweet baking recipes that take advantage of leftover mashed potatoes. But the seasoning complicates matters: You can’t put last night’s garlic mash into chocolate cake or doughnuts. Or, at least, you shouldn’t. Casual bread bakers might work their clumpy potato remnants into flatbreads or country loaves; I bet they’ve saved the potato cooking water, too. Good for them! But the rest of us want something simpler, something we’d actually be ready to cook the day after a big feast—something that could work with any family’s mashed potato dregs, and make them feel new. Maybe something that would go really well with fried eggs.

I found the solution in cookbook author Bert Greene’s fritterra—mashed potatoes seasoned and shaped into a cake, then griddled, like you’ve probably seen before, but with a few smart improvements. “It was a gift from a taxi driver,” Greene writes in the recipe’s headnote, “who related it in pieces—each time we stopped for a light.”

He uses a lot of scallions, but briefly boils them first—a quick extra step that packs in fresh greenness without the bite of raw alliums. And to bind the cakes, Greene uses bread crumbs instead of flour because they don’t go gummy when introduced to liquid and are much more forgiving. These upgrades make for an altogether lighter than average potato cake, and therefore a reasonable postfeast breakfast (or lunch, or dinner)

Serves 4

12 whole scallions, bulbs and green tops

2 large eggs, lightly beaten
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt (see Genius Tips)
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup (15g) fresh bread crumbs
1½ cups (315g) cold mashed potatoes
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1.Wash and trim the scallions, leaving about 2 inches (5cm) of green stems. Cook in boiling water until tender, about 5 minutes. Drain and finely chop.

2. Place the scallions in a bowl. Add the eggs, nutmeg, salt, pepper to taste, bread crumbs, and mashed potatoes. Mix well.

3. Heat the oils in a large skillet until hot but not smoking. Shape the onion-potato mixture into patties, using 2 rounded tablespoons of the mixture for each patty. Fry about six at a time until golden brown on both sides, 2 or 3 minutes per side. Keep warm while frying the remaining patties. Serve warm.

GENIUS TIPS

Chop the blanched scallions finely, or the cakes will break along scallion fault lines as they fry. And don’t be shy with the heat; searing them quickly helps hold the loose batter together—this will keep you from adding too many bread crumbs, which, after a certain point, you will regret.

Depending on what you’ve already got in your mashed potatoes, you may not need much salt, if any. If you want to be safe, undersalt the mix at first and fry off a tiny test cake, then adjust accordingly.

Chocolate Muscovado Banana Cake

Breakfast pastries are essentially pie, scones might as well be cookies, and—let’s face it—banana bread is really just cake. At least this breakfast cake has a whole lot of banana in it.

Cookbook author and Observer columnist Nigel Slater shows us that to make the best cake, we need to treat it as such. Unlike most banana bread recipes that call for simply stirring in oil or melted butter, his tells us to cream butter and sugar to give it loft and a sturdy, crunchy crust. He also uses muscovado (or dark brown sugar) to twist a pleasant, standard sweetness into a deep caramel thrum, which, rather than obscuring the banana flavor, gets it all riled up (think bananas Foster). With all that banana and moist, molasses-rich sugar, the cake is even better on days two and three.

I stand by the assertion that this is no less healthy, and no less breakfast, than any other banana bread. Think of this as the treat you bring to the office, on road trips, or for holiday brunch—or, if you’re like me, as a sensible alternative to the Danish at the coffee shop.

Makes 1 loaf cake

2 cups (250g) all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ cup (125g) butter, softened

1 cup plus 1 tablespoon (235g) muscovado sugar

14 ounces (400g) ripe bananas (peeled weight), about 3 medium bananas

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 large eggs

3½ ounces (100g) dark chocolate

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). You will need a nonstick loaf pan approximately 9½ by 5 by 3 inches (24 by 12 by 8cm) deep, lined with parchment paper. Sift the flour and baking powder together.

2. Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar together till light, fluffy, and pale coffee colored. 

3. Put the bananas in a bowl and mash them with a fork. The mixture should be lumpy rather than crushed to a puree. Stir in the vanilla. Beat the eggs lightly with a fork, then beat them into the butter and sugar mixture. Introduce a spoonful of the measured flour at any sign of curdling. Chop the chocolate into small pieces—about the size of fine gravel—and fold them and the bananas into the butter and sugar mixture. Gently fold in the flour and baking powder.

4. Scrape the mixture into the lined loaf pan and bake for about 50 minutes, or until a metal skewer inserted into the center of the cake comes out moist but clean. If there is any sign of wet cake batter, return the cake to the oven for a few more minutes, covering the surface with foil. Leave the cake in its pan to settle for 15 minutes or so, then loosen the sides with a thin spatula and carefully lift out of the pan with the parchment paper liner. Leave to cool a little longer, then carefully peel off the paper. Serve cool, in thick slices.

GENIUS TIP

If you’re coming up shy on the banana, you can scrape the insides of the peels for a bit more matter. It might look a little stringy, but break it up enough and it’s as good as any banana, melting softly into the crumb.