Making breakiast fun

The first meal of the day should be vvaueee wes te

MANY PEOPLE believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Yet most of us eat the same thing every morning. This can be incredibly boring as well as unhealthy. Breakfast can be a fun meal if you're willing to be a bit creative in the kitchen.

The following recipes should help get you out of your early- morning rut.

BACON WITH CREAM SAUCE (Serves 4)

This dish is from New Hamp- shire. My friends there told me they had this for breakfast often.

While I don’t want you eating bacon every morning, there is something to be said for a few slices of old-fashioned cured New England bacon.

12 strips of pan-fried or micro- waved bacon

4 slices of toast

Cream sauce (recipe below)

The cream sauce can be made a day or two ahead and then warm- ed in the microwave in no time.

Place three strips of bacon on each piece of toast. Top with the cream sauce. Then pour black coffee and open the windows so you can smell-the fresh New Hampshire air. (This works best if you are in New Hampshire!).

CREAM SAUCE

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons peeled and chopped yellow onion .3 tablespoons flour

2 cups hot mik

Y% teaspoon paprika

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Tabasco (optional)

1 tablespoon dry sherry

In a heavy saucepan melt the butter and saute the yellow onion until clear. Stir in the flour with a whisk and then the hot milk, stirr- ing all the time until the mixture thickens. I heat my milk in the microwave.

When the mixture is thick, add the remaining ingredients and heat for a moment. _

PEANUT BUTTER WAFFLES

(makes 4-5 waffles) . We would often have waffles for breakfast when I was a child. I have the recipe Mom used to use, but mine were never quite as crisp and wonderful. ! finally fig-

‘Myster

Inquisitive Cook

ANNE SUE GARDINER WILSON

Le na aes

THE FRUGAL GOURMET

ured out what was wrong.

Mom always used an old- fashioned electric waffle iron, the kind to which the first waffle always stuck. It never failed.

Now we have a Teflon-coated waffle and nothing sticks -—- and the waffles are always soggy. If

* you can, find an old waffle iron

at a garage sale and clean it. Spray it with cooking spray and you will have no problem —- and the waffles will crunch.

1% cups all-purpose ficur

2 teaspoons baking powder

Ys teaspoon salt

T tablespoon sugar

3 egg yolks, beaten

4 tablespoons melted butter or oi] 1M cups milk

3 egg whites, beaten until stiff

4 tablespoons peanut butter

4 tablespoons hot tap water

Mix the dry ingredients together. 1 use my electric mixer for this.

Mix the egg yolks, melted butter or oil and milk together and blend into the: dry mixture. Do not overmix. Fold in, most gently, the beaten egg whites.

Blend the peanut butter and water in a cup and stir with a table fork. When smooth, add mixture to batter..

FRIED CORNMEAL MUSH

I remember my father making this dish when I was a boy. He had eaten it often as a child and I could not understand why he would be cooking something that marked difficult times in his

youth,

I asked him why and he replied, “Because I can.**

There is something very impor- tant about choosing to eat foods from times in which you had few or not choices at all. Dad’s younger brother Dale told me he remembers Thanksgiving dinners at which fried cornmeal mush was served — and nothing else.

I enjoyed the dish very much. Make it for your kids now and then. | think they will get a kick out of history on the table for breakfast.

Make a baich of Hasty Pudding (recipe below) and add 4 table- spoons of flour to the mixture. Whip it in, in a hurry.

Pour the mush into an oiled loaf pan and chill overnight.

In the morning slice the cold mush % inch thick and fry it in oil, butter, bacon fat or a mixture of same. Fry it slowly until it iskes on a golden and crunchy crust. This will take some time, about 15 minutes on each side. No, this is not an instant break fast.

My friend Beatrice in St. Paul tells me that I should always flour the slices before frying. She’s right. They brown evenly and taste wonderful.

Serve with butter and maple syrup. :

HASTY PUDDING (serves 4-5 as a side dish) 6 cups boiling water 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup yellow cornmeal

Bring the water to a rapid boil in a heavy covered pot. Add the salt and slowly add the meal to the boiling water, stirring all the time. I use a wire whisk for this.

Continue stirring until the corn- meal thickens, avout 5 minutes. Turn the heat down low and cover the pot.

Continue to simmer lightly, stirring the pudding several times, for 30 minutes more.

HOMINY

Hominy consists of dried corn kernels that have been treated with lime or lye so that the germs and hulis are removed. It is ground by Indians in the Southwest for making tortillas and it is cooked whole by the Indians in the Great Lakes and New England regions.

NEWS photo Cindy Goodman

MANY OF us'eat the same thing every morning. even though breakfast is considered the most important meal of the day.

Southwest Indians also: cook it with meats in a wonderful stew. Long [Islanders claim their own version of broken hominy called samp.

You can find this American food product in some specialty supermarkets, in Latin American markets and in some health food stores. I dislike the canned varie- ty, preferring to cook my own from the dried-corn product.

Canned hominy tastes like a can. What else can I say?

To cook hominy, soak the dried product overnight in ample water. Then simmer, covered, for 3 hours,

maybe more, until it is”

greatly puf fed and tender.

You will have to keep checking on the water content throughout this process. You will need to add more water. You may wish .to add some salt to the water when cook- ing.

Plan on % cup uncooked hominy for each serving. Cooked the day before and refrigerated, it becomes an easy dish to warm.

HOMINY AND EGGS This is common in the Ameri- can south and is really quite good. Cooked hominy is prepared with scrambled eggs and served for breakfast.

cake’: the sustenance of angels

ANGEL FOOD cakes were called ‘‘mystery cakes’’ ear- ly in the nineteenth century.

Accounts suggest that some were baked behind locked doors and shuttered windows lest the recipe be discovered.

Indeed, an angel food cake i. such a fine, light batter, so dif- ferent in taste and appearance from an ordinary butter cake, that it's delightful to suspect that it may well be the sustenance of angels.

Whatever its origins, mere mor- tals are grateful that the two secrets to its success have been revealed: egg whites must be beaten only until they billow, and the batter needs only gentle bak- ing temperatures.

Older egg whites, or those which have been frozen and thaw- ed, whip more easily to a feathery

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foam than fresh whites. And whites at room temperature beat to greater volume than eggs taken directly from the refrigerator.

To add the most air, whites are best beaten in a metal or glass mixing bowl. Even a speck of fat from the egg yolk, or the slight greasy residue on a plastic bowl, stops foaming.

Beat the whites until frothy be- fore adding cream of tartar or salt. These are stabilizers wiich delay foaming if added too early. Cream of tartar, an acid salt, also whitens the batter.

Add sugar slowly once the whites start to foam, so_ its granules dissolve as beating con- tinues.

Beating egg foams is similar to pulling an elastic band, for as egg proteins stretch they wrap around tiny bubbles of air.

But egg whites, like elastics, can

only stretch so far.

It doesn’t take long to notice a dramatic increase in volume and the color change from transparent to white as air is beaten in. The whites are sufficiently beaten when soft peaks still fold over.

Whei: stretched only to this point, there’s still some elasticity left to support the dry ingredients and the batter expanding as it bakes.

In homemade angel food cakes, egg whites beaten until they are rigid are overdone. This is quite different from commercial mixes, which use dried egg whites, reconstituted with water, and in- struct you to beat until firm.

Flour plays a secondary role as it only reinforces the delicate egg white structure,

And it’s only air beaten into the whites, and steam produced as water evaporates during baking,

that lifts the batter to such magic heights.

Homemade angel food cakes are more tender when they’re baked at a lower temperature than most cakes. Try 300°F (149°C) for about an hour and ten minutes for a recipe using twelve egg whites. .

An angel food cake is tradi- tionally baked in an ungreased tube pan. The centre cone pro- vides support for the inner portion as the. fragile batter creeps up the sides and rises well above the top.

When done, turn the pan upside down so the fragile cells stay stretched until the cake cools and sets.

A well-balanced recipe has a thin crisp crust, snowy whiie inte- rior, and a high, feathery texture. And it’s so tender it’s hard to believe there aren’t celestial con- nections somewhere.