Borne primarily out of laziness and the hatred of single digit temperatures I have begun a weekend tradition I'm calling The MacGyver Breakfast. It consists of me waking up, wandering aimlessly around the kitchen opening and closing the refrigerator door several times, taking note of what I do and do not have to work with.

When I've keyed in on at least one bountiful ingredient I open up my Joy of Cooking cookbook and check the back pages for recipes utilizing that ingredient. When I opened the fridge last Saturday I couldn't get my mind off the bottle of lemon juice I had purchased the week before when I made chicken salad. I wanted pancakes, I wanted them to have flavor but all I had was lemon. That is when I discovered


Lemon Pancakes:

Dry Ingredients
1 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

Wet Ingredients
3/4 cup sour cream
1/3 cup milk
lemon zest
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 tablespoons butter (melted)
1 egg 1
1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Mix the dry ingredients with a wisk, in a separate bowl mix all the wet ingredients until it becomes a milk-like consistency. By hand quickly mix the wet ingredients with the dry for 15-20 seconds. The batter will be light and airy. Do not overmix the batter or the pancakes will be dense and not nearly as good. Heat a skillet and make pancakes.

These pancakes are awesome on their own, but the next time I plan on making them I'm going to throw in some blueberries. I didn't bother with the lemon zest since I was using bottled lemon juice.

This post isn't done yet. A couple weeks ago I had a similar, but far less spectacular, experience with sour cream. The night before Lauren and I had made some white chicken chili and as a result had most of a 16 oz container of sour cream left in the fridge. So when I went rummaging through it the next morning looking for potential breakfast items I couldn't get my mind off of the sour cream. It might be weeks before we do anything else with sour cream and I just don't trust expiration dates, especially when the container in question costs about $1.50.

So once again I opened up The Joy of Cooking and discovered an excellent use for the ingredients I had on hand.

Sour Cream Muffins:

Dry Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Wet Ingredients
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream
2/3 cup brown sugar (packed)
1/2 stick butter (melted)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Bake at 350 or 375 for 10-12 minutes, or until you can stick a fork in the middle and have it come out clean.

This is an excellent base muffin recipe. The sour cream and brown sugar keep the middle and muffin top nice and moist. They are pretty good on their own but a bit less sweet than you might expect. My suggestion here would be to add either lemon and blueberries or banana and walnuts to the muffin batter to round out the taste.

Other sour cream muffin addition possibilities include Snickerdoodle (pictured), cherry & peach, apple cinnamon and chocolate.

Sour cream is pretty awesome.