Thunky Pancakes: a very southeastern culinary jam

 Thick+chunky pancake batter = thunky

Made this in the DC region with my friend, Danny makes this an southeast of southeast Michigan culinary adventure.

I'm forgetting the exact ingredients now--highlights included using:
+ create a mix of almond meal, flax seed, walnuts, and some other substance to form the
+ a touch of vanilla, cinnamon, and all spice
+ possibly soy or almond milk and water

This made an incredibly substantive mix which literally would "thunk" on the pan. One pancake is so dense it makes a satisfying breakfast in itself.

Ready to flip!

We'd later top it with a smoothie of blueberries, apple, and other fruits. Plus either ice cream or yogurt.

Not pictured: we literally sketched out our plans before topping the pancakes

Mine (blueberry-banana-apple-spinach center mass, apple-banana blend radiating, topped with ice cream & almonds + apple slice)


For our first trial, Danny went all out with the blended fruits, same ingredients, hearty proportions.

Sweet summer pies & a snippet of scientific inquiry!

This summer's been filled with memorable and very heartening pies indeed!

First: A generous gesture of kindness 
Blueberry Pie at a technical conference
Kindness in the form of an Amish blueberry pie gifted to me by a duo of Kansas professors.  We shared a dorm at Alfred State College in upstate New York for a technical conference on sustainability in higher education.  As I've written elsewhere, most people I know of suit up to power network, I treat it like a sport.  But the people there savored the good conversations that arose from the event and over meals sourced from the campus and nearby farms.  It must have been the most humane sustainability conference I've ever attended (I even titled a new viola tune of mine and wrote an essay called "emotive mechanics" thanks to the experience).

While the pie was way too sugary, diabetes by the first bite, the story and trip made it worthwhile: they bought the pie from a stand on the side of a country road run by two Amish girls, had a slice during the conference (no one had utensils available) and gave it to me before they departed for the airport.  For me, the pie reaffirms the value of a personable story.

Second: Wondrous pie
Huckleberry Pie--the finest pie I've had yet & a taste of curiosity

If sound could represent taste, I'm pretty sure it would be akin to the joys heard in this song (if you're a synasthesiac--where you taste sounds, let me know if it's a good approximation).

Just the right sweetness from the berries and sensible use of sugar, with a crispy salted crust and topped with delectable crumbles made a wonderful counterpoint in texture and taste.  Best of all, made by a friend to enjoy at the end of an excellent meal with her family!

Huckleberries are new to me--I thought they'd be a fruit of the South thanks to Samuel Clemens' (AKA Mark Twain's) book Huckleberry Finn, and the accent of Huckleberry Hound, the cartoon.  My friend picked these fresh from a farm in the Upper Peninsula (before freezing them for safe keeping).  Even her father was curious about their origin and distinguishing features.  We speculated that blueberries were a commercialized agricultural cultivar of the huckleberry.  Our reasoning:

1) blueberries tend to be larger,
and
2) huckleberries tend to be sweeter.

To substantiate that line of thought, the best fruit I've ever had was from foraging a wild strawberry native to Michigan before a storm in May at the University of Michigan-Dearborn's Environmental Interpretive Center (even captured the moment in shaky video!).  If you've seen them (or watched the video) commercial strawberries are huge, and frequently nearly flavorless.

After consultation with whatever scientific consensus I could find through an un-scholarly and brief google search, I learned that our joint hypothesis was incorrect.  Huckleberries are a different species altogether, and their ranges differ too (I'm guessing we ate the fruits of Vaccinium membranaceum).

In any case, the findings have no bearing on how much I enjoyed sharing the pie and evening with everyone at a table in Traverse City.

Local sweetness

I'll dare say pure maple syrup can work better than honey in a tea/herbal brew.  Something about the woody notes of the syrup mingling with a good minty warm brew makes it a success.

I've thought about maple syrup (less so birch syrup, but that too) as a regional source of sugar instead of having cane sugar, honey, or corn syrup.  I wondered: why don't we take pride in having Michigan maple syrup in our drinks/baking/cooking?

I suspect it's really challenging to obtain since you need about 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup.  How do I know? Partake in making maple syrup at UM-Dearborn during the late winter/early spring!


Edit: In the interest of sustainability and food systems, I wound up posting a question on Quora about what source of sugar takes the least energy to create.  You can check it out here: http://www.quora.com/Sustainable-Agriculture/Which-are-least-energy-intensive-for-producing-sugar-sugar-cane-beets-corn-maple-birch-or-honey

The biggest problem I can see with asking that kind of question the way I did is that people are likely going to look at it as a matter of industrial optimization--how can we get the most sugar with the least amount of energy/water.  While that's not the intent, I figured it would be useful for others to know what goes into the production/procurement process of our sugars.  For anyone curious, there's a relatively standardized technique called "life cycle analysis".  In concepts of environmentalism, we had to perform embodied/embedded energy assessments.  In essence, ask the question: what went into making, processing, and transporting whatever product you're using?  How much energy did it take to make? To process? To transport? etc. and then sum it all up.  Similar idea.

If you've got answers, or just want to research with me, I'd be really interested in seeing them!