Pancakes and Vegetarian Sausage.

Happy Mardi Gras, y’all!

Shrove Tuesday (aka Fat Tuesday) (aka Mardi Gras) is upon us again, and as usual, I whipped up pancakes and vegetarian sausage for dinner.  LeeLee and I have been enjoying our pancake tradition for years, and I’ve had it on the menu plan for several weeks now in anticipation of today. 

A couple of years ago, I used my cast-iron skillet to make a batch of pancakes, and my world has never been the same!  The nonstick properties of a properly seasoned skillet can’t be beat – not even my Teflon omelet pan is as smooth!  One pat of butter is all it takes to help an entire batch of pancakes (about 15 small ones in all) cook with pitch-perfect precision, with not a lot of babysitting from an often-distracted cook such as myself. 

For my whole life, I’ve had trouble getting pancakes to cook evenly throughout the batch – the first few always turn out so very nicely, golden and light, but by the end, I’m struggling to keep each cake from burning, and/or cooking on the outside but remaining raw on the inside.  The cast-iron skillet has changed the whole game for me.  No longer do I worry about burning the final rounds of pancakes!  No longer do I fuss and fight with them to ensure they’re all cooking evenly.  The skillet handles the heat so well that I can rest assured that the whole batch will come out nicely, and it hasn’t let me down yet. 

And so it came to pass that dinner was on the table with nary a burn mark, the pancakes fluffy and golden, the sausage heated up and ready for action.  We topped the cakes with butter and syrup – this IS Fat Tuesday, after all – and down the hatch they went!  When we rose from the table, there wasn’t a crumb left on our plates, but we weren’t hungry, either; a winning combination indeed.

Let the good times roll!

:)