Strawberries and Cream Scones: Day Light Savings Treats

Today I slept in to the gloriously late 8 AM thanks to day light savings. And today I decided to spend that extra hour baking Strawberry and Cream Scones, because strawberries from a Halloween sangria were starting to look a little sad. An extra hour gained doesn't feel like it should feel meaningful to me. After all, I waste many hours doing things as mindless as watching tv I don't even like (looking at you Grey's Anatomy), learning more about memes on reddit, or just hitting cmd+T and typing in "facebook.com" or "buzzfeed.com" or "twitter.com" or "nytimes.com." The usual eclectic mix of online fake news.

The "busy-ness" I experienced during medical school last year *should* have given me a new sense of appreciation with my time. After all, back then I would savor at just the rare treat of helping cook dinner, or just taking a walk. But I guess similar in the way thinking in graduate school is not quite the same as thinking in medical school, so too is my free time. All of which to say graduate school is not some leisurely afternoon tea. More like a tea for the queen that you have to put on entirely on your own and she wants some bake and tea that no one else has ever created and you as a completely inexperienced baker and pure coffee drinker don't even know where to begin.

But thanks to my extra hour, I can at least have some of these scones with which to eat while crying over why I don't understand visual cortex or why I have no interesting ideas or whatever thing decides to make my grad school day blue. I've already tested them on Ikea furniture building tears today and they held up well, so lets hope grad school tears are about the same as Ikea tears. 

Recipe from King Arthur Flour, with 1/2 flour substituted with whole wheat flour. 

Banana Chocolate Chip Pancakes: A Week Long Devotion

Do you ever build something up in your head to be this great, wonderful thing, only to find that when you've finally achieved that item, that its just an utter disappointment? And not because the thing sucks or anything. Rather, it can be pretty great objectively. But nothing can compete with the nonsense if your imagination. Except for yourself. When you just ~let it go~.

Well, yea, I kinda did that with pancakes this week. Banana chocolate chip pancakes to be exact. It all started with some depressingly cold weather, that ended up being only mildly cold later this week. The cold weather, plus, absolutely no desire to really think about my meals this week resulted in a very narrow mindset- pancakes, pancakes, pancakes.

So when I finally did get around to making these pancakes, needless to say there was a lot riding on them. I mean, I was eating american cheese. Yea, that plastic wrapped, floppy goodness thats really only good like once every 4 years when a wave of nostalgia hits for wonderbread and plastic cheese. And I didn't even have wonderbread! But thats another story.

After thinking about it, I believe this may have been the first time I've made pancakes from scratch. We usually have a very large, costco-sized bag of Krusteaz mix at home, so it delighted me to see the bubbles and rise that came out of these pancakes. I did substitute half the flour for whole wheat though, so my pancakes seemed to deflate quite a bit when I flipped.

And if you're noticing the rather er, burnt, tinge on these pancakes? Well, lets just say my stove has basically a very hot setting, and an off setting most of the time. Banana chocolate chip-flavor wise, the banana didn't really come through. Not sure if thats because I used frozen bananas or what. The pancakes did taste better the next day when I had them for breakfast. Anyways, pancake experimentation will continue the next time I harbor a week-long desire for ~pancakes~.

Recipe from All Recipes.