Sausages and Griddle Cakes

The recipe in "Joy Of Cooking" for Griddle cakes is notably lighter than a regular pancake.  Less flour anyway.  I got the mix all set while the griddle was heating up, and the sausages (not pre-cooked) started cooking.  It's that "timing" thing I was shooting for.

I put the oven on warm so that when the sausages were done, I could keep them warm on a plate with a paper towel (for the excess oil) while I cooked the griddle cakes.

Cooking these items is not foreign to me, but as I had been saying in other posts, I'm focusing now on timing and technique.  So starting the sausages first and giving them time to cook before starting the griddle cakes was logical, since the sausages would take the longest.

The batter for the griddle cakes was light, (I sifted the flour), and I cut back the heat on the griddle, not wanting to burn them (I had been running the heat up at about 375ºF for the sausages), and tried to check one just a tad too soon.  It broke in half on me.  So I waited a minute more and flipped the half dozen I had been cooking.  They were brown, but not as brown as I thought I would like, and I gave a little less time for the second side of them.  When I served them, they were thin, light, and modestly brown, but cooked all the way thru. 

There were "issues" for me like..........do I scrape away the fatty oils from the griddle that the sausages produced, ........"yes" came the answer from somewhere back in my memory banks, not wanting the griddle cakes to taste like sausage.  But the residual (very light) oils were enough on the non-stick surface after scraping, to need to add more butter to the griddle, before pouring the griddle cake batter onto the cooking surface.

I was able to then take out the sausages being kept warm in the oven, and serve the hot griddle cakes with the hot sausages together.  A small victory for me, to be able to keep everything warm at presentation time.

The "breakfast" meal, depending on the folks in attendance and the time of the morning, need not be heavy and overwhelming. I'm glad I only fried up half a dozen of the sausages for the two of us, and only 3 griddle cakes each (about 4 inches in diameter).   That was more than enough food for a Sunday morning at 7 AM.

What did I learn: cook the griddle cakes just a tad longer so they are not quite so "white" (although cooked all the way thru); try a different sausage manufacturer on the next run, since these were a bit too salty (I didn't add any salt).