Flaming Hotcakes - A Country Kitchen With Abby Lab

Abby the Lab here.  Does your Mom or Dad remember the show Green Acres? The premise of the show - a successful New York lawyer and his spoiled society wife move to the small town of Hooterville to live on a small farm. One of the more comical aspects to the show was stunning Lisa Douglas' attempts to cook, especially her specialty Hotscakes!, which could also be used as a replacement head gasket on a farm tractor and were served with Martini shaken coffee. 

Other kitchen specialties of Lisa included:

Fried dry oatmeal
Crepe Suzette (flaming hotscake)
Vaffles (hotscakes pressed in a waffle iron)
Tunafish and jelly sandwiches
Tortillas (actual paper plates)
Hot Kebobs (flaming hotscakes on a skewer)
Chicken Sandwich (a rubber chicken between two slices of white bread)
Polarized Chicken (it beeps when it's ready)
and for dessert  . . .
Fruitcake (which had the entire top of a whole pineapple sticking out of the top)

and the ever popular 20 Pound Pound Cake

I think my Mom has an actual copy of the Green Acres Stove

Our house is sort of like the Green Acres house as we renovate room by room.  An antique farmhouse sink is going here under the "new" stained glass window.

Throw me a hotscake Dad!

Like many modern women, Lisa Douglas sometimes resorted to convenience foods such as Dee Dee's Dehydrated Mason Dixon Fried Chicken Dinner and Dee Dee's Dehydrated  New Orleans Pompano (which included a bottle of dehydrated wine).

Her loving husband took it in stride, however, somehow mustering the energy to spend the day working on the tractor on nothing more than hotscakes sandwiches and hot water soup.

My Mom does a lot better, and every Saturday, she makes Hotscakes.  It's her "splurge meal" of the week if she's watching her calories and she says it's worth it.

Today's Buttermilk Cornbread Hotscakes 

This version  tastes just like cornbread, but lighter, with all the crisp wonderful edges that cornbread gets (as good as pizza bones).

1 and 1/4 cup stone ground cornmeal (get the good stuff, not No Name Brand Cornmeal Dust).
1/2 cup flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon sugar
2 dashes salt
1 egg
1 and 1/4 cups buttermilk (or make your own by adding 1 T, lemon juice to milk).
1 Tablespoon melted lard
1 Tablespoon melted butter

Mix, cook on a cast iron griddle.

Served with butter and maple syrup or molasses, they are tasty and filling.



Perfect for a day with the tractor mangler (don't laugh, Mom came home and found this in the garage - a surprise from Dad from an auction somewhere)

Come on Mom - Nothing says "I love you" like your own mangler!   

Or a plate of hotscakes.

Sing along with me -

"Green acres is the place to be.
Farm living is the life for me.
Land spreading out, so far and wide.
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside".