Coconut Macadamia Macaroon Pancakes

Oh yes, that's right. I forgot I had this recipe. It's one that I think you'll enjoy. If you're into coconut macaroons then this should be all up in your business.

It's a recipe I've made a few dozen times before, but somehow never got around to posting. Strange how after 10 years that can still happen.

So what else has been going on? Well, I'm still plugging away at the cocktail cookbook, Stewards of Spirits. I'm also jamming along over at About.com's Fruits and Vegetable channel. I'm keeping it very classy by talking about why coffee makes you poop and why beets turn your pee red. I've also started working for Gallo Family Wineries and all of their various brands, which keeps me pretty darn busy.

Lastly, I completely redesigned the Garrett McCord website; a task that was sorely needed and I'm very pleased with the results.

One more thing to announce among all this craziness is that I will be speaking at IFBC 2016. It'll be hosted in my town of Sacramento, the Farm-to-Fork capital. (Or if you're more of a drinker, the #farmtofuckedup capital.) I'll be speaking with some other fine people about freelance blogging and corporate food writing.

So yes. It's been way busy here. Still, I'm never too busy for pancakes as they only require a bit of attention and time, which is a good thing. Pancakes gives you a chance to concentrate on something that isn't work/school/family/relationships/taxes or whatever today's end of the world scenario happens to be. Fuck the Big Bad. Ms. Summers will stop him for you. You just focus on some breakfasty goodness.

So do yourself a favor. Sit down. Turn off the phone. Put on some Netflix. Make pancakes.

Ingredients
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
pinch of salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
⅛ teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 cup sugar
½ cup chopped macadamia nuts, plus extra for garnish
2 1/2 cups unsweetened dried shredded coconut
1 14-ounce can of coconut milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 large eggs
butter or cooking spray for the skillet

Method
Let's do this easy. Mix together the dry ingredients into a bowl. In another bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients. Pour the wet into the dry and mix together.

Easy so far, right? Okay, now get a skillet or fry pan and heat it up over medium-high heat. Add some butter or cooking spray to grease it up.

Now pour 1/4 cup amounts of the batter into the skillet. Cook on both sides until golden brown. Continue until all the batter is used. Enjoy with a lot of maple syrup and some extra chopped macadamia nuts.

Self Respect: Shirred Eggs with Sun Dried Tomato Pesto

-Ladies, brace yourselves.-

So longest post ever followed by the shortest post ever. I was at the market today buying some eggs for a cake I wanted to make for a potluck.

All and all, this was an in and out trip. Go in. Grab eggs. Buy eggs. Leave. It was a mission of practical pinpoint accuracy that I fashioned after watching far too many military movies and dating a lot of military personnel.

So in I go and I get to the eggs without any incident. As I pick one up a lady and her little girl around twelve are going through carton after carton looking for perfect eggs and - I kid you not - assembling a new one. When she found an egg she liked, one that was obviously superior to one of the eggs in the carton she was holding, she would switch it with the worst egg in her dozen.

Lord know what the qualifications were. They all looked exactly the same, but maybe I'm just a layman when it comes to egg analysis.

-Insert any obvious joke about the sexes and eggs here.-

Speaking of eggs. Here's a snippet of the conversation they were in the middle of:

Child: "So, mom, if those people are making all those decisions shouldn't there be girls helping make them? All the people they showed on the news were men."

Mom: "Yes, well, sometimes women make very bad choices and men need to make them instead. Women can be very emotional and men are more rational."

Me in my Head: "Oh f***, no, she didn't."

Careers: Orange and Poppy Seed Pancakes

-Is pancake maker a legitimate career choice? It should be if it isn't.-

When I was a child I knew that I was going to grow up to be a world famous brain surgeon. Or Cyclops from the X-Men. I considered both to be exceptional career paths. Regardless, it was plain to say that my aspirations were loftier than the attic in my mother’s house.

With time my ambitions changed. I had the grades, handgun accuracy (thank you afternoons at the range with dad), and language skills to become an FBI officer and so for a while I dallied with that idea with a small nod of inspiration from the morose and comely David Duchovny. However, a realization that putting me in a place where I could legally start knocking mothef***ers out probably wouldn’t benefit anyone, least of all myself.

The brain surgeon idea persisted through all of middle school and the early years of high school. I enjoyed human anatomy and the concept of medicine, but my heart didn’t seem in it. This stemmed in whole from the fact that while I was fine looking at the pulsing meats of a human being, the fact that a broken nail or wiggling baby tooth icked me out seemed a portend eventual problems in the surgical field.

In the end that dream, like my dream of shooting concussive blasts of energy from my eyes in order to protect humanity, was put aside.

-With my penchant for clumsiness it was probably for the best. (Both in regards to medicine and concussive eye beams.)-

Instead, I found myself rather engrossed in marine biology. I took a special class in high school on the subject that culminated in week long trip aboard a research ship off the coast of Catalina. I was fascinated by the inner working of starfish and read up on how book gills functioned. I was engrossed by the biolumiscent organisms that sparked in the toilet when you flushed it on the ship (it flushed with local saltwater) and perused the ship’s library for more information on the chemical processes that made it happen.

Eventually, I dragged my mom with me to a scuba class where we were both, after some tribulation due to some asshole having a panic attack 40 feet underwater during my scuba final and ripping off both breathing regulators from my air tank (and this only an hour after someone stole my wetsuit and left me wearing one three sizes too small), certified. My mom used new talents of ours both as a means of adventure for herself and as a way to encourage me to pursue a possible career. Of course, entrenching yourself in the center of a 60-foot tall funnel of swirling purple fish off the coast of Nevis certainly possess a rather memorable aesthetic of its own.

I began to apply to colleges under a double major of Marine Biology and Genetics. While U.C. Santa Barbara, my first choice due to it’s Marine program, turned me down. U.C. Davis with it’s rather world renowned genetics laboratory, did. With time I began to lean more towards genetics.

I blame an instance where I was meeting with a professor who let me use an electron microscope to look at a strand of recombinant salmon DNA in its raw form. Let me tell you, actually looking at the raw structure of life, the very various chemical bonds and the elements that make them strung together by such primordial but world-making forces that can’t be seen by the unaided eye, well, it has an impact on you.