Jethro Bodine's Dad's amazingly tasty banana pancakes
My Father made these mostly on the weekends for my mom, brother and your most humble narrator. i was always impressed with the way they turned out, and i present them here for your gastrointestinal enjoyment as well.
Ingredients:
The two ingredients of this recipe that make or break these pancakes are bananas and butter.
The bananas should be ratherly brown and kind of mushy with a small herd of fruit flies circling above them. Got some bananas a little too mushy for your taste? Large brown splotches marring the still-yellow peel? They'll work, but leave 'em sit on top of the fridge for another 3 days or so and they'll be perfect. You need quite a few of them, too - figure about 3 bananas for every 2 servings of pancakes. If you've got some bananas that are at the right state in rotting but you're not going to make these pancakes immediately (for some perverse reason...), you can freeze them until the mood strikes you to make delicious breakfast hotcakes.
Butter. Now then, dear readers, please hear me out on this point. Margarine, oleo, lard, bacon grease and/or astroglide WILL NOT WORK. If you feel like perverting your pancakes with any of the above, go right ahead. However, Jethro Bodine's Dad's amazingly tasty banana pancakes rely on good old butter and plenty of it. Nothing else cooks up banana pancakes quite the same way, nor would my dear father ever think of making banana pancakes for his loving family with anything else, so you shouldn't either. i mean, look at how well i turned out!
Another Quick Note Before The Actual Goddamn Directions: You'll notice there aren't any firm quantites mentioned here. That's because neither my father nor i bother to measure any of this shit out. You don't need to - instead, use your brain and some common sense, but most importantly pay attention to the food.
The Actual Goddamn Directions, Finally!
Take about two cups of Bisquick, add an egg or two and enough milk to make a yellowish batter, about the same consistency as Elmer's Glue but much tastier. Oh yeah, stir it up really well, try to break up all the little chunks of Bisquick. Make more batter for more pancakes, of course. Keep adding Bisquick, eggs and/or milk until it gets to a consistency you're comfortable with.
Got batter? Rad.
Now then, shoo the swarm of fruit flies away from the bananas, peel and drop them into the batter. With a fork (preferably a 3-tined fork, but i'm flexible on this point), coarsely mash the bananas into the batter. Don't make it into a homogeneous batter, though, stop mashing it when you've got a mixture of banana chunks in a batter suspension matrix.
Now that the batter is ready, take a plate and put it in the oven. Turn the oven on as low as it will go, just enough to keep the plate warm. Take a large pan, preferably with some sort of non-stick coating and start melting a good-sized lump of butter in it over medium heat. While the butter is melting, sip your coffee gingerly. My dad drinks his with soy milk (yes, soy milk, ya enchanted hoor), i drink mine black. Spread the butter around in the pan and drop some batter in. Don't be afraid of making the pancakes too large. The batter should be ratherly thick, so they will also be quite 3-dimensional. These are all good things. Be sure they're always in a light film of butter. Let the pancakes cook over medium-low heat until you start to see bubbles form on the surface. Carefully lift up the pancake with a spatula to check if the bottom is done cooking. They should be a delicate mottled yellow-brown with a brown ring around the edge (the brown ring is the butter's doing). Flip 'em over, add more butter to the pan and let 'em cook on that side. When fully cooked, put them on the warm plate in the oven, add more butter to the pan and repeat until you're out of batter or butter. Sip your coffee further and put enough plates in the oven for all those eating these banana pancakes.
i know this was complicated and all, but if you've done it all correctly, you should have warm, sweet pancakes with deliciously hot lumps of banana scattered throughout. Serve on warmed plates with another cup of coffee or a tall frosty glass of milk. Eat in the company of people you love and think nice thoughts about my Dad. If you do actually make these, please let me know how they turned out.
Enjoy!