Diners, Drive-ins, and Derek's Birthday Breakfast

For better or for worse, I watch a lot of food shows on the Food Network and the Travel Channel. My two favorites are Man v. Food with Adam Richman and Diners, Drive-ins and Dives with Guy Fieri. In the last week, both of these hosts visited restaurants that had interesting breakfast concoctions so this morning I thought I'd give one a try for Derek's birthday breakfast.


Now, I've done the fried egg in the middle of the pancake before and the boys love it (me too) and this one was a variation of that. Now I'll tell you, the first time I tried the fried egg in the middle of the pancake, I was pretty happy with myself that I only destroyed the first one in the flipping process. But by the second one, I'd drawn the perfect hollow circle of pancake batter, cracked the egg into the center and flipped it without breaking the yoke for the perfect over-easy egg surrounded by a golden buttermilk pancake.


So as I decided to try this pancake with sausage circle filled with scrambled eggs I thought "how hard can this be?" Four funky-looking blobs later, I decided there has to be a better way. The cook on TV poured the batter circle, decorated the batter with sausage, poured the eggs in the hole, flipped it and voila! Unfortunately, every time I flipped it, the sausage prevented the flip side batter from touching the griddle (like stilts) and the second side didn't brown or lay flat. Don't get me wrong, it still tasted great but it just didn't look right.


My Solution? I put the sausage in a circle on the skillet first (like clock numbers) and poured the pancake batter over it to create my circle and then filled with the eggs and ... voila! Now that's pretty AND tastes great. Try it! The restaurant that was making it also did it with bacon in stead of sausage. I bet that would be good too.Yum!


Happy Birthday Derek!