Uncle Buck's Breakfast (#106)

Our September movie was Uncle Buck, a character played by John Candy who has to babysit his nephew and nieces for several days. I had never seen this film before so I had to do a little homework to figure what our dinner theme would be.

I discovered the scene where he first meets the kids while cooking them his "specialty" which appears to be scrambled eggs mixed with everything but the kitchen sink. The kid's didn't appreciate it much and had cereal instead. I also discovered a scene where Uncle Buck surprises his nephew with a giant stack of giant pancakes. I decided to do breakfast for dinner making my own version of the egg scramble and having my own version of giant pancakes as our dessert.

Garbage Eggs

Dishes like this are typically called either egg scrambles or "dirty eggs." This is a variation of that that I have decided to call garbage eggs because when the kid named Miles sees him cooking, he says "He's cooking our garbage."

This recipe is pretty straight forward. It's essentially just scrambled eggs with mixed in ingredients. The ingredients that you decide to mix in are up to you. In the film, he had onions, peppers, sausage, and bacon. I decided to have the meat on the side and let guests decide what they wanted to mix in, but I had a beef bacon and smoked salmon option.

We cooked everything on my flattop griddle. We started with the beef bacon, because it is really fatty and that fat works well to grease the griddle and cook the rest of the ingredients on without having to add additional oil or butter. After the bacon was cooked, we cooked the onion and peppers. The scrambled eggs were the last thing that we cooked. Though scrambled eggs are pretty easy to make and everyone has their own way to do it, I would suggest that you follow this recipe. I based it partially on what I saw in the cooking scene and partially on my own experience making scrambled eggs. They came out absolutely delicious.

Ingredients: (per every 6 eggs)

6 eggs

1/4 cup heavy cream

1/4 tsp Worcestershire

1/4 tsp yellow mustard

salt & pepper to taste

I'm not going to explain to you how to cook scrambled eggs, because I'm assuming you already know. For these eggs, you whip heavy cream, Worcestershire sauce, yellow mustard in the egg mix. The heavy cream makes the eggs extra fluffy when you whip them. The Worcestershire sauce and yellow mustard are ingredients that Buck added in the movie, so I included them here. They actually work pretty well at adding flavor to the eggs without overpowering them. Of course, you should still add some salt and pepper to match your personal taste.

Once, you have combined your egg mixture, cook them on the same pan or griddle that you cooked your other ingredients on. Mix in the veggies toward the end of the cook. Add more salt and pepper if you think you need it. You can also mix in the meat at this time or keep it separate if you want to have different meat options for your guests.

These eggs came out really tasty. I made 18 eggs for myself and 6 guests. We ate them all. In addition to the eggs, we also had cereal available since that was also mentioned in the movie. I bought Frosted Flakes and I asked guests to bring their own favorite boxes of cereals as well. Toast is also a good thing to add as a "part of a good breakfast."

For drinks, I had some different breakfast drinks like milk and orange juice. Also had some cocktails available like mimosas, screwdrivers, and fuzzy navel. Coffee is featured in this breakfast scene, but I'm not a coffee drinker, so I didn't have that available, but did have espressos martinis available.

Uncle Buck's Giant Pancakes

 

For dessert, I knew right away that I wanted to tackle the giant pancakes that Buck made. With that said, making an actually large pancake and flipping it would be pretty much impossible. I already had 18 in pizza pans from when I did the giant oatmeal cookie sandwich so I decided to come up with a way that I could make them in that. That was easier said that done. If you just bake pancake batter, you end up with something that looks a lot like a flat yellow cake. I needed it to look like a browned pancake and I needed it to be the correct thickness of a scaled up pancake. It took me some time to figure out this recipe, but what I ended up with worked perfectly. If you make this for a pizza pan of a different size, you should scale the recipe appropriately.

Ingredients: (per 18 inch pancake)

3 cups flour

6 tbsp sugar (plus a little more for sprinkling in pan and on pancakes)

1 1/2 tbsp baking powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

3 cups buttermilk

3 eggs

6 tbsp melted butter (plus a little more for greasing pan)

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

nutella

bananas

powdered sugar

vanilla ice cream

Directions:

1. Grease 18 inch, non-stick pizza pan with butter. Sprinkle a light coating of sugar over the butter.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
3. Combine dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon) in a large bowl until evenly mixed.
4. In an electric mixing bowl, add buttermilk, eggs, melted butter, and vanilla. Set mixer to low or "Stir" setting.
5. Move the buttered and sugared pizza pan to the center rack of the oven.
6. Leaving the mixer on low, slowly add the dry ingredients to the mix. The batter will thicken as you add each bit.
7. Once you have emptied your dry bowl into the mixing bowl, turn off the mixer and use a spatula to fold the ingredients together make sure nothing is sticking to the sides of the bowl.
   
   
   
8. With oven mitts, take the pizza pan our of the oven. By now, it should have been a couple minutes and the white sugar that you sprinkled on it should have started darkening and caramelizing. While the pan is still hot, quickly pour the pancake batter into the pan. If it doesn't reach the edges of the pan, use your spatula to guide the batter to the edge. Pouring the batter into a hot pan with caramelized sugar will give our giant pancake that dark crispy bottom similar to cooking on a frying pan or griddle.
9. Return the pizza pan to the center rack of the oven and cook for about 30 minutes or until center comes out clean when tested with a toothpick.
10. If that was your first pancake, this would be a good time to clean some dishes and repeat these steps with the next pancake. I made two giant pancakes for my dessert. You could make more if you wanted.
11. After all your pancakes have been cooked and removed from the oven, you will need to turn off the oven and change it to broil mode. The pancakes are yellowish when baked and we want them brown, so these steps will fix that.
12. Melt some more sugar and brush it onto the top of each pancake. Sprinkle each pancake with a light dusting of sugar as well.
13. One at a time, put each pancake back in the oven on the top rack. The top will begin toasting and the sugar will caramelize. Keep a careful eye on it so it doesn't get too dark. It will only take a few minutes.
14. Once the top of each pancake has been browned, it is time to start layering. Decide which pancake is the prettiest and will go on top. On the other pancake, put your pancake topping. I used Nutella and bananas. You might want to use something different like a blueberry topping. The goal here is just to add a little sweetness while also giving something for the pancakes to stick that will help them stay together when we stack them.
15. It's now time to stack the pancakes. Using a flat spatula with soft edges, gently run it along the bottom of the pancake to make sure that it's not sticking anywhere to the pan. Once it is loose from the pan, gently lift and slide it onto the pancake that has the topping layer. Repeat these last two steps if you decided to make a stack of 3 or more pancakes.
16. Once the pancakes have been layered and stacked, It is time for the finishing touches. A sprinkling of powdered sugar would be a good touch now. Also, a large scoop of vanilla ice cream onto the center of the pancakes can look a lot like a dollop of butter. Serving with syrup and/or whipped cream.

I'll admit that this recipe is a little better than what I ended up making. I forgot to add the cinnamon to my batter. I also forgot the powdered sugar at the end and the syrup. Still, it was pretty tasty. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. The tricks that I used to brown the top and bottom of each pancake worked perfectly. The end result was something that was not quite pancake or cake, but something in between. Every one seemed to really enjoy it though. The seven of us ate about half of it, and the leftovers make for a great snack or breakfast.

Overall, the party was a big hit. The food all came out great and the movie was a ton of fun. I will probably make these eggs again. As for the pancakes, I don't know if I will ever need giant pancakes again, but if I did, this is the recipe that I would use.