Pancake Breakfast Sandwiches

The weekend of St. Patrick's Day, we were a little stumped about what to do.

No, we didn't just want to make green pancakes, or "lucky" pancakes shaped like four leaf clovers.

Greg doesn't drink and I've never been interested in celebrating St. Patrick's Day, so we weren't really interested in doing boozy pancakes. Although in hindsight that probably would have been a good direction to go.

I even looked up traditional St. Patrick's Day foods and I mostly found recipes for cabbage and potatoes. Not easy to work with for pancakes.

Ultimately we decided what the people really need after St. Patrick's Day shenanigans, is some hangover food.

Though I don't get trashed often, the few times I have, I absolutely love getting breakfast the next day. Something hearty. Not too heavy, but filling and warm and cozy.

So we figured this would be a good time for a pancake breakfast sandwich. Egg and sausage sandwiched between two warm pancakes, and drizzled with maple syrup. Yum.

For those of you familiar with Wawa, they have the best breakfast sandwiches, and even though I usually get mine in a croissant, they have ones with pancakes or waffles. So we were slightly inspired by that. This would also give us an opportunity to play around with our base recipe for our pancakes. We actually ended up trying it with less salt than we originally had and found that it was better! So all previous recipes have been adjusted to reflect the corrected amount of salt.

This also gave us a chance to expand our breakfast skills. We made the breakfast sausage from scratch, using a recipe for Apple-Onion Chicken Breakfast Sausage by an Edible Mosaic. You can get the recipe here.

A few notes about this delicious recipe as it's actually my second time making it! The second time we tried it with ground turkey instead of chicken, and we can confirm that it is better with chicken. Not that we didn't think the author of the recipe knew what they were doing, but having tried both, I thought it was significantly better with chicken and would recommend against any swap.

Also, the recipe says this too, but you want to dice the apples and onions very small. You'll be able to better blend them into the mixture and you'll be less likely to have pieces fall of the sausage while you cook them. I would also recommend mixing the apple and onion mixture with the herbs before mixing into the chicken. You don't want to over mix the sausage but mixing the herbs with the apple and onion first can help make sure the mixture is evenly seasoned, while avoiding over mixing. It's easier to tell when chunks of apple and onion are mixed in, than the herbs.

Seriously, we love this recipe and it's great for a holiday brunch! The recipe also makes a note for how to bake in the oven, making serving a crowd even easier.

For the egg, Greg went with a little egg white omelet. I, however, love fried eggs. So I took this as an opportunity to perfect how to make fried eggs, since I typically tend to burn the bottom before the top is fully cooked. I ended up using this how-to from Martha Stewart.

I've since used it to take a shot at making a Filipino breakfast as well. I don't know why it never occurred to me to to put a lid on to get the top to cook before the bottom burns, but sometimes you just need help.

We probably could have topped our pancake breakfast sandwiches with cheese as well, but with the runny yolk, the delicious sausage, and the fluffy pancakes, it didn't seem necessary. Instead we opted to put a little maple syrup on the pancakes while assembling.

Pretty sure this sandwich is the perfect hangover food.

Pancakes!

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 cups flour

• 1 tsp baking soda

• 1 tsp baking powder

• 1 tsp salt

• 3 Tbsp sugar

• 1 1/2 cups skim milk

• 2 Tbsp low fat butter

• 2 eggs, separated

Directions:

1. Combine all dry ingredients.

2. Add milk, butter, and egg yolks until combined.

3. Add egg whites, folding into batter until just mixed.

4. In non stick skillet, add about 1/3 cup of batter for each pancake. Cook until small bubbles form, and flip, cooking on other side for about another minute.

5. Using two pancakes (or three if you want to make a pancake breakfast club sandwich, I won't judge, go crazy), assemble a sandwich with sausage (homemade or your favorite store bought), egg (fried, scrambled, or mini omelet), and syrup. Cheese is optional.

6. For the perfect fried egg, you can use this how-to.

7. For a delicious homemade breakfast sausage, we recommend Apple and Onion Chicken Breakfast Sausage, by an Edible Mosaic. You can get the recipe here!

Enjoy!