Favorite Recipes from Melissa Clark's Kitchen

I’ve been experimenting with a range of different whole-grain flours, and have found that I absolutely adore the complex, winey nuttiness of buckwheat flour. It’s traditionally used in blinis, but since I don’t make blinis very often (because I don’t serve caviar very often, sadly), I decided to try it in a regular old pancake, the kind I make for breakfast on the weekends. Since I don’t bother using yeast, the flavor isn’t as complex as a blini, but the buttermilk gives it a nice fresh tang and the honey lends a little sweetness that makes these pancakes wonderful on their own, should you choose to forgo any syrupy distractions.

If you are interested in syrup, however, please try this oddball, creamy, exotic-scented, and utterly divine cardamom cream syrup at least once. I can’t really tell you how I came up with it other than to say I like the combination of cardamom with juicy ripe peaches. And I like cardamom cream cakes, which I ate on a brief trip to Sweden. Come to think of it, they grow buckwheat in Sweden, and I’m sure my subconscious was aware of this as I made breakfast that day. So there you have it: Cardamom, cream, peaches, and buckwheat are a natural—okay, a plausible—combination.

In any case, it all works and tastes delicious, no matter how you connect the dots.

As I was growing up, my mother made what she called her “David Dares” pancake. I loved that pancake, with its airy, souffléd custard that browned in the oven, and its glazed-sugar top drizzled with a zippy burst of lemon. My mother baked it in a gratin dish deep enough for the eggs to set into a wiggly, flanlike layer beneath the buoyant, crunchy crust that deflated dramatically when you dug in.

The original recipe came from a story in the New York Times; the pancake was named after David Eyre, a gentleman in Hawaii with whom food editor Craig Claiborne once had brunch. Mr. Eyre got the recipe from a cookbook published in 1919, which recommended serving the pancake for dessert.

Naturally, when I made his original recipe, I could not suppress the urge to tweak. I added a little salt to deepen the flavor, and an extra egg to mimic the thick, flanlike quality of my mother’s version. Call it a German pancake, a Dutch baby, or clafouti, a puffy baked pancake is a basic foodstuff common to cultures with surfeits of milk and eggs, or at least a taste for sweet, custardy things. In my family, we didn’t want to wait until after dinner, so we did, and still do, eat our “David Dares” pancakes for breakfast.

Given the American predilection for cold cereal, it’s odd that hot cereal beyond oatmeal less frequently enters the picture. But grits and her first cousin on the Italian side, polenta—served soft and steaming, with plenty of salt, pepper, and grated cheese, paired with sautéed Swiss chard with loads of garlic and a jolt of red pepper flakes—is exactly what to have for breakfast or brunch when you’re hungry for something more filling and savory than Wheaties.

Coarsely ground polenta and cornmeal are essentially the same thing, both made from ground dried corn. And they are similar to, but not exactly the same as, hominy grits, made from corn treated with an alkaline solution, a process called nixtamalization. Look for stone-ground and avoid “instant,” a euphemism for pasty. Though recipes tell you to patiently stand over the pot, dutifully stirring to prevent the cornmeal from clumping up in protest, I’ve found a brisk whisking every couple of minutes will correct any lumpy inclinations. (Stand back between stirrings to avoid getting burned by eruptions of molten polenta.)

While the polenta is bubbling, prep and cook the Swiss chard.

As a final garnish, there’s olive oil–fried eggs. Cooked sunny-side up, the runny egg yolk coats the greens and cornmeal mush like a golden, velvety sauce. It picks up and carries the flavors of the cheese, garlic, and pepper, imbuing each tender mouthful. If you cook the eggs over high heat, letting the whites get brown and crisp around the edges, they’ll shatter when you bite, adding crunch to the sea of softness. It’s the crowning pièce de résistance.

I call this creation “green eggs no ham,” and it’s an ideal vegetarian dish. Spiked with lemon zest, chives, chile, and cream, it really doesn’t want bacon or ham or all the other meaty things I automatically think of when I think of eggs.

It’s based on a recipe for sorrel-poached eggs that I came up with when I used to have a sorrel plant on my deck. The poor plant succumbed to the squirrels, who used it to bury (and aggressively dig up) nuts. Although I can certainly buy sorrel at the farmers’ market, it’s not dependably available.

Spinach, however, is always there, except in the broiling heat of summer. From September to June, I can count on finding bunches of the crinkly, dark green leaves, ready to be tossed into salads or wilted in a pan of butter or olive oil, and sometimes crowned with runny eggs.

If you do find sorrel, simply substitute it for the spinach. It will break down into more of a sauce than the spinach does, and the color will fade from verdant to olive drab, but the flavor will pop. Leave out the lemon zest if using sorrel; you won’t need it.

Either way, while I like this for supper (not dinner; eggs are for supper), it’s especially excellent for brunch.