Foodblogging -- 1

One egg, one slice of bread, and one cup of milk: I spent most of my childhood dieting (or if you want to be more accurate, alternately dieting, and cheating up a storm whenever my mother's back was turned) according to the Diet Watchers system, and that, or a facsimile, was my breakfast every single morning. I won't even talk about the animal fat content. These days when I want a light breakfast, I'll go for some beans and brown rice with salsa on top, or a handful each of peanuts and dried fruit. But on the Diet Watchers plan, dried beans, nuts, and dried fruit were all verboten. This was the 1970's, and vegetable proteins hadn't been heard of yet. And so we learned to be creative with our eggs, our bread, and our skim milk.

One of my favorite strategies was to mix 1/2 a bottle of blue food coloring into my single scrambled egg, and then eat it on top of the bread, toasted. You get rather a nice shade of teal-colored eggs that way, and I don't think the food coloring I used has been declared carcinogenic yet.

Another strategy was to mix 2 ounces of grated cheese into the egg and spread them thin on a hot pan, so the cheese came out way past melty, and the whole thing was a little stiff and chewy. But that was a lunch meal; at breakfast, we weren't allowed so much protein.

Here is the breakfast recipe I liked best of all though, out of the old Diet Watchers Guide, that was my mom's and my Bible for all things food-related, all those years ago:






APPLE PANCAKES


1 medium-sized apple [Nowadays I'd use a cooking apple, but back then we just used what we had, tart green apples after my dad's trees, supermarket Red Deliciouses or whatever, and the pancakes were still delicious.]
1 egg
1 slice enriched white bread [A coarse-textured brown bread makes, or even better, a homemade white, makes for a better pancake.]
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/4 cup skim milk
Pinch of cinnamon and liquid non-sugar sweetener mixed to taste [Back then we used saccharin of course, because that's what there was. I'd substitute out for a packet or two of Splenda nowadays.]

Slice peeled apple quite thin and simmer with lemon juice, cinnamon and liquid sweetener until apple is tender [we used the microwave; it took a couple minutes each to get the apples soft, if I remember correctly]. Blend the egg, bread and skim milk in blender, and pour batter into mixing bowl. Add the cooked apple. Heat 10-inch Teflon pan [any frying pan would be a good substitute of course, sprayed with non-stick spray while heating.] and pour in batter to make four-inch cakes. Brown well, flip carefully to brown the other side. Top with No-Cal syrup (cherry, strawberry, orange, etc., as desired).


Notes: Back then either my mom or I used to make this dish at least once every week, not just for ourselves, but for my sisters (who weren't dieting) as well. It was one of the few Diet Watchers recipes that was delicious, and filling, exactly as written, and didn't leave me wishing that I'd could eat something more fattening.  Oh, and I never added any topping.  Sugar-free syrup, with its fake-maple flavor, that didn't do anything to hide the aftertaste of the saccharin, would have been a sacrilege of course.  But you really didn't need a topping.  The lemon juice and the cinnamon sweetened the apples nicely.  And just the little bit of grease in the nonstick spray was enough to make the pancakes taste crispy.

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