I Am a Cult; and Frugal Dessert

THREE followers! I have THREE followers! I wonder when I can start claiming that I am the world's fastest-growing religion.

The Common Room has long been one of my favorite blogs, richly deserving its many blog awards and nominations. I don't read that many blogs, to be honest, and there are long stretches when I don't read other blogs at all and barely manage to visit my own, so when I say that I "follow" The Common Room, let it be understood that this "following" happens in swoops and dives, so that a period during which I am absent for months on end might be followed by a period during which the Deputy Headmistress begins to feel that I am stalking her. There are many blogs which I visit peremptorily and then never return to, but I always return to The Common Room because what's going on there is so reliably interesting -- politics, religion, books, food -- and because regardless of who's writing the posts (this is a family blog in the truest sense, with most of the family contributing), it's so darn well-written. Good prose will get me every time, as will good frugal recipes, which abound at The Common Room, which leads me to my real topic: tonight's dessert.

It's not only Sunday, of course, but the Feast of Christ the King, and while I didn't do anything especially clever -- no crowns on the table, no purple regalia -- I did make a fairly nice dinner. I was getting ready to put it all on the table when I realized that I'd neglected, once again, to think about dessert. How can you have a feast without dessert? So I was casting about in my mind for something that I could throw together quickly, without anyone's having to trudge out to the grocery store, when I recalled a dilemma I'd been pondering earlier in the day. We'd come home from Mass, as we usually do (well, practically always -- I can't think of a time when we haven't eventually come home from Mass), and made pancakes and sausages for brunch. The sausages get snarfed up almost before people sit down at the table, but the pancakes -- if there's a pancake recipe out there that doesn't make seven million large pancakes plus about thirty-eight silver-dollar-sized ones, we haven't found it yet, and as a result, our freezer has been filling up rapidly with bags of leftover pancakes. I keep meaning to trot them out for breakfast some weekday morning, but then I forget, so week by week, they keep piling up, and I hate to throw them out (or even compost them), but even I have to admit that reheated frozen pancakes don't taste like quite the thing you want when what you want is pancakes.

What do you do with leftover pancakes? Well, possibly you can make dessert with them. I have to credit Aelred with the idea; I also have to credit him with reminding me of the jar of too-runny jam that's been hanging around the fridge uneaten, because people get tired of putting strawberry syrup on their toast. If I'd had some sherry, I would have soaked the pancakes in it and called the subsequent dessert "trifle," but I didn't have any sherry. I laid a layer of leftover pancakes in a baking dish and poured on some jam and let that soak in, then more pancakes and more jam. Then I made a quick English custard and poured that over as well. I let it all just sort of steep while we finished dinner, and then I dug around in the freezer, saying, "Excuse me," to the two free turkeys (there's some reason for shopping at Bi Lo after all -- they give you these bonus points, and now I have about thirty-five pounds' worth of turkey hanging out in my freezer, waiting for Christmas), and found -- let me just say that what I found is the kind of item which I would never, ever, ever, even in extremity -- ever buy. Aelred bought it. I can't remember why. I don't even normally think of this kind of thing as a food item; it's more of a chemical oddity. I'm talking about frozen "whipped topping," of course. It wasn't that long ago that Aelred bought it, and ever since a few people put little dollops of it on whatever it was that he'd bought that he thought that dollops of frozen whipped topping would crown with glory, it's just been sitting there keeping the turkeys company. Anyway, there it was, and as the general theme of tonight's dessert was turning out to be "get this stuff out of my freezer," I smeared the whipped topping over the jam-custard-pancake dessert, and the family consumed it with exclamations of -- if not delight, at least exclamations of, "You know, this isn't half bad." Helier had two helpings.

I suppose the lesson to be learned is that when people expect something sweet at the end of a meal, it doesn't much matter what it is. Still, I ate some of this dessert, too, and I had to concur -- it really wasn't half bad. I wouldn't serve it to company, unless maybe I had a trifle dish and some sherry and some real whipped cream, but people here seemed perfectly happy with it. They were much happier, at any rate, than they would have been had I said, "I forgot all about dessert! Sorry!" and let it go at that. So now you know: you know what depths I am willing to stoop to in the name of dessert; and you also know what to do with leftover pancakes, if you have them.

For more creative frugalities, go consult the DHM. She's better at this than I am.