Who knew milk was so important?

Being poor college students, we cannot currently afford to be very lavish in our food spending. That means a lot of pasta roni, soups, and salads for us. To break the monotonity, though, we aim to try and make one new special meal about every two weeks. We want to do it once a week, but so far just have not. We received some great cook books from Shane's family (thanks again) that are a bunch of 5 ingredient recipes, crock-pot magic, and bisquick recipes.

The bisquick one has been the least used so far so for tonight we chose from its pages. We cooked Mexican Corn and Bean Cakes and will tell y'all about that because the rest of our lives are boring. We thought it would give us something else good to write about on here plus if anyone thinks it looks good, then ask and we'll happily provide the recipe. On with the grub!

First off, I will explain today's title: who knew milk was so important? We started off mixing the bisquick, corn meal, and egg whites to make the pancake things. We mixed it all together and the batter did not look so pretty. You know there's a problem when the recipe says "pour batter into skillet" and we were stuck with dry crumbly dough. Not much pouring here.

"Maybe it just looks gross now," we thought. So we started cooking it up and these are the beauties that came out:
















Nice, huh?

I could not for the life of me figure out how it was supposed to be moist with only 3 egg whites for liquid. Then, on closer inspection, we realized that we were supposed to add a cup of milk. Whoops.

We remade the recipe and here are the new and improved pancake-things:
















I promise there is also more to the recipe than just pancakes. It is almost like a pancake sloppy joe sorta. Each serving uses two pancakes, one on bottom, then spread with refried beans, topped with another pancake, and then capped with a chunky salsa, corn, and cheese mixture. Here is the final product:
















All told we enjoyed it very much. My only complaint was that the pancakes were slightly on the dry side (I'm used to drowing my pancakes in more syrup than cake!). We corrected that by pouring a little Ketchup on it and voila. Overall I give them a 7.5 out of 10.

But life lessons are so much more than just eating a good meal. Shoot, now we know just how important milk is and have some good duck-food at the same time.

This is up there with that one time about a month ago that I almost set the oven on fire. I walked into the kitchen to check on my cookings and realized that I couldn't see the kitchen window 10 feet away from me through the smoke. I believe the conversation went something like this:

"Crystal...do we have a smoke detector?"
"Yeah, why do you ask?"
"Oh...no reason...on an unrelated note where is it?"

Then I rushed off to unplug the battery. Don't worry, she very quickly realized what was going on. The food was perfectly fine and tasted great, some dripped onto the bottom of the oven though and smoked out our apartment. For a while it made our apartment smell like we smoked two packs a day. We just prayed that no ward members would come by and visit during that time.

Praise the heavens for Febreeze! Spray on, freshness-lovers, spray on!