Eureka!

Ok, so it has become a semi-ritual in my house to make some kind of special breakfast on the weekend.  It can vary from pancakes to waffles to omeletes to fritatas.  On the days that we have pancakes, I invariably have left over batter and a starving dad (yours truly) with no desire to have pancakes.  Well, after throwing out the leftover batter innumerable times, I decided to try something a little different.

First off, this must have been inspired by the episode of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives that I was watching on my kitchen computer that day. Guy Fieri was visiting restaurants that featured Mexican and South-West cuisine.  There was a lot of masa, peppers and pepperjack cheese going down that day and it all looked fantastic.

So wouldn't you know it, that's what I ended up using with what remained of the pancake batter?

Here's what I did:

1) I added approx a 1/4 cup of yellow corn masa to the 3/4 cups of left over pancake batter.

2) I chopped up about 2 tbsp of pickled Jalepeno peppers and 2 tbsp of sweet onions and added them into the batter.

3) I grated about 1/4 cup pepper jack cheese and added that

4) I seasoned it with salt, freshly ground pepper, Hungarian paprika, cumin and onion powder - to taste, y'all!

5) after all that, it got a bit thick so I added approx 3 tbsp of buttermilk.

When all was said and done, the mixture was like a slightly thicker than usual pancake.

Now here comes the major twist.  I did not just make a tasty savory pancake with this mutha.  Here's what I did next:

6) I heated a 10" cast iron pan over medium heat,  fried two strips of bacon cut into 1/4" strips.

7) Once the bacon was just starting to crisp up on the edges, I added a teaspoon of butter to the bacon and then then placed a 3" ramakin in the middle of the pan, displacing the bacon out to the edge. Making sure the ramakin was flat on the pan, I spooned the batter around the ramakin out to the edge of the pan over the evenly spaced bacon.

8) I then let it cook for approx 2 minutes or until the batter has solidified enough to allow me to take the ramakin out of the middle of the batter, leaving a round open area in the middle.  I then turned the heat up just a tad and let things sit for approx 30 seconds.

10) I then slapped another dab of butter in the middle of the pan where the ramakin was and cracked two eggs into the pancake crater - the Eagle has landed!

11) I then covered the pan, left the heat at medium high for about a minute so as to cook the top of the eggs and then took the pan off the heat, dabbled some more shredded Monterey Pepper Jack cheese and placed it in the oven at 400 for about 1-2 minutes or until the whites were fully formed.

12) I then plated the Masa Hub Cap of Love and did my best Jackson Pollack impression with some Sriacha.

Viola! I have a savory South Western pancake.  Oh, yeah, babe!