Blueberry Lemon Yogurt Pancakes

Blueberries hit $1.99 a pint at Aldi this week, the lowest price they have been all year, and I bought two pints on Tuesday afternoon on my way home from a Sonic shift, and I am going to write about what I did with them, because what I did with them turned into the kind of Sunday morning I want to put down on paper before it dissolves into the rest of the year.

The blueberry math first. I have figured this out about Aldi: their produce on sale is what you build a freezer around. They mark down whole pints of berries when the truck comes in and the previous truck’s produce is one day from soft, and if you grab the marked-down trays at the right hour you can get pristine fruit at a third of what it costs at Walmart. I bought four pints of strawberries on a Tuesday in May at $1.49 each and froze three of them on a sheet pan first so the berries did not clump, then bagged them in freezer bags, and we have been using those strawberries on cereal and in oatmeal all summer.

The blueberries are going to do the same thing. Two pints, $3.98 total. I rinsed them, dried them on a dish towel, and spread them on a sheet pan in a single layer to freeze. Three hours in the freezer and they were rock-hard and separated, and I poured them into two quart-sized freezer bags and labeled them Blueberries July 2016 with a Sharpie. Two pints fresh becomes about four cups of frozen, and four cups of frozen becomes about thirteen bowls of cereal worth of blueberries, which works out to about thirty cents per topping. That is the math that is going to keep us in blueberries until Christmas.

But this post is not really about the blueberry math. It is about the Sunday morning. So let me get to that.

Mama got Saturday off this week. The new district policy at Dollar General is one weekend day a month, and Mama scheduled her July day for the third Saturday, the seventeenth, because that was the day they could give her. She slept until ten in the morning, like the last time. I worked the morning shift at the Sonic, eight to two, came home around two-thirty, and walked into the kitchen still in my polo, and what I saw on the back porch through the screen door is what I want to put down on paper.

Mama was on the back porch in her jeans and a clean t-shirt with a glass of iced tea. And Cody was sitting next to her. In a clean t-shirt of his own. With his hair washed. With his face shaved for what I am pretty sure is the first time in three weeks. He had his elbows on his knees the way he does when he is thinking hard, and Mama was looking out at the magnolia tree, and neither of them was talking, but they were both there. On the same porch. Together.

I stood in the kitchen doorway for a long ten seconds. I did not move because I was afraid moving would break it. I had not seen the two of them on the same porch, in clean clothes, in the daytime, in months. The whole spring and the whole start of summer have been the slow disappearance of my brother into a version of himself that does not come home and does not eat at the table and does not wash plates and does not put on a clean t-shirt. And here he was, on a Saturday afternoon in July, on the back porch with our mother, in a clean t-shirt, with his face shaved.

I put down my Sonic bag. I went to my room and changed out of the polo. I came back out and I made iced tea for myself and I joined them on the porch. I did not say anything for a few minutes. None of us did. We sat in the three folding chairs Mama keeps on that porch and we watched the magnolia tree do whatever a magnolia tree does in mid-July when there are no flowers on it but the leaves are deep and shining. Cody finally spoke. He said, Kay, you doing okay at the Sonic? Three sentences from him in two weeks. I said yes, that I was doing okay. He said, good, that’s good. Mama drank her iced tea. The three of us sat on the porch for an hour and we did not talk about where Cody had been for the past two weeks, and we did not talk about the eight days he was gone, and we did not talk about how the rest of the spring had felt, because there was a thing in the air that suggested if any of us said the wrong thing we would shatter the small porch we were sitting on, and none of us did.

That night I told Mama I was going to make pancakes Sunday morning. I told her in the kitchen while we were doing the dishes. I told her I had bought blueberries and a small tub of yogurt and a lemon. She said, I will tell your brother. And she walked down the hallway to his bedroom door, and she knocked, and she said something through the door, and Cody said something back I could not hear, and Mama came back to the kitchen and she said, he’ll be at the table at nine. And I do not know what they had said to each other, but Mama’s face was different when she said the sentence than her face had been when she went down the hall.

And Sunday morning at nine, Cody was at the table.

I want to walk through the pancakes because the pancakes were the prop and the morning was the play. The recipe was a Cookie and Kate one I had copied out a month ago, blueberry-lemon-yogurt pancakes, and the trick of it is that the yogurt makes the pancakes tangy and tender, and the lemon zest folded into the batter brightens everything up, and the blueberries do the blueberry thing where they pop and bleed purple into the pancake while they cook. The flour and the eggs and the milk and the baking powder were already in the kitchen. The yogurt was $1.49 for a small tub from Aldi. The lemon was forty-nine cents from Walmart. The blueberries were already in the freezer from Tuesday. Total cost of breakfast for three: about $3.20.

I made the batter at eight-thirty. I zested the half-lemon I had left over from last weekend’s Greek salad dressing. I folded the zest and the yogurt into the wet ingredients before they went into the dry. I let the batter rest for ten minutes, the way the recipe said to. I dropped a third of a cup of batter onto the hot greased griddle for each pancake. I scattered six or seven blueberries onto each pancake before the surface started to bubble. I flipped them when they were ready and not before. I had two stacks of three on each of three plates, with a small slab of butter melting in the middle and Aunt Jemima syrup poured slow over the top.

The three of us ate at the kitchen table at nine in the morning. Sun coming through the window onto the linoleum. Coffee for Mama. Orange juice for me and Cody. Cody ate four pancakes. He still did not say much, but he was there, in a chair, with his eyes clear and his face shaved and his elbow on the table. Mama looked at him. He looked back. They did not say anything to each other but the look went on for about three seconds, and I do not know what was inside it, and I know it was something. I am keeping it in the notebook anyway, the way you keep a photograph you are not sure why you took.

After breakfast Cody went back to his room and slept some more. Mama did the dishes. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote what I am writing now, so I would not forget that Sunday morning, July seventeenth, was a morning the three of us were at the same table at the same time, eating pancakes I made from scratch with blueberries I bought from Aldi for ninety-nine cents’ worth and froze on a sheet pan, on a $3.20 budget, on the porch we had sat on the night before and not talked.

I want to remember it. I am writing it down so I will.

The recipe is below, the way Cookie and Kate wrote it. The yogurt is the part that matters. Use plain whole-milk yogurt, not vanilla, not flavored, not low-fat. The lemon zest goes into the wet ingredients, not the dry. The blueberries get scattered onto the pancakes after the batter hits the griddle, not stirred into the bowl. Make these on a Sunday morning when somebody you love is at the table for the first time in a long time. Make these on any other Sunday morning too. They are good either way.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 15 minutes | Total Time: 25 minutes | Servings: 4 (about 8 pancakes)

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup plain Greek yogurt
1/2 cup milk
1 large egg
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries
Butter or neutral oil, for the pan

Instructions

Mix dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt until combined.
Mix wet ingredients. In a separate bowl or large measuring cup, whisk together the Greek yogurt, milk, egg, melted butter, vanilla extract, lemon zest, and lemon juice until smooth.
Combine. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir gently until just combined — a few lumps are fine. Do not overmix or the pancakes will be tough.
Fold in blueberries. Gently fold in the blueberries with a spatula, being careful not to crush them.
Heat the pan. Heat a large non-stick skillet or griddle over medium heat. Add a small pat of butter or a light drizzle of oil and let it melt and coat the surface.
Cook the pancakes. Pour about 1/4 cup of batter per pancake onto the skillet. Cook until bubbles form on the surface and the edges look set, about 2–3 minutes. Flip and cook the other side until golden brown, about 1–2 minutes more.
Keep warm and serve. Transfer finished pancakes to a low oven (200°F) to keep warm while you cook the rest. Serve with maple syrup, a dusting of powdered sugar, or extra fresh blueberries.

Nutrition (per serving)

Blueberry Lemon Yogurt Pancakes — The Sunday Morning the Three of Us Were at the Table