Pancakes and waffles and dumplings! Oh, my!

The friend who gave me The Daylight Time-Savers Are Here! is very serious about saving time, as she also gave me 133 Quicker Ways to Homemade... with Bisquick (Betty Crocker, 1959).

The booklet offers a lot of Bisquicky variations on common recipes, like this love child of pigs in a blanket and corndogs, the cutely-named Pronto Puppies.

Since Bisquick is so commonly used as a pancake mix, the Betty Crocker team had to figure out a way to make pancakes seem more exciting. They went all-in on pancake towers with special fillings between the layers, to be cut and served almost like a cake. There's everything from the evocatively-titled "Sunday in Vermont Pancakes"...

...which are apple pancakes with cranberry sauce between layers-- maybe a good after-Thanksgiving breakfast to use up the leftovers?--

...to the Colonial Jelly Stack...

...I guess because colonists had to preserve fruit as jelly? (I'm sure they didn't have any powdered sugar, but if you're trying to get old-timey with a baking mix anyway, authenticity isn't exactly the main concern.)

There's also a savory way to dress up waffles that isn't the chicken-and-waffles we're used to today.

I love that "Waffle Club Rabbit" sounds as if it's a reference to the fuzzy mascot kept by an organized group of breakfast enthusiasts, but the rabbit in this case is of the cheesy Welsh rabbit variety. (I still want to know where and when the Waffle Club meets, though. I wasn't much for extracurricular activities, but I'd have been happy to stay after school and make waffles! I might even have accepted them with cheese if I could have skipped the mustard.)

(Also, if you're really into chicken and waffles and disappointed that the booklet didn't offer a recipe, it does mention a "Waffle Supper Royal" consisting of waffles served with the cook's favorite creamed chicken and some whole cranberry sauce. I'm a little surprised Ocean Spray wasn't a cosponsor, as much as this tries to sell readers on adding cranberry sauce to things.)

I also had to check out the dumpling section, as so many people seem to love dumplings and I can just never figure out why. They always seem too heavy and gummy and goopy to be very enjoyable to me. (Give me the crisp, brown, lightly crunchy edges of a biscuit any day!) The book tries to make dumplings look exciting, here with a sprinkle of parsley to make the pale dumpling blobs pop against a red stew.

What's the stew? Good question. The booklet doesn't actually offer a recipe that seems to match up with the picture. Instead, it tells readers to make things like Sauerkraut with Franks and Dumplings.

I wasn't sure there was a way to make dumplings sound less appealing to me, but filling them full of caraway seeds and serving them with sauerkraut is an excellent way to do it. I also imagine this sounds fantastic to somebody out there, but I hate sauerkraut.

Bisquick seemed ready to try to talk haters into giving dumplings a shot, offering five different ways to "dress up" the gluey little fuckers.

Maybe the sweetness of corn contrasted with savory beef stew or the pop of color from pimiento and green pepper in a dark veal stew would help, but raisin dumplings in the chicken fricassee? No thanks.

 I will say thanks to the thoughtful friend (and fellow dumpling despiser) "George" for giving me a fun afternoon of pondering all the things I am happy not to do with Bisquick! Now let's head on over to the Waffle Club meeting. We don't want to leave the rabbit waiting.