This Morning's Cooking Project

This morning, Sam and I made pancakes. Specifically, a half batch of plain pancakes and a half batch of chocolate chip and banana pancakes.

We start, as usual, with taking my super not-so-secret pancake recipe and multiplying it by six. "Six?" you say. "That seems like an awful lot of pancakes!" Good point (and thanks for reading this far.).

I do it for a couple of reasons.

First of all, my philosophy is that if I'm going to bother to cook or bake anything, I'm going to make it worth my while. Same amount stuff I have to haul out. Same amount of stuff I have to clean up and put away afterwards. If I'm going to go to all this trouble, I may as well have plenty to eat.

Also, we like pancakes.

Today, there's an additional excuse. Today, I'm taking most of the "left-overs" (meaning, those pancakes I can put away before they get eaten) and I'm freezing them, in groups of three four (late update). I'm doing this since we're not going on our usual grocery runs on the weekends. These pancakes, along with the French toast I froze a week or so ago, will give Sam different breakfast options on weekends - at least for a little while.

Anyway, we start with the recipe, read through the ingredients, read through the instructions, then get out all our tools - bowls, measuring cups, mixer, etc.. Next step - we go back and read through the ingredients and read through the instructions one more time - just to be sure we understand them.

Then we start with the ingredients we're supposed to start with. Sam helps me do the math, in this case multiplying each ingredient by six - and, if necessary, helps me convert. Then, off we go.

One of Sam's job, as always, is to crack the eggs. I have him crack them one-at-a-time into small glass measuring cup, then add them one-at-a-time into the bowl. This is what's known as "our system". We do this because if we see the inevitable eggshell spec floating around in one of our eggs, it's a lot easier to fish it out of one egg than it is to fish it out of a bowl of six eggs.

I won't bore you with the rest of our process (assuming you somehow managed to make it this far) but I will say that, this morning, we concentrated on teaching Sam how to: a) pour the batter onto the griddle in pancake-like quantities, b) how and when to flip the pancakes, and finally, c) how to stack the pancakes on the griddle, then get them over to the plate. (There is no step "d". He already knows how to eat them.)

I have to say, Sam did amazingly well - especially on the flipping. A couple of them landed in unplanned areas, but as I reminded him, no big deal, we can fix it. And besides, they're only pancakes. (This is pretty much our motto for most things in life - pancakes or not).

The other steps will take a little more practice and a little more repetition, but really, that's a good thing because, like I said, we like pancakes.