Peppa Pig

England is a long way to go for a pancake connection, but when my 3 year old requested pancakes today, I knew what made him want them. He was watching the episode of Peppa Pig where Daddy pig cooks pancakes for breakfast. The Cartoon Network here in the U.S. doesn’t show Peppa Pig any more, which is a shame. My son liked it, we all liked it. I thought it was a good show for kids, but the Cartoon Network quit showing a lot of the kid’s shows that we really liked.

Two of the cartoons that we watched were Peppa Pig and Gordon The Garden Gnome. Both of these shows are from the UK, where they speak English, but for some reason they re-did the voices with American voice actors. This makes no sense to me. Did someone think that English accents would confuse the children? I went looking on Amazon.com for Peppa and Gordon, but I didn’t have much luck, so I thought I’d check out Amazon UK. They had a wonderful selection of the shows that we were looking for.

As soon as Daddy Pig started flipping pancakes, Ulysses came running. He wanted to make pancakes, so I took down the batter bowl, and gathered up all the ingredients. As I placed each ingredient on the counter, he would name it and give a little cheer. I knew we would make a mess, but I didn’t really care. We spilled some buttermilk and some flour, but it was all fun.

Here is the recipe that we used:
1 cup whole wheat flour
½ t salt
½ t sugar
½ t baking soda
2 large eggs
1 cup homemade buttermilk
1 T melted butter
thin with a little plain milk or water if the batter is too thick

Sourdough Pancakes

My basic recipe for sourdough pancakes:
2 cups sourdough
1 egg
1 T sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 T oil

A good sourdough pancake starts its life the night before it’s going to be cooked. In a large bowl, preferably non-metal, add 2 cups flour, 2 cups water, and your sourdough starter. Mix it up and let it sit overnight. In the morning, take out 2 cups of the batter, and put the rest in refrigerator for later use, as this is now your starter. Beat the egg with the salt, sugar, and oil, and then gently blend it into your batter.

When your griddle is hot enough, sprinkle the baking soda over the batter and gently blend it in. In a minute or two the batter will start to bubble as the acid in the starter reacts with the baking soda(NaHCO3). I like to fry my pancakes in butter for a crisp edge around the pancake. Butter will burn if the griddle is too hot, and I often find myself wiping down my griddle with a paper towel midway through the cooking. You don’t really need to oil the griddle to get a good pancake with this recipe, but that’s the way I like it.

One of the many things that can be added to pancakes to boost the nutritional profile is flax meal. A 1/4 cup of flax meal added to the basic recipe gives it a nice nutty flavor. In experimenting with blueberries, I found that I liked them best when I let them sizzle for a minute in the butter before pouring the pancake batter over them.

Pancakes for Breakfast

Sunday morning is hereby and forever to be a pancake breakfast. I don’t care if you are low-carb, low-fat, vegetarian, or all around wanker, if you eat breakfast at our home on Sunday morning, you will have pancakes if you don’t want to be expelled with extreme prejudice.

Pancakes at Ember's, 1997

Ember's, on E. Washington in Madison, WI, had the best pancakes in town. They were about the only restaurant that could make a breakfast as good as my own. They've been gone for a long time now, and being a breakfast man, I haven't had much desire to eat out. I've had decent breakfast's here and there, but they weren't hardly worth the trouble it took to eat them.

A Dream Come True

Last night I dreamt that I created this blog. In the dream I was riding a bicycle while thinking about blogging. I thought it would be fun to have a blog called "Backpedaling While Blogging For Pancakes." It was such a fanciful title that I thought that surely it would be a big success. In the dream I could see that "Backpedaling While Blogging For Pancakes" was too long to be a URL. It was a confusing moment until I saw that I could simplify it to "bloggingforpancakes."

I woke up in the night knowing that there was something that I needed to write down, which is something that I never do. It came to me in bits and pieces, and I had to get up a second time to write it down in full, but now it's here. I don't know what it's going to be about. It's just crazy to create a blog from a dream, but it's the most fun I've had at 06:30 in a long time.