You’re allowed to have pancakes more than once a year. In fact, you should. They’re ace.
Right now the rest of the world is blinking, coffee halfway to its face while the UK is going ‘Yes, but-‘
No. No but. There is no but here. There is only delicious, easy breakfast food that will make you happy and you can do all kinds of stuff with. I know, I know, I can hear you being all ‘This is blasphemy! This is madness!’
THIS!IS! AL DENTE!
Except I…make you pancakes instead of kick you into the special death pit Leonidas clearly had made to kick folks into. Wouldn’t that have been a nicer way to resolve things than all the stabbing? ‘Oh hi Xerxes, yeah yeah conquering, mangod all that. Want a pancake?’
‘…THESE ARE DELIGHTFUL.’
World peace. CENTURIES EARLY. That’s the sort of power pancakes have.
This particular recipe is git simple and comes to us from Borough Market, where I will be this very Friday. Borough Market is Food Valhalla, it’s a bustling hub of activity and deliciousness where I once had a vast cheese sandwich it took both of us over a day to eat. It’s the embodiment of everything I love about cooking and writing about cooking; positivity, variety, inclusiveness and food.
So much food.
Victor! The suspects!
So we have:
60g wholemeal flour
½ tsp baking powder
2 tsp light (whispers; ‘Durn da dun dun dun DUN) brown sugar
½ tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
250g cottage cheese
The cottage cheese in particular will weird you out a bit I suspect. Let it. It’s a slightly weird food stuff, and part of me suspected for years that it was actually edible packing peanuts wrapped in some form of Philadelphia style sauce.
I was, it’s fair to say, an unusual child.
Anyway, combine the dry ingredients and then stir in the eggs and cheese and whisk it for a couple of minutes. It’ll look like this:
I know, I know you’re thinking ‘Gosh, do I grout my bathtub, cover my walls with it or just go all out and buy that wallpaper we’ve been meaning to get?’. But here’s the thing; yes it looks sort of awful, like faintly apologetic puke (‘I’m sorraAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!’) but it’s actually delicious and will take you less time to make than you’ve spent reading the article so far.
So what’s next?
Drop half a tablespoon of butter into a heated frying pan and let it melt. If you have a gas hob, like me, you’ll have maybe two minutes before the tiny sun you have inside the cooking ring burns it to a crisp. Go, get your tweezers, and begin the desperate search for the single micrometre wide ‘Will Cook Things’ setting nestled between;
-‘1970s Public Service Announcement Waiting To Happen’
and
-‘The entirety of the Russian Gas Reserves Are Cooking Your Dinner’
and drop two table spoon dollops of mix into the pan. Then, get ready for the greatest act of patience as a cook you will ever commit; not turning them over until they’re done. Here’s an example;
See that suave looking cat on the left? He’s chilling (Well, cooking actually), slowly getting cooked through. His mixture is being heated, he’s got bubbles coming out of the top of him, he smells great. If a pancake was dapper, this would be the world’s most dapper pancake.
And then there’s his buddy. Poor little guy, whose entire central structure has collapsed because I flipped him early. He looks like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards, and then robbed and then done some form of hilarious 1970s style hijinks that the BBC could spin into a ten series sitcom with Christmas specials, nostalgic DVD releases and immensely unnecessary celebrity cameos.
Don’t be that pancake.
Be the suave pancake. Be the Fonzie of pancakes. Eyyy.
Basically, leave them alone for at least 2 minutes and, under no circumstances, assume they’ll be ready the same time as this.
Once they’re done, pull them from the pan and serve them immediately. The wholewheat flour and cottage cheese gives them a nice chewy texture and they go very well with yoghurt and jam. Or at least I’m told they do. Ours were crammed into our faceholes as fast they could safely be pulled from the solar heated butter. These things taste really REALLY good.
And that’s my point. Even if you go the whole hog and drizzle (or dunk, or chug, or intravenously inject) Maple Syrup over them this is still a meal that’s not full of horrifying calories and takes less time to make than a comedic blog post about making it takes to write or read. You can even, if you’re hyper efficient, make the batter the night before. Even better, whatever pancakes you make but don’t eat, put in a ziplock bag in the fridge and pop in the toaster the next morning. Booyah! Insta-breakfast!
So celebrate Pancake Day all year round. Because they’re cheap, simple to make, healthy, delicious and I’m way prouder of that Fonzie pancake joke than I was expecting to be. Do it for him. Do it for Fonzie Pancake. Eyyy.