blueberry pancakes

Alas, for I am griddle-less. The large cast-iron pan is too tall to be useful for pancakes, so Farberware it is. Not the best cooking surface choice for pancakes, but it'll do.

Yesterday I watched Food Network's Dinner Impossible with Robert Irvine. The challenge was to use candy in preparing dinner for a million a lot of people. Along the way he intended to tempura some kind of candy bar the way the Scots deep-fry Mars Bars. To be honest I wasn't paying close attention, but I did notice Robert pull out a box of tempura mix. My jaw dropped upon seeing a famous chef rely on a prepared mix which we all know to be nothing more than what any reasonably provided kitchen would already have. See, this is what I am talking about here. It bears on the raisin de tree, I mean the raison ďêtre of this humble blog. Robert pulled out the kind of box with which  I was well familiar. Our family had them all, basically the same thing for all types of different purposes, tempura, fish and chips, various pastas with their sauces, hamburger helpers, potato flakes, reconstituted rice, instant oatmeals, chicken coatings, prepared bread crumbs, prepared stuffings, biscuit mixes, cake mixes, everything you could imagine from the convenience aisles. They are slipping from my memory now because I do not even bother going through those aisles anymore. But I did grow up assuming that pancakes started with a box of prepared mix. Best to make your own. I urge you to try it.  Com'on, be a sport, you'll thank me for it. 

Base recipe:

*  1 + 1/2 cups A/P flour

*  3 + 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

*  1 teaspoon salt

*  1 tablespoon sugar

*  1 + 1/4 cups milk

*  1 egg

*  3 tablespoons melted butter

Present mutilation, but be mindful, it can be anything your creative spirit contrives.

* 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
* handful of blueberries.

Hint: with an addition like blueberries, drop them into the pancake after the batter is poured onto the griddle or the pan. Otherwise it will turn the whole batter blue. Maybe the kid in you wants blue batter. Who am I to judge?

Consider any fruit that seems good to you. In high school I used to make pancakes (from a box) and at the half way point upon turning, smeared it with preserves and folded it in half before the second half had fully cooked, so it took two turns instead of one turn and cooked on three sides, producing a semicircle. Or did the same thing with two whole pancakes. The point was to get preserves inside two cooked pancakes.

I also grew up thinking maple syrup was maple-flavored corn syrup, and I did wonder what the BFD was with maple flavor because it wasn't that great, and why was it automatically associated with pancakes? Imagine the shock when I learned the real thing is actually the sap of trees. Why were we misled so sorely down that wayward path? Why did my parents punk us like that? The whole thing was a considerable setback. Being not much more than kids themselves when they married, maybe they never knew any better.