Kids Cuisine

Nothing says yeah, yeah, I love you like getting up early in the morning just to make pancakes for your kids.

If you’re not the kind of mom who normally does that, I mean. And I’m not. Especially now that my kids are “older” (meaning, in elementary school), I’m much more the “get your own cereal and wake me at 7:30″ kinda mom.

But my daughter thew down the equivalent of a gauntlet the other day when she said, “Autumn’s mom makes them pancakes on a weekday.” Oh yeah? Well I could do that too, couldn’t I? I mean, if I wanted to and all.
“No, it’s too much trouble,” said my daughter. “You like to sleep in until the last minute.”
“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Don’t bother.”

Them’s fightin’ words, girlie.

So the other morning the alarm went off and I went to hit the snooze bar as always, when I remembered, “Oh yes! I’m going to be that kind of mom this morning,” and up I leapt to run down to the kitchen and stoke the hearths.

Now it’s really true, what Mark Bittman, author of “How to Cook Everything,” says. Americans must have become terribly alienated from the kitchen to forgo homemade pancakes in favor of the instant kind. It really is easy to make them. I use his simple recipe often when making the Sunday morning pancakes. But for this weekday fare, I thought I’d use my daughter’s favored recipe.

From the Usborne Children’s World Cookbook:Canadian pancakes. My daughter only recently figured out how to make these herself, so they’re her new favorite. They’re made with oil instead of butter, and fried up in oil, so they’re not my favorite. But this is about cooking with kids, right?

Here’s the recipe. It’s enough for 8 to 10 pancakes, or, if you make them big like I do, maybe 5 pancakes.

2/3 cup flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

a pinch of salt

1 egg

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 cup milk

Mix the dry ingredients together. In another bowl, whisk the egg and milk together with two tablespoons of the oil. Beat the wet stuff into the dry stuff. Heat the remaining oil unil “a faint haze rises from the pan.” Spoon out some batter; let it cook for about a minute on each side, or until it looks a little firmish.

Serve up with maple syrup and a giant glass of milk.

So what was the reaction of my progeny, you ask? Did they follow their noses downstairs, eyes alight? Well, no. Sometime in the night they both developed head colds and couldn’t smell anything by morning. But my daughter did express surprise at finding that not only had I gotten up without ever hitting the snoozebar, but I had met the Pepsi challenge and made her pancakes on a weekday.
That’s surprise. Not necessarily vocal appreciations. That’s OK. She didn’t feel well. She ate and went back up to bed and I kept her home from school that day. So while technically I proved that I can so make pancakes on a weekday like Autumn’s Mom, maybe in practice I proved nothing more than I love her enough to make the effort. And really, that’s all she needs to know.