Pancake Day!

 

Pancake Rocks, South Island, New Zealand, 2015

C always does the pancake mix (this year it was Jamie Oliver's recipe with 3 eggs and it worked a treat) and then it's a frenzy of taking turns to cook, garnish, eat, and then jump up to make the next one while the other one eats. The whole meal is over in about 12 minutes.

When I was a kid Mum always marked pancake day  because it was Shrove Tuesday, the day before giving-things-up-for-Lent. We would have Golden Syrup on ours, much like we did with the leftover Yorkshire puddings on a Sunday. This was when we lived in York, prior to 1962 when we moved house. 

(Our diet in York was limited by what we could afford. I remember sausages, eggs, fishcakes chicken for Sunday dinner, maybe cottage pie. Vegetables would be peas from a tin or whatever Dad brought back from the allotment, not that us kids would be very interested in real veggies. 'Afters' was Instant Whip or something from a can - pears, mandarin orange segments maybe with "cream" (Carnation Evaporated Milk). Or sometimes a baked pie or cake perhaps. Nobody had a freezer, back then.)

Now, 60 years later, I am still using Golden Syrup on my pancakes (probably the only day of the year it comes out of the can - today's, I note, is marked BBE 07/22 and is a strange dark brown colour but I'm sure it's alright). But also juice squeezed from a reluctant orange and a bit of banana. That's for half of the pancakes. The other half benefit from a generous splodge of Nutella.

The pancake day I am reminded of each year is 1987 when little B was a few hours old and I returned home after a long night and our lovely next-door neighbour Marjorie made me pancakes for breakfast. She was a gem, and still is.