Pancake Round-Up

My laptop charger arrived today! :) I don't think it's completely solved the problem unfortunately, but for now at least, it has provided me with computer access so I'm happy! :)

I hope you've all having a great pancake day?

Lots of pancakes have been eaten here...

It started with regular pancakes before the others went to school/uni - 200g plain flour, 2 eggs, 2 tbsp oil and 600 ml milk to make these beauties...

I had 2 rolled up with lemon juice and sugar...

Yum. Although a lot smaller than usual - the "non-stick" pan we normally use for pancakes decided it had enough this morning so we had to use the mini pan instead, they were quite cute, although it did cause much frustration for Liam (the pancake maker) as we were eating them twice as fast, whereas it was still taking him just as long to make them!!

I can't remember if I've told you about the water problems we've been having in the house recently? On Sunday they were doing roadworks and managed to burst the water pipe outside our house...so no running water on Sunday night. Then on Monday we came down to find water dripping from the ceiling in the entrance hallway, right by the light! So our landlord's brother came round last night to have a look and stop the immediate leak, then was back again this morning to finish fixing it. By the time he left at 10.30am I was starving again - 2 mini pancakes is not enough for breakfast!! So I used some of the remaining pancake batter to make a banana fritter/thick banana pancake... It went from this rather unappealing mess in a pan...

to this after half frying, half grilling (I didn't trust myself to flip it!)...

to this...

It tasted amazing, especially with the maple syrup. These photos don't really do it justice!

So good. And it's got fruit in it so it's kind of healthy right?! Who cares? It's pancake day...any excuse! :)

For lunch, I wanted to stick with the pancake theme, so decided to have a 2nd attempt at socca. Those of you who remember the disaster that was me trying to pan-fry socca, will not be surprised that I decided to oven bake it this time! I just mixed 55g chickpea flour, 110ml water and 10ml sesame oil (as I was going to be serving it with houmous) and put it into a cake tin...

and baked it in the oven at about 180C (I already had peppers roasting in the oven so just put it in with them) for about 15 minutes...

not bad...you'll have to wait a minute to see whether it came out of the pan ok!

Luckily for me, baby decided to have a super-long nap today 10.30am-1.30pm, so I had plenty of time in the kitchen to make the banana pancake (above) and lunch. As well as the socca, I roasted some peppers and made houmous. I decided on caramelised red onion houmous as it's my favourite shop bought flavour. I sliced and fried 2 small red onions, then blitzed them up with a tin of rinsed chickpeas, 1.5tsp sesame oil, 40g tahini, 2 garlic cloves and 5ml lemon juice..
.

plus water until the houmous reached desired consistency...

this is good, nice sesame flavour, but the onion tasted raw...I'll have to cook it for longer first next time...

So, time to plate up lunch. Not surprisingly, the socca didn't manage to come out in one piece (I'd forgotten to grease the pan which wouldn't have helped!!)

but once it was topped with houmous and roast peppers you couldn't really tell...



although admittedly it didn't really look much like a pancake then either! Ah well, it tasted good...socca didn't really have a strong taste but had a nice texture...any taste would have been overpowered by the "raw" onion flavour anyway!!

This afternoon, I snacked on non-pancake food...namely 4 chocolate biscuits (oops!) and a maple walnut latte...but non-pancake photos aren't going into my post today or it'll go on forever! Having not had access to my laptop recently, I've kind of got out of the habit of photographing every little thing I eat...I might stick to just posting photos of my main meals in future, unless I eat/make any interesting snacks of course! :)

For dinner, another version of pancakes... goat's cheese and leek crepes...which were based on a recipe in The Vegetarian Cookbook...

and were meant to look like this...

I simplified the recipe down a bit, cutting out salt pepper etc as I don't like using salt in cooking and we didn't have the other things. So I ended up just gently frying leeks in butter and oil...

Before assembling the pancakes. The recipe just calls for "savoury pancakes" and, in my experience, shop bought pancakes tend to work better for savoury bake recipes. However Waitrose were out of stock of their fresh crepes, so Liam bought dry good pancakes from Tesco. Bleugh...much smaller, thicker, and way too sweet despite saying they were suitable for sweet or savoury! Had to make do though, especially as our pan was in no way up to making more pancakes!

First I added the leeks...

then goat's cheese on top...

before rolling them and putting in baking dish...

Whenever I've made savoury pancakes in the past, I've put a white sauce on top of them before baking. However this recipe didn't suggest that so I just went with it as I was tired and wanted a quick dinner!

After about 5 minutes in the oven...

it was time to serve up...

typically I served mine last and it split everywhere. Daughter's looked slightly more attractive...

...or maybe not...they tasted better than they looked!! Everyone else really enjoyed these (baby scoffed the pancake super fast but wasn't keen on the leeks!) but I couldn't get past the sweetness of the pancakes. I ate a bit of the filling when I was prepping them though and that was yummy...I'm in a loving goat's cheese phase at the moment! :)

After dinner, Liam and daughter had yet more Tesco pancakes, this time with Nutella, banana and whipped cream...

but I contented myself with a few fingers of Nutella, then waited until the children were in bed before using the last of the pancake batter from this morning up.

My final pancake of the day... a blueberry and vanilla version of this morning's banana pancake... not quite the American style pancakes I'd planned to make (I ran out of time/sacrificed them for the banana pancake earlier!) but delicious nonetheless...served with Rachel's Greek style coconut yoghurt...

Yum. So many pancakes! I think my favourite was the banana pancake, but they've all been prettyy good! :)

Have you managed to enjoy some pancakes today? And are you giving anything up for Lent?

I made a last minute decision today to give up shop-bought processed sweet treats (...and breathe!) so, importantly!, I'm still allowed raw chocolate (some on its way to me in the post at the moment!) but not bought chocolate, bought cakes, bought biscuits etc...and if I make my own sweet treats I will try to replace the white sugar with a more natural alternative. A bit of a wordy one, but hopefully means its not too restrictive (I don't see anything wrong with having a sweet treat now and again, even in Lent) but will make me think about what I'm giving up, and also focus me back to healthy eating again...I think I need it after today's load of white flour pancakes!! Delicious, but so full and bloated now!