Family Tradition: Pancake Wednesdays

Rowan proudly displaying her pancakes: a fairy, planets, a kangaroo with a unicorn horn, and Lowly Worm's apple car

As I sit down to write this morning and take a survey of my surroundings, I see that I am wearing a feather boa, Aaron has a Hello Kitty sticker on his chest, Retta has hit the keyboard 3 times now and deleted some fragment of this post, and in the background I overhear Aaron and Rowan saying, "Let's make a big fat sheep, a hungry wolf, a slide, a mermaid and an ostrich egg." It's another typical (and by typical I mean strangely trippy and chaotic but in a good way) Wednesday morning at our house. Somewhere along the line Aaron and Rowan started making pancakes together, and it became a special father-daughter thing they like to do. After a couple times of making regular round pancakes, they decided to get artful and expand their repertoire to the more abstract. Given their shared affinity for nature, most of our pancakes tend to fall into that shape genre (wood frogs, salamanders, mossy rocks, and wolves), but lately they've really been branching out and anything goes. Aaron works from home on Wednesdays, which have officially become Pancake Wednesdays in our house...a lovely mid-week tradition, where we find ourselves actually able to share a leisurely breakfast together before we all set upon our work for the day. Rowan looks forward to it all week, and never forgets what Wednesday means: PANCAKES!!! She usually runs into our bedroom on Wednesdays, jumps up and down next to Aaron's head, reminding him of this very fact, and it's urgency. This morning while cooking breakfast, she kept randomly yelling while pumping her fist in the air, "YAY! Pancake morning!! Thanks Daddy for letting it be pancake morning! Daddy, isn't this going to be a great day?! Inside on  a rainy morning but it's okay because we are listening to music and making pancakes!" It's the little things people. A lesson I'm sure we can all keep in mind.

Here is a recipe for a new twist on their original pancake recipe (from Betty Crocker's Cookbook) which we are loving at the moment...we've figured out how to sneak some quinoa into Rowan's diet. Plus if it's got quinoa, I think it means it's okay to eat more pancakes.

Blueberry Quinoa and Cornmeal Pancakes

• 1 large egg
• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup milk
• 1 TBS granulated or packed brown sugar
• 2 TBS vegetable oil
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup quinoa flakes
• 2 TBS cornmeal
• blueberries--as many as you'd like

Mix all ingredients together and cook them in a cast iron pan or griddle, greasing with butter or oil. Make any shapes you fancy, drizzle with maple syrup, agave, or honey and devour!  

Some more pancake art: I think we have a crab, a slug, Mickey Mouse, a salamander, a snake, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Enjoying pancakes out on the deck earlier this summer, Retta's first time watching us eat them

Rowan and the fairy pancake