Most of you know that I try and get my children involved in the kitchen. I also try and expose them to all sorts of different foods. It was with this in mind that The Lovely Wife and I bought them two cookbooks from the Usbourne Childrens series.
When my son was in hospital recently for a minor lung infection, he was served pancakes for breakfast one day. He seemed to enjoy it tremendously although both The Lovely Wife and I found it a tad rubbery. Now both the kids have had pancakes before although we have never made it for them.
So one fine Saturday, The Lovely Wife decided she was going to make pancakes for the kids. I think she's getting a little bit of my 'disease' where she can't stand it if the kids like something other than homecooked food! She decided to get the kids involved as well by reading through the recipe with them. The recipe came from The Usbourne Little Round the World Cookbook - one of the very same books that I spoke about earlier.
The thing I like about the cookbook is that it not only provides the recipe but also some information about the country that the recipe represents. Now I am very, very sure that Canada has much more interesting Cuisine than Pancakes but at least the kids got to learn a little bit about Canada!
For instance, they learnt what maple leaves look like as well as learning that it is the National Emblem of Canada. They also learnt that maple syrup comes from the sap of the maple tree and that metal tubes are drilled into the tree to extract the sap. They also learnt about the Rockies and that Canada has "vast fields of wheat, mountains and huge lakes." Canadians often eat pancakes for breakfast too. I'm sure that's a generalisation but all in all, not a bad learning exercise
This is the recipe that makes about 8-10 pancakes although we made them small so we got a much larger quantity of pancakes. We also reduced the oil as we used a non stick pan.
145g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1 egg
2 tbsp vegetable oil
300ml milk
Method
Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Whisk the egg with two tbsp oil and milk. Beat the egg mixture into the flour a little at a time until smooth. Sppon the mixture onto a hot non stick pan and cook for about a minute. Pancakes will start to bubble. Turn over and cook the other side.
We served the pancakes with honey and nutella since we didnt have any maple syrup. A few days later though, we did get a bottle of maple flavoured pancake syrup since the pure maple syrup is just way, way too expensive over in this part of the world.
The kids loved the pancakes and they both scoffed them down like their was no tomorrow. It looks like pancakes are one of their favourite foods now!
