Pancake Day!

Photo by jeffreyw

Shrove Tuesday is the traditional time for a clear-out of tempting ingredients from your store cupboard if you're planning to give up goodies for Lent. It's also a fantastic excuse to stuff yourself silly with various sweet or savoury pancakes.

Our new young hens have been laying an egg each per day right through the winter, and their rich orange yolks give pancakes a lovely rich colour. Pancakes to eat with lemon and sugar or maple syrup are always best eaten as soon as they're made, but they can be frozen if interleaved with greaseproof paper. This year I found a lovely recipe for salmon and prawn pancakes, so I'm making an extra big batch of batter so we can have the old favourites for tea tonight and try the new recipe for supper at the weekend.

To make the pancake batter I use 2 eggs, 8oz flour and enough milk to make a fairly thin batter (around 15 fl oz). I do this a couple of hours before its needed - when the children were small they used to love doing this before school, then eating the pancakes when they got home!

To cook, I melt a tiny bit of lard in my dedicated pancake pan until it's smoking hot, then quickly pour in enough batter to cover the base. Cook for a minute or two then flip it over to cook the other side. Tossing pancakes is great fun, especially with children in the house! One year while ours were at school, I cut a pancake shape from yellow paper and stuck it to the ceiling, ready to fool them that one had flown just a bit too high...