Pancake Bush

When I got home yesterday afternoon, I was proud to find that our daughter and a visiting friend had made themselves a brunch of pancakes. We do not keep a lot of "food" in the house, though we keep a lot of "ingredients" and fortunately Paloma has been raised to know what to do with them. Our indispensable Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison (aka Hayes-Boh Family Bible) was on the counter, opened to the page that is the basis of my James' Famous Pancakes (Readers of this blog will know that we have a favorite approach and many other quite-nice pancake recipes.)

For breakfast this morning, I offered to make pancakes, using the batter leftover from the efforts of our young chefs the day before as a starting point. There was not enough for the whole family and guest, so I augmented it with the ingredients from my own version of the recipe. This time I used 1/2 cup whole-wheat flour and 1 cup all-purpose, as I sometimes do. I used a spatula to alternate dry and wet ingredients (yogurt, vanilla, milk) and beat in one egg and a little canola oil.

Then came the fun part. Last year I had planted a blackberry bush, and in recent weeks had noticed it already starting to bear fruit. I had nibbled a few directly from the bush, and decided it was time to cook with them. We also had a few blueberries on hand and some butterscotch chips. Rather than mixing in any of these ingredients, I simply scattered them onto individual pancakes, so that we ended up with three different choices, all of which proved to be quite popular, especially when served with warmed, genuine maple syrup.

The blackberries were so big that I had to press them down a bit into the cooking pancakes.