Pater Familias … because I'm your FATHER!

No-Brainer Pancake/Waffle Batter

February 24, 2010 · Food

What do you put in front of kid(s) for breakfast?

Scratch-Made Batter Easy As Box Mix

Over-fathering in this house begins right after Minerva takes off for the city, at which point Girl Child chooses a made-to-order hot breakfast that I have, if I’m lucky, 10 minutes to deliver.    

Why not? We only have one girl, who turns seven in a couple weeks. This means only 10-11 more years of morning meals before our baby goes off to college or the around-the-world trip to find secret Wizard School that she and one of her bestest friends plan on. So breakfast should be a deluxe parent-child ritual, am I right? Also, I like the intensity, the challenge, like one-man short order Iron Chef. The pretend competition thing goes way beyond breakfast. Making stay-at-home/work-at-home fathering a game, played to the max, knocks back despair and suicidal ideation.

Among my winning moves – a favorite of the kid and good enough for brunch guests – are pancakes or waffles made from a fast scratch-made batter recipe so simple I carry it around in my head.

2-1-1 Pancake/Waffle Batter

Before you do anything, memorize the three digits above. 2-1-1 tells you the amounts of the three principle ingredients needed to make a batch that feeds two or three medium eaters – or, since batter stores in the fridge, one kid for multiple mornings.

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup of all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon of Canola oil or other vegetable oil

After a few repeats, you’ll remember the rest….

• 1 teaspoon of baking powder
• ¼ to ½ teaspoon salt
• Up to 1 cup milk (depends on desired result; ½ cup and an extra splash of milk for waffles and cake-y high pancakes; full cup for thin but not quite crepe-thi

After all the stuff and a couple of small mixing bowls are out on the counter, heat on medium-low stove setting a nonstick griddle that’s very lightly oiled (like a spritz of Pam wiped off with paper towel), or get the waffle iron going. Then...

1. Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl.
2. Beat together eggs, oil, and milk in another bowl.
3. Add the wet to the dry and mix with big spoon or spatula until batter is smooth-ish but still with a few small lumps.

With batter ready, turn up burner under griddle to the high side of medium. Test surface heat by flicking on droplets of water. When they sizzle and disappear in a hurry, you’re good. A pancake’s ready to flip when bubbles form across the entire surface. You can lift edges with your pancake-flipper, to monitor color.

Waffle guys just obey the waffle iron, which self-senses heat and doneness. Newbies need to go light on batter, covering just a little more than half the iron’s surface. A waffle-size pour, the thing erupts guck on the counter.

2-1-1 is really an algorithm for scalable breakfast. Go bigger or smaller so long as you maintain the ratios.

Once you get it wired, you can also go crazy     with variations. Instead of plain old milk, I like to sub in blends of milk or water and all sorts of dairy-ish products – ricotta or cottage cheese, cream cheese, plain yogurt, tofu. Also like to add flavor and granolahead cred by leaving out a little flour for offsetting amounts of wheat germ, bran, whole-grain flour. But keep the mix mostly regular flour. Overdo health store stuff without adjustments to the rest of the recipe, things come out like lead or just wrong.

What do you feed in the morning? Trad breakfast, cereal, weird? Got a tip or recipe?

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