Over last weekend, I was trying to do the whole wife-y thing. Staying home, doing chores and making breakfast. This does not happen often. I’m not the wife-y sort which is really strange because growing up I always thought I could be the wife-y sort. Life does have a strange way of changing on you and I turned out to be pretty much an independent chickie whose only few talents include making my husband laugh (I think that’s the only reason he married me) and having silly rules like “No jeans in bed”. So I pretty much don’t do the cooking and house cleaning thing too well.

But it was the weekend before Christmas and I was feeling all family and needing to nest. So I got up early, 9am (that’s very early for a Saturday in our household) and was all inspired to make pancakes with no eggs and milk. I flip through a couple of my recipe books, trying to figure what’s the best way to get the fluffy pancakes from my pre-vegetarian days. I gathered the ingredients I thought would work best.

Using 2 references from my favourite cookbooks, I came up with my own batter of rice milk, brown rice flour, oat flour, soy protein and a pinch of salt. It was looking rather good, I was feeling all proud and was going to declare myself, Carlene, the Wonder Chef till … …

That’s my first attempt. Not quite the usual pancake and it was kinda crumbly too, the batter wasn’t holding together very well. After another two more sad attempts, I was about to throw in the pancake towel when my dear husband told me that the first couple of pancakes are always the worst of the lot. Now you know who is the more patient of the two. So I kept at it, varying the amount of batter I poured for each pancake and the speed of which I poured the batter.

Not bad, huh? Yes, I was starting to enjoy doing the whole wife-y thing again. Thinking to myself, I can do this everyday and the more I practised, the better the pancakes were turning out. By the last bit of batter, I figured out thinner was better and slowly pouring it out worked the best.

However, while it looked pretty good, I was told by my ever patient and kind husband that it could do with more time on the pan i.e. it was undercooked. Unlike him, I doused my pancakes with maple syrup so I couldn’t really tell it was undercooked. Did I mention I love maple syrup … YUM 😀 Anyway, I’ll be practising some more this weekend and hopefully I’ll come up with a batter that even my super-allergic-to-almost-everything little friend can eat.

Here’s to a fantastic last weekend of 2007 and year end parties with a blast!!