What a Tosser

Jif Lemon Day, as my friend Viv calls it, is upon up again and I must admit that although I have both lemon and lime juice in my fridge, it is unlikely that I’ll be using it today. We will be having pancakes for dinner, but something a little more substantial than lemon and sugar is required for a main course. There seems to be a peculiar notion in this country that pancakes are a sweet dish, whereas there are so many possibilities to stuff them with savoury fillings. To this end, I’ll be making chilli later and we’ll be having that in pancakes, topped with cheese and sour cream. The plan was to have chilli with rice on Monday and use the matured and slightly drier leftovers for the pancakes today, but the perpetual chicken* has made everything slip again.

*lasting a record 6 days (8 elapsed thanks to a Chinese New Year takeaway on Friday and an indulgent Rugby pizza on Sunday)

Chilli is pretty easy to make: brown some mince and a chopped onion with some chilli powder, add a carton of passata, a carton/tin of chopped tomatoes, a tin of kidney beans (drained), a chopped red pepper, seasoning and a couple of secret ingredients to make it special, then simmer to thicken. Oh OK, I’ll tell you – my secret ingredients are smoked paprika and cocoa powder. (My DH’s secret ingredient is lots and lots of paprika to sweeten and thicken the tomato sauce. He also add a beef stock cube, which I usually forget.) This makes a fairly wet chilli suitable for serving with rice, so I’ll probably cut back on the passata today.

Chilli is far from the only option for a savoury filling and the only limit to the variety of toppings or fillings for pancakes is your imagination. Any combination is possible, rather like the toppings on a pizza. Try spinach, chicken, mushroom, ham, bacon, cheese (grated or cream), pesto, pepperonata, duck (Chinese style with Hoi Sin sauce, spring onion and cucumber, naturally), BBQ pulled pork and even scrambled eggs or cauliflower cheese (why not?), so get creative. You can make your pancakes thick or thin, fluffy or crispy, stack them or roll them or even top them like a pizza, you don’t even have to make them with wheat flour.

Of course, I’ll be making enough pancakes for us to enjoy a sweet version too. It is possible that one of the children may want lemon and sugar, but it’s more likely that they’ll opt for syrup (golden or maple) or chocolate spread on theirs. I haven’t decided yet, but one of my favourite sweet toppings is cream cheese and cinnamon sugar (icing sugar with cinnamon), sometimes I have sliced banana on that as well. Pancakes work very well with fruit of all kinds: berries, stewed apple with toffee sauce or maple syrup, banana, even orange (Crepes Suzette) and, of course, lemon. I may just have some lemon curd on mine as a variation on a theme 🙂

On that note, I haven’t had breakfast yet and I feel a couple of thick pancakes with banana and cream cheese calling me.**

What are your favourite fillings?

Happy eating 🙂

**Addendum

Breakfast pancakes were so nice that I had to share.

No horse in this dish

For the Pancakes:

2tbsp self-raising flour
2 tbsp buckwheat flour (or use wholemeal)
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 large egg
semi-skimmed milk and water
pinch of salt
melted butter

Sift the dry ingredients together, add the egg and a little milk and mix to form a paste. Add more milk and water until you have a thick batter. (Water will make the batter less stodgy – I use about 50/50). Whisk or whizz with a hand blender to remove any lumps. Mix in a little melted butter. Cook your pancakes in a small pan allowing them to be fairly thick.

To serve, spread cream cheese over the top of the pancake, add sliced banana, sprinkle over icing sugar and cinnamon. Enjoy!