Note to self: Do not mess with a good thing

For a minute there I was about to be the next great culinary genius. Alas*, fate threw a spanner in my works and I'm just another failed chef. For now. Let me take a moment out of what I'm supposed to be doing, which is trying to work out how my spreadsheet of all the housekeeping jobs at the nursery school just fails to tally with the list of all the families at the nursery school, to tell you about it.

*This reminds me that I have to mention that Monkey has started saying "Behold!" in his games of superhero-before-bedtime. I heard it for the first time last night, but B says it's a regular utterance now. Maybe Thor says it in The Avengers; he talks a bit funny sometimes. (Also also, and clearly I'm procrastinating on the spreadsheet even more than I thought, given all these tangents, I do love that Mabel can tell me that Odin is Thor's daddy and Loki is his brother who is not nice. I don't care that she's getting it all from a cartoon series that also includes Iron Man and The Hulk. It will win her a pub quiz in later life, I'm sure of it.)

Where was I? Oh yes, culinary. Genius. Me. Yup.

Last week I made sweet potato pancakes for lunch one day, and nobody ate them but me, because my children are heathen ingrates with cardboard where they should have palates (and don't tell me that heathen is irrelevant there, because I'm sure it's not; and they are, because we're raising them to be). B didn't eat them either, because I ate my share and quickly froze the rest for safekeeping. Then I had two a day for the next week, with syrup, instead of toast for my breakfast. They were yummy. I suspected they could be made even better for one by using half wholemeal flour the next time instead of all white flour. I promise to try that next time.

Today, I looked at the half-can of pumpkin puree and the buttermilk that needs using up in the fridge, and decided that I was perfectly well able to make up my own delicious Wholewheat-Buttermilk-Pumpkin Pancake mixture, riffing off the sweet-potato one and the Alton Brown recipe that's my basic standard. As I threw together a cup of this and a pinch of that, I mused on my future as the latest big food blogger, who could whip up delicious baked goods using no more than her intellect and her innate baker's soul.

However. There's a reason I am happy to throw food in a pot and call it dinner without consulting a book, but tend to stick to the letter of the recipe when baking. It works better that way. My batter was was a bit stiff. No matter - just stir in another quarter cup of pumpkin. Plop it in the pan and wait for the bubbles to let me know it's time to flip. No bubbles. Flip it anyway. Golden brown with a hint of orange: the perfect autumnal pancake. They'd be soft and yielding, slightly spicy, crisp on the outside, just waiting for communion with maple syrup to acheive pancake nirvana...

No. Not really. Mabel was not interested. The finished articles, while edible, were a bit too heavy, a bit too doughy, a bit too bland, a bit too not much good. They reminded me of the sort of thing sailors used to pack on long trips to the end of the world. Dense. Stodgy. Full of nutrients.

I will channel my father and eat them up rather than waste them, but I'll do it with the help of a lot of syrup, and if they're really not hitting any spots at all, I give myself permission to chuck them out. Next time, I'll just make pumpkin bread again. Maybe I can turn it into muffins. I think I could safely manage that. Probably.