Beyond Chocolate and children - pancakes

It's Sunday night. My partner has gone out to watch men run after balls and I'm at home with my 3 year old son. He's been doing this thing of eating stuff like pasta and ham sandwiches at breakfast and typical 'breakfast' food at dinner time. Tonight was no exception. He polished off a serving of spaghetti with bacon and tomato sauce at 9am and requested pancakes at five. I love pancakes and we'd had a huge and lateish roast lunch so a couple of light, fluffy, fruity pancakes sounded perfect. I had a very mature banana which Oscar refuses to eat because it's got a 'bua' (an ouchie in Italian) so I thought I'd find a recipe to use it up in. I also had some half fat creme fraiche bought in the belief it was soured cream - the pitfalls of rushed online shopping...

I remembered Nigella having a banana pancake recipe in Feast and decided to experiment with those. When Oscar saw me putting the ingredients together (it's ridiculously easy, you put all the ingredients in a blender and whizz) he insisted we put some apple in it too so I grated one into the batter. We sat down to dinner 15 minutes later. We ate the pancakes with Greek style yoghurt through which I'd stirred some maple syrup. 

My son ate 3 and half of them, patting his tummy in between each one and saying 'mmmmh' emphatically. I ate 3 too. There are half a dozen left which I've packed away and will propose for breakfast tomorrow. Because it's fine for Oscar to be eating pasta at breakfast and pancakes for dinner and it would be even finer if we all ate the same thing, most of the time. Makes life easier if I don't have to whip up some pasta at dawn and all that.

They were very good. In fact, they were so good that they went on the "favourites" list in my special Kitchen Fairy notebook. I'm sure I will be making these often. I made a note about substituting buttermilk for creme fraiche which I'd watered down with milk and the addition of a grated apple. As I did so I noticed that this easy, store cupboard recipe which my son had devoured also happened to cover the 5 major food groups and had only a teaspoon of  sugar per 12 pancakes. A lot less than contained in most breakfast cereals. Brilliant.

The Recipe

Nigella Lawson's Banana and Buttermilk pancakes - adapted

For approximately a dozen pancakes (it depends how big you make them...)
150 g of flour
1 teaspoon of sugar
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of sodium
200ml buttermilk (or creme fraiche with a bit of milk to loosen it up)
1 banana (very ripe)
1 egg

30grams butter melted

Put everything except the butter into a blender (or tall jug if using hand held blender) and whizz everything together until you get a smooth batter. Set aside until ready to use and add melted butter at last minute. Get a large non stick frying pan, brush with a little of the melted butter left in the bowl or with some flavourless vegetable oil and fry little rounds of batter for 1minute on the first side and a little less on the other. Transfer to a heated plate or warm oven while you make batches.