A maple syrup day

Joe and Kate are off on an overseas holiday at the moment so this morning I offered to cook them a "bon voyage" breakfast.  Kate had mentioned that her favourite breakfast was a Canadian one -- pancakes, maple syrup and bacon.

As it happened, I had in one of my cupboards a bag of pancake mix which I had bought from Woolworths for 99c.  So the die was cast.  A pancake breakfast it would be.  I had cooked pancakes only once or twice before so the young couple were taking a risk.

And it was a bit chaotic. With the help of my premix, I brewed up plenty of batter and poured it nicely into my special teflon-coated pancake pan. And they cooked well.  But then came the problem:  Getting them out of the pan.  My psychomotor skills have never been great and my tendency to the shakes has slowly got worse over the years.  So I could not get the pancakes out in an orderly way.  They came out rather crumpled up.

Fortunately, Anne was to hand so I gave the job to her.  She also claimed to be no good at it but, oddly, she found that if she made big pancakes nearly as big as the pan, she could do a reasonable job of it -- which she did.  While she was doing  that I concentrated on cooking the bacon and also did some fried eggs.

I had kept aside the messed up pancakes that I had made and offered them to Joe before Anne's pancakes arrived.  They disappeared like lightning.  He must have been hungry.

I had a bottle of allegedly genuine Canadian maple syrup so with its help we had a good breakfast.

And the syrup made an appearance later on as well.  I made Anne and myself a chicken salad for our evening meal.  I think I will draw a veil over its contents but it was not completely filling so there was room for a dessert of waffles.  And it just so happened that I had a pack of pre-cooked waffles to hand.  So waffles with maple syrup and Streets Blue Ribbon ice-cream  finished off the day nicely.