No short stacks here

Around 2 p.m. I realized that I had neglected to take out any meat to thaw the night before and it was also too late to put anything in the crock pot. Yep, you still have ADHD. So I went to the old standby: Breakfast for dinner, aka pancakes and scrambled eggs.

I love pancakes. My dad taught me to make them when I was in elementary school, possibly in a bid to get to sleep later on Saturday mornings, and some of my earliest memories are making them with him on weekends. There's just one little problem. Unlike my father, I can't really cook pancakes well.

Sometimes I put them on too early and have to wait for the pan to warm up, while the batter congeals and does strange things in the meantime. Other times the pan gets too hot and burns the outsides of the pancakes and I proudly announce "tonight it's Cajun pancakes, kids!" Once, in what I can only describe as a Ramona Quimby book moment, my husband told me he didn't think the pancakes were done in the middle. I was pregnant with Lily, tired, and I hollered he had no idea what he was talking about. He cut one. Batter oozed from the crack. I picked it up and threw it against the wall (spoiler: unlike spaghetti, if your pancake sticks to the wall, it's not done yet). Almost a year later and I swear I still see a tiny bit of batter on the neutral colored wallpaper, sticking like spackle and mocking my culinary skills.

 Today stared out well. The first ones were beautiful.  Perfectly golden, cooked through, and the spatula glided under them like a figure skater on ice. (Oh, I also can't seem to get a decent spatula. All of them wind up getting caught on the pancakes eventually.) The pan got momentarily too hot, but I recognized disaster and only some of the pancakes are "Cajun." I give those to Tim because he's learned not to care, or at least not to say anything. It was a Christmas miracle come late. And then, like a culinary Icarus, I flew too close to the sun.

I looked at the stack of pancakes. It seemed kind of...small. I mean, it would probably be fine. But what if Tim came home from work hungry? What if the kids were growth spurting and I didn't know it until one of them wanted to consume her weight in dinner? So I went to mix another batch. The box used to have measurements for just a few pancakes, but they took those away. Being far too tired to do math, I just started mixing, and wound up with about 40 little cakes.

Oops.

I don't think anyone is going hungry in my house tonight.