Pancakes/crepes

A rotten sort of a day - cold, wet, and everyone with hacking coughs. We brought in the little Christmas tree to make up for it, and decorated it with tiny fairy lights, angels and chocolate baubles.

Tea was rather an afterthought, after all that excitement.

To make 15 thin pancakes you'll need:

500ml milk
2 eggs
a pinch of salt
250g plain flour

Bung the flour in a large mixing bowl, and add the salt. Make a well in the middle of the flour, and crack the eggs into it. Add about half the milk, and whisk, so there's not too many lumps in the gunge. Add the rest of the milk, and give the batter another really good whisk so it's nice and smooth.

If you can leave the batter for 10 minutes or so while you sort out the fillings, so much the better. We tend to like our pancakes rolled up with crispy bacon and a little something inside (pick any from sweetcorn, spinach, mushrooms and courgettes, grated cheese) or drizzled with a little maple/golden syrup and lemon juice.

Put your frying pan on a high heat, and add a little sunflower oil. Once it's really hot, add a ladleful of the batter into the pan. Swirl it round really quickly, and then leave for a minute or so, until you can feel it coming away from the pan when you shake it. Flip the pancake (the best bit is obviously when Daddy drops one on the floor - although I have to say he was remarkably restrained tonight), and stick a little bit of your filling in a line on the top.

Cook for another 30 seconds until it's starting to brown on the underside, and then flip one half over, to cover your filling, and slide onto your plate. Eat really quickly while it's still hot...

American-style pancakes

We spent the afternoon on the beach at Tynemouth, in unseasonably hot sunshine. Weird.

Anyway, we were starving. So pancakes it was.

Makes enough for one adult and one toddler:

1 egg, beaten
115g plain flour
a pinch of salt
1 heaped teaspoon of baking powder
150ml milk
a knob of butter, melted

Stick everything in the blender, and persuade sandy toddler to press the button. Ideally you should leave the batter to stand for a bit, but we were too hungry.

Melt a little butter in the frying pan (or use a bit of sunflower oil), turn the heat up high, and then drop a ladleful of batter into the pan. After about a minute or two, you'll see little bubbles and blisters appear on the surface. Turn the pancake over, and then give it about another minute. Ta da! Repeat ad nauseam until you've run out of batter.

You could make a stack, American stylee, dripping with maple syrup. Or stick some sweetcorn/blueberries/spinach (anything small, essentially), into the ladleful of batter once it's hit the pan. We ate ours today with salty, smoked streaky bacon - either on the side (you) or in the middle of the batter (me). Sadly we'd run out of maple syrup, but Golden Syrup was a fairly good substitute.