Today was interesting. It started with early morning swim class (still the fastest) and more sinus-searing flip turn practice. I’m getting better, slowly. I’ve figured out that if I don’t flip around enough then when I push off the wall, I head straight down to the bottom, so that’s another step forward. My usual gang didn’t even make it to the flip turn stage yet, so I’m really glad I went on Wednesday. From there, I had to jump on the bike and head straight downtown in the rain to pick up a prescription for the liver-destroying drugs I need to keep my bowels from eating themselves because the pharmacist was being somewhat bitchy about expired prescriptions and where exactly on the piece of paper the doctor signed it. Then back home as fast as my poor city bike could go to meet the heating guy who was there to do the yearly inspection of our very efficient, but often broken heating system. He beat me there even though I was a full three minutes early for once. We got inside, I went upstairs to my little workstation and left him to do his thing. Which involved inordinate amounts of under the breath muttering and the occasional German expletive. He had to go down to his truck on three separate occasions, had to talk with both his boss and the makers of the temperamental heating several times and frighten the cats at least twice. And this for a system that wasn’t even broken in the first place. Oh, yes. That was foreshadowing.
By the time he left, he’d had to go down to his truck one more time for the duct tape to fix the bit he had broken, we’d had to turn off a circuit breaker so he could do more fixing of the thing that wasn’t broken and the entire electronic innards were strewn all over the kitchen floor. He’s got to come back at some point to replace the part he broke while fixing the functional heating and…
You know what’s coming, don’t you?
There was no hot water after he left. So yes. Success on all counts. Immediately after I went into righteous indignation mode and made the (long-suffering) Wife write a nastygram to the landlord, she discovered that the hot water didn’t work because the heating guy failed to turn it back on. Someone had a Friday the 13 today. I’m just glad it wasn’t me. The Wife rescued us by pushing a button. She’s quite the handyperson.
The other thing that happened today of course is that the Hobbit part two opened. The one with the dragon and apparently extraneous elves. So since I can’t find my Lembas scones recipe (they started as cookies, but the texture changed as I continued to modify it and I wrote all the changes down by hand somewhere and I can’t find it. Anyway, these are somewhat light, kind of healthy, and definitely filling.
L on Wheels’s Lembas Pancakes
(These are my version of Lembas done as pancakes; they’re dense and a bit nutty and should fill hungry bellies for hours)
Makes: 8 to 9 regular pancakes or 5 Mickey Mouse pancakes, enough for 3 adults or 2 hungry boys
Ingredients
- 1 Egg
- 3/4 cup flour (white or whole wheat)
- 1/4 spelt flour
- 1/3 cup dried coconut flakes
- 1 Tbsp. sugar (white, brown, or raw)
- 3/4 cup milk (low fat)
- 2 Tbsp oil (canola or similar)
- 3 tsp. baking powder
- 1/4 cup chopped walnuts (or other nuts)
Preparation
- Preheat frying pan over medium heat with oil (canola or similar; not olive). Preheat oven to about 120°C or 250°F or so with an oven-proof plate already inside to keep pancakes warm.
- Beat egg until fluffy.
- Add the other ingredients and mix with spoon until just moistened, not longer. If consistency is too thick, add a bit more milk, if too thin, add a bit more white flour. Too thick would be if a metal spoon stands up straight and never falls over, too thin would be if that same spoon meets no resistance and falls straight over. Anything in between and this recipe will work with varying degrees of pancake height.
- Grease pan with oil and butter – add the oil first, then butter for flavor. Do not substitute margarine for the butter here. If no butter, just use oil. Do not use olive oil.
- Pour batter onto heated pan in pancake‐sized dollops. (About 1/4 cup)
- Turn pancakes when bubbles pop and the edges are slightly dry.
- Store in warm oven until whole batch is done.
- Serve with: Fruit, syrup, honey, jam, butter, etc.
Lembas pancakes with fresh fruit, honey, maple syrup and lime juice
Believe it or not, the Wife had never had a Mickey Mouse pancake before I made these for her last year.
Everyone should get to have Mickey Mouse pancakes made especially for them at least once.
Devil-kitty checks out some race swag as Captain Dukie patiently waits his turn.
And we got our first Christmas Card today! It’s a gorgeous, hand made (cyborg) Qui Gon Jinn from a friend that we will hopefully be visiting in the UK next year.
Which makes me think of my favorite Star Wars featured song…
L on Wheels 