In the house I grew up in, making pancakes for 1 person was unfathomable.  With up to 9 people bustling about on a typical Saturday morning, mom was making triple and occasionally quadruple batches of her adapted version of Betty Crocker’s pancake recipe.  And always from scratch.  The giant Sam’s Club boxes of Bisquick in the pantry were only for biscuits and strawberry shortcake.   Logistics are trickier with that many pancakes, too.  Mom rocked two cast iron skillets at once, one big and one small, which meant that depending on your timing, you either got a big pancake (we’re taking 8+ inches in diameter) or a small pancake (about 6 inches across).  Once there was a good 6 inch stack already cooked, the family would sit down and start eating while mom kept flipping.  Once my sisters and I were old enough (and good enough) to man the skillets, we’d tag in so mom could sit down and eat too.

Life in the marianhd household is quite different.  But when I wake up early to an empty house on a Saturday morning, I still want pancakes.  I shuffle into the kitchen, make coffee, and strategize how I can get pancakes on a plate the quickest and easiest.  I don’t have any of my cookbooks handy, and the laptop is all the way in the other room.  Then a lightbulb!  I flashed back to a morning in Northern Ireland when my friend and I wanted pancakes, and I nearly stopped us because “I don’t have a recipe for pancakes” but my wise friend responded with, “It can’t be that hard.  We’ll just make it up!”  We made it up, and they were delicious!  Maybe they weren’t as fluffy and light as Alton Brown’s, but with syrup and butter, they tasted just as good.

I applied the same logic to my morning challenge of pancakes for one.  I grabbed a bowl and started rummaging through the cupboards.  I ended up with something like this:

Blueberry Walnut Pancakes for One

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup oatmeal
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 Tbsp vanilla flavored protein powder (totally optional)
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• Dash of salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup almond milk
• 1/2 Tbsp butter, melted
• 2 Tbsp whole walnuts, broken into small pieces
• 1/4 cup blueberries (I used frozen, fresh would be awesome)

Preparation

1. Mix dry ingredients in a bowl.

2. Measured the almond milk in a glass liquids measuring cup, add in the egg and beat the egg into the milk.  Stir in the melted butter quickly so that it doesn’t all clump up together when it hits the cold liquids.  (The melted butter hardens back up and creates these little butter bombs that will melt in the pan and make the pancakes nice and buttery from the inside out.  You could replace this with olive oil, but it won’t be quite the same.)

3. Add the liquids to the dry ingredients and stir until just mixed.  Stir in the walnuts.

4. Butter or spray (with PAM-like product) your skillet and heat it to medium-high heat.

5. When the skillet is hot, spoon about 1/4 cup of batter in the skillet and spread it out to make it thinner.  Drop the blueberries onto the pancake.  When the edges have set, check the underside and if golden, flip the pancake to cook the other side. Repeat with the rest of the batter.

Serve the pancakes with butter a syrup of your choice.  I used a cherry syrup from Michigan that I’ll tell you more about later.