Yesterday was the first early day game of the season. An old friend, Shari, was in town for the game and we were invited to a breakfast tailgate hosted by Michigan students, friends of her son. The menu was chocolate chip pancakes. Shari added an antipasti of salami, fruit, cheese and a thermos of Bellinis (Prosecco and puréed white peaches) to the menu. Leave it to mom, pretty fancy stuff.
Pancakes are perfect for lazy morning weekends, and early morning tailgates. A little known fact I discovered are Bellinis, the classic Italian drink, are exceptionally delicious with chocolate chip pancakes.
The student’s pancake recipe was simple: Open mix, combine mix with water, combine chocolate chips with mix, then fry. That simple? Maybe it was the pre-game festivity. Maybe it was the conversation. But those box-mix pancakes seemed to taste just as good as the made-from-scratch pancakes I prepared last week. Ouch! I’ll bet it was the Bellini’s confusing my palate.
Pre-game synopsis: I cook pancakes in my kitchen, they nimbly fry them up in the tailgate of their car. They use a pancake mix, I make my pancakes from scratch. I evenly divide and sprinkle the chocolate chips into each individual pancake while they are frying, for even distribution. They randomly dump the chocolate chips into the entire batch of batter. Surprisingly my random sampling of several of their pancakes had the perfect ratio of chocolate to batter. How do they do it? I’m not giving it up for the box, but I’ll admit that these kids aren’t in grad school for nothing!
