This is Summer

Pancakes with strawberries for breakfast. Pasta salad for lunch. Fresh apricots in the afternoon. Burgers for dinner (left-over from the 4^th of July).

Jeans cuffed. New tan lines every day. The perfect feeling of pulling on a hoodie as a warm day turns into a cold evening. Dirt scuffing over the edge of your sandals, dusts your toes with cool earth. 

Dogs racing through long grass in the park. Fat bumble bees slamming the window three times before they decide it’s solid. The warm belly fur of the little black cat you meet on the sidewalk. Two swans on the lake in the morning, ruffling their glowing white wings.

Pancake weather

I've been experimenting a lot more with my cooking and baking this year and been wanting to share the results on this blog. And what better to start off with than breakfast? And did I mention it's raining? So obviously we need pancakes.

So here are some apple-cinnamon pancakes I made to start off the day yesterday and today. I got the idea to put shredded apple in the batter off the internet, but I used my own recipe for the batter. Well, when I say recipe, I mean the casual, estimated-proportions, busy-before-school recipe that I've come up with this year. It starts with one egg and a cup of milk (or milk mixed with yoghurt, which gives a fluffier pancake, I think), and then I add a little bit of baking soda and baking powder, salt, and as much flour (or oats, or cornmeal) as I need to get it to batter-like consistency. It never turns out quite as good as following some of my favorite recipes for pancakes, but sometimes I don't have the right ingredients or am too lazy to do proper proportions. Or, like in this case, I want to try something new.

I must warn you, these are pretty gooey, no matter how long I let them cook, but I'm OK with gooey. The apples (which I shredded with a cheese grater) give them great texture. I added a bunch of shakes of cinnamon but would recommend even more, because I couldn't really taste it too well. I added nutmeg, too, but not sure I could taste it as such.

Finally, these photos are from day 2, so as you can see, the batter keeps well overnight in the fridge. Yummy and ready in no time. I do enjoy putting together the batter in the morning, though. So often, I think, we rush through our mornings, trying to get somewhere or harness our energy to work before it wanes later in the day. But sometimes it's nice to put that energy into something restorative, like standing in the quiet kitchen stirring oatmeal and doing a little gentle yoga while it bubbles away. I find that if I do something like that first thing in the morning, I end up feeling more productive and accomplished than if I had plunged straight into work.

So, give these pancakes a try, and let me know how it turns out. Or do you have a favorite variant on the basic batter recipe?

Lights!

It's that time of year...

 When the reindeer start showing up in all the shop windows...

And all the mannequins start wearing scarves with their pyjamas.

So by special request from the lovely Sunnie, here are some photos of the lovely lights and holiday decorations that went up all over town a couple of weeks ago. Happy December!

Snow

 

 Well, maybe just frost. But still.

Scrapbook II: Grey Days

Some more photos I didn't have a place for but wanted to share. This time around it's the grey days pictures, shading into night.

Scrapbook I: Sunny Days

 I've been going through my photos from the past few months and wanted to share a few that I liked particularly but that don't really fit together into any particular theme. So I grouped them into sunny-day pictures and grey-day pictures.

I threw this one into B&W just because I thought it looked nicer that way.

The same statue from two angles.

 

The one on the left has odd framing, but I like the impression of a stag just pausing on its way through London.