CHEF COOKING TOOLS

I make pancakes quite often. These are walnut pancakes and tea, with real maple syrup.

I make mine from scratch. As far as I'm concerned, there is no real good reason for buying pancake mix from the store. It takes a mere 2 extra minutes, if that, to do things the right way.

Recipe...
In a large bowl combine
1 cup flour
2 tsp of sugar (or therabouts, I don't measure)
dash of real cinnamon
dash of cassia (what normally you find in the store labeled as cinnamon)
1 tsp baking powder

While it's dry, give it a good stir to evenly mix the dry ingredients.

In a small bowl beat 1 egg and 1 egg white. Once beaten, add 1 tsp of vanilla, 1 tsp oil, 1 cup milk. Stir

Add contents of small bowl to large bowl. Stir until large clumps dissapear... if you stir too much the pancakes become tough. Optionally, add blueberries or walnuts.

Cook on medium heat in a lightly greased skillet. Flip when bubbles start to appear on the top.

The reason why I'm using two bowls is that if you don't, you run the risk of having parts of chalazae (nasty white bits of egg) in your pancake. The smal bowl can be a salad bowl; I don't think there's much point to wory about using one bowl instead of 2.

If you try to go too healthy and remove that one egg yolk from the recipe, the pancakes will stick to the griddle and not have nearly as nice of a texture. Despite what some people try to go on about, you cannot blindly remove egg yolks from a recipe without otherwise adjusting it. If you don't believe me, try making custard with just egg whites.

The milk is slightly variable. If you add a few teaspoons more milk, the pancakes will be thinner. If you don't put in extra egg white, the pancakes won't puff up as much.

I said it before, but this bears repeating. Stir as little as possible, just so much as to not have flour clumps in the cooked pancake. Otherwise, the pancakes will be tough and nasty.

Serve with real maple syrup, not that nasty Log Cabin or Aunt Jemima stuff.

This is dedicated to zillions of tea lovers worldwide.

A brief description from Wikipedia ~

Camellia sinensis is the tea plant, the plant species whose leaves and leaf buds are used to produce tea. White tea, green tea, oolong and black tea are all harvested from this species, but are processed differently to attain different levels of oxidation.

The name sinensis means Chinese in Latin. Older names for the tea plant include Thea bohea, Thea sinensis and Thea viridis.

Camellia sinensis is native to mainland South and Southeast Asia, but is today cultivated across the world, in tropical and subtropical regions. It is an evergreen shrub or small tree that is usually trimmed to below two metres (six feet) when cultivated for its leaves. It has a strong taproot. The flowers are yellow-white, 2.5–4 cm in diameter, with 7 to 8 petals.

The seeds of Camellia sinensis and Camellia oleifera can be pressed to yield tea oil, a sweetish seasoning and cooking oil that should not be confused with tea tree oil, an essential oil that is used for medical and cosmetical purposes and originates from the leaves of a different plant.


The three basic types of tea are green, oolong and black. Green tea is steamed very soon after picking to stop the oxidation process. Oolong tea is left to oxidize a bit longer and is the type used by most Chinese restaurants. Black tea is oxidized for the longest period of time which produces the darkest of the teas.

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