Cooking is a great way to take pause, lose oneself in the immediacy of tasks at hand and forget all cares if only for a while. This applies for cares big (apocalyptic world events) and small (broken vacuum cleaners). The reward at the end is a feeling of calm and the great pleasure of eating something cooked with intention and love. If you have found yourself saying ‘what the fuck?’ at the crumbling of the world as you know it, then I give to you: What the Buck? Pancakes for a Pandemic (or Anytime) – my very own recipe. Enjoy!
Work in Progress 
Yes, I always find that cooking is a very zen thing. Thinking about the combinations of flavours, balancing the heat/time relationship of the ingredients, adjusting recipes for the intended recipients….all things which keep you focussed on the now, rather than on any anticipated fears for the future.
It’s maybe even better with ingredients which come from your own garden…. fruits, nuts, vegies, whatever. If there is an upside to the current WTF situation, it is that many of us now have the chance to slow down from our hectic lives and appreciate the things which are truly important…healthy food and family are two great places to start.
Thanks for the recipe – I’ll give it a go.
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Hi Mike! Nice to hear from you. Apologies for not thanking you personally for your kind donation…the final tally was just over $700 for WaterAid! Thank you!
I like the way you’ve described the process…yes, so many elem elements to make cooking a mindfulness practice. Do you grow your own fruit and veg? Just tgis morning I was chatting with locals in a whatsapp group we have for community resilience and I’ve gone from seeking a contact free composting solution to being inspired to plant my own vegies and compost for my own garden. The fact I’m renting and the impermanence of that had deterred me from planting but isn’t everything impermanent afterall? It will also be a nice way to really claim this space as home.
I agree with you about the upside…I definitely see it as a chance for humanity and our society to reset and choose a more sustainable way of living and engaging with others and nature. Arundhati Roy expresses these sentiments a lot of us now feel so beautifully in this piece :
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
I hope you and Ange are keeping well.
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Firstly, congrats on the great result for Water Aid.
Yes, Ange and I always have a good vegie and herb garden on the go, and we grow everything organically with no pesticides or artificial fertlisers. Our soil here is quite heavy, so we broke it down initially with a bit of gypsum and now we use a lot of compost. The compost took a while to get going, but now we have 4 bins, each of about 100 litre capacity, and on average we get three “crops” of compost from each bin each year.
We haven’t done so well (yet) with fruit. The combination of the local parrots (especially king parrots) and fruit bats meant that there was almost none left for us! We do have a wonderful macadamia tree however which bears a lot of nuts, and last year we were successful in growing a couple of blueberry bushes in tubs in the back courtyard. We also grow ladyfinger bananas, but we generally only get one bunch a year which we “share” with the parrots.
I agree that it’s worth starting your garden, even if you can’t guarantee that you’ll be there at any given time in the future. For me, so much of gardening is about being there in the NOW. Sure it’s great if you can look forward to a great crop, but we find just being in our garden every day is wonderful therapy.
Also, a lot of crops such as coriander and things like radishes can begun to be eaten in quite short periods of time. Certainly if you planted some of these things in the next week, you will be partaking of them before this current isolation period is over.
Best wishes and stay safe,
Mike
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I cook at least one meal a day. I am just now trying baked oatmeal with cinnamon and peanut butter. A suitable substitute for pancakes I think. Too bad I have no bananas! (K)
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Hi Kerfe! How are you? That sounds delicious. We made ANZAC biscuits recently because we had no milk. Oats, sugar, rice malt syrup, dessicated coconut and butter…ingredients for deliciousness!
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Anything with butter is good!
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Did you create this cute little recipe card? You know I love a good waffle, so I’m going to have to try this. I’ll let you know on IG how it turned out.
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😊 I adapted one on Canva. It was nice largely as it was in the template so it was one of few times I didn’t have to make many changes. Let me know how it turns out. We are now ba cvk to regular pancake making and have also started making french toast with the best recipe i have ever used, courtesy of a local cafe.
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Oh send me the french toast recipe when you get a minute. I have one that’s pretty good, but I’m always up for new things.
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