on Shrove Tuesday and I remember my brother and I getting very excited and wanting to skip dinner, just to wade through a mound of pancakes!

Now I’m older of body (but certainly not in mind ), I like to enjoy pancakes throughout the year and this recipe is great for pudding or even as a Sunday breakfast – being a fruit-lover, my daughter really enjoys the summer fruits and strawberry coulis filling, it’s a great way of ensuring she is eating plenty of goodness for breakfast.

The ingredients are as follows:

For the pancake mixture:

• 110g plain flour
• 200ml of milk mixed with 75ml of water
• 2 eggs
• 50g/2oz butter
• pinch of salt

For the filling:

• Strawberries
• Blueberries
• Raspberries

For the coulis:

• Strawberries
• Sugar (to taste)
• A small drop of water

Sieve the flour and salt into a mixing bowl and the make a well in the centre of the flour and break the eggs into it. Whisk the eggs with the flour.

Now gradually add small quantities of the milk and water mixture, still whisking until all the liquid has been added and the batter is smooth.

Now to make the coulis – tip the strawberries in to a warm pan, with a little water and sugar. Heat the strawberries for several minutes until it begins to look like jam. Now pour strawberries in to a blender/food processor and blitz until smooth. Now pour the mixture in to a bowl, through a sieve, which will remove any of the seeds and leave you with a wonderfully, bright red, smooth sauce!

For the pancakes, heat up the pan until it is very hot and then turn the heat down to medium. Add 2 tablespoons of the batter mix to the pan and tip it  from side to side to get the base evenly coated with batter. The underside of the pancake will be cooked pretty quickly and when it is, turn it over using a spatula .As soon as the top surface is cooked, add some strawberries, blueberries and rasberries and then fold the pancake in half. After about 30 seconds to 1 minute, the filling should be nicely warmed and ready to serve.

Serve on a warm plate, dust with a little icing sugar and spoon on the coulis, being creative and arty if you so wish!

Enjoy!

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This gave me a thought; when I was a kid, my Mum always kept a tub of ice cream in the freezer, complete with a packet of cones in the cupboard (and if we were lucky, then a pack of those flaky chocolate fingers to stick in the ice cream!). I promised my daughter that we would buy a nice tub of ice cream to take home for future treats, however, when I picked up several tubs from the local shop, I began to read the ingredients and realised that the preservatives and additives contained in each would undoubtedly send her in to a frenzy of hyper-activity….what to do?

We then spied an ice cream maker and like in all great cartoon moments, you could almost see the light bulb appear from above my head! However, being slightly naive, I read the front of the box which stated, “make ice cream in 20 minutes”…..this got my daughter and I very excited indeed and we promptly headed home armed with our ‘miracle machine’. The initial excitement was soon dampened by my slightly more grounded wife, who questioned how perhaps I wondered how you could take warm ingredients and turn them in to a frozen product in just 20 minutes? Ok, so perhaps I should have read the rest of the box, which indicated the need to place the ice cream maker in the freezer for 12 hours prior to mixing…

So, 12 hours later, our excitement was on a par with 12 hours earlier! My daughters favourite fruit is strawberry, so we agreed to make strawberry ice cream. To me, this is fantastic because as with other forms of cooking, you know exactly what is going in to the food and you have full and complete control of this; no additives, no preservatives, no colouring and no flavourings, just plain and simple, quality, fresh produce.

Here’s the recipe we used:

• 1 Punnet of strawberries (approx 500g)
• 1/2 Pint (300ml) of double cream (ok, so it’s not going to be the most healthy, but who cares?!)
• approx 100g of sugar (we actually used less than this because the strawberries were particularly sweet, so just use to-taste)
• Juice of 1 lemon

And the fun bit:

1. Whiz up the strawberries in a food processor or blender
2. Mix in the sugar, cream and lemon juice
3. Follow the instructions of your ice cream maker
4. Spoon on to a cone and enjoy!

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