The other day we had a tough decision to make: What were we going make for dinner? When we are at a loss for ideas, or want to whip up something easy after a hard day on the job, we switch up our menu a bit. We have breakfast for dinner!  The kids love it, and usually it's pancakes and sausage that are what's on the menu.  Other times we make waffles or omelettes.  To round our your meal you can serve cateloupe, apples, or oranges on the side for good nutrition balance.

Usually, we make our pancakes or waffles just like most other people, from a box of pancake mix.  But on this particular evening we were all out of mix, so we 'kicked the fridge' (or actually the cupboard) and made our pancake batter from scratch. We came up with our own little recipe after doing a little research on the internet.

 There are tons of pancake and waffle recipes on the net, so I took a shot in the dark and used a modified version of this one from cooks.com.  I did not have any buttermilk though, so we skipped it and used the cooks.com recipe as a base  and came up with this recipe: 

1  1/2 c. flour
3 tsp. baking powder
3 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/4 c. milk
2 beaten eggs
3 tsp butter
a dash of vanilla flavoring

Sift dry ingredients together. Mix wet ingredients separately. Add the dry mixture to the wet and beat vigorously for a few seconds. (Overbeating this mixture produces flat pancakes.) If batter is too thick, add 1 tablespoon milk.

I like my pancakes thin so that they cook up a little more like a crepe, so I make the  batter a little more watery by adding more milk.  Note that I also used butter instead of oil.  Butter adds a nice flavor to the pancake since there is no buttermilk.  This may differ from your preferences, so you can adjust as you like.  Adding more baking powder will probably make the pancakes more fluffy, too.

A few days later, I used the original cooks.com recipe with the buttermilk and make pancakes They  came out really good.  Making the batter from scratch leads to much less salt content in your batter than the commercial mixes.  And making these from scratch is just a fast as making it out of the box.