I LOVE breakfast.
I wake up hungry. No… starving.My husband thinks I’m crazy. He would not even dream of eating breakfast before 10 am, but then technically, it’s not even breakfast, it’s brunch.My ten year old son takes after me. He is so concerned with the meal the following morning, that he asks me nightly, what I’ll be preparing for the morning’s menu.”Good night, Mom. I love yo… hey, what are you making for breakfast tomorrow?”

My five year old has it the worst. She breaks down into a flood of tears if she does not eat within the first ten minutes of her morning. I now resort to giving her a cup of dried cereal, while I prepare breakfast.

This morning I made German Pancakes. I don’t know if the recipe is German or not. When I was growing up, we called it called Dutch Shoes. It doesn’t look German or taste shoe-ish. It’s just good…

Directions for German Pancakes, or Dutch Shoes, or whatever name you make up

1. Turn off your annoying alarm and drag yourself out of bed. Put on slippers or flip flops, depending on the temperature (because, for sure, the floors aren’t that clean and you don’t want to walk barefoot through the kitchen on dirty floors… that will just make you grouchy).

2. Stumble into the kitchen and turn the oven to 450 degrees.

3. Stare at stupid stuff on your phone for 5 minutes, because you are not ready to be awake yet. Maybe make some green tea or coffee.

4. Open your fridge, and then recoil slightly… due to the bright lights.

5. Get out eggs, milk and butter.

6. Crack 6 eggs into a blender.

7. Go wash your hands. There is no way you cracked 6 eggs without getting egg slime on them, and you don’t want to accidentally lick thatoff.

8.  Pour about 2 cups of milk into the blender. It’s hard to be precise in the morning, especially if it’s not necessary.

9. Grab the vanilla and salt from the disheveled cupboard where you keep that sort of stuff.

10.  In with the eggy milk, add about a teaspoon of salt. But who am I kidding, I don’t ever get out a teaspoon, I just pour some into my palm, and call it good (I don’t want to wash any more dishes than I have to).

11.  Pour some vanilla into the mix. I’m guessing about two teaspoons. I like vanilla, so who cares if I over pour? No one else is awake critiquing my breakfast making skills anyway.

12. Get out a big oven safe frying pan, or a cast iron skillet (hopefully the kids didn’t wash it with soap after the last time I used it).

13. Put said pan in hot oven.

14. Go back to the blender with the eggs and all of the other meticulously measured ingredients and add roughly a cup and a half of flour. You can’t make this breakfast ‘healthy’ by substituting wheat flour, that just makes it gross.

15. Put the lid on the blender and let ‘er rip. Caution, it is noisy and you just woke up.
Let it run for a minute-ish, until it’s all blended. If you are weird, like me, you will probably want to get a scraper and clean the insides of the blender and then re-blend. If you are like my kids, and like a little bit of messiness in your life, don’t scrape it. No big whoop.

16. *Use a hot pad* and take the hot pan out of the oven. Throw a teaspoon or two of butter into the pan and watch it sizzle, then pick up the pan and let that butter slide its way all over the bottom and sides of the pan.

17. Pour half-ish of the blended egg smoothie into the hot buttered pan and then put her into the hot oven.

18. Now you can read the rest of your daily SKIMM.  You have about 12 or 16 minutes to kill. You could be ambitious and pack your kids lunches (but I prefer to let them learn ‘self reliance’ and do it themselves, then they tend to throw away less and I don’t have to do it).

19. If you followed the directions just right, the breakfast should have risen up on the sides, bubbled all over and turned golden brown. mmmm

20. Take it out *with a hot pad* (it’s still early, so don’t burn yourself). Shake it out of the pan onto a giant cutting board (you know, the one you use to cut watermelon), and cut it up into whatever shape pieces you want.

21. Get out some lemon juice and  powdered sugar (I have heard that you can make powdered sugar by blending up regular sugar…but your blender’s dirty, so I hope you have some on hand).

22. Sprinkle the sweet sugar all over, like it’s snowing, and then make it rain lightly with lemon juice… the perfect combination to rot your teeth out.

23. Eat some, and then go wake up the kids for breakfast. Make sure you repeat with the second half of what’s left in your blender, so the kids will have something to eat too.

24. If you are feeling especially frisky, sprinkle frozen berries all over the second one before you pop it into the oven.  Sooooo good.

See… super easy.

Let me repeat;
6 eggs
2 cups milk

1  and 1/2 cups white flour
1 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp butter
cast iron skillet
powdered sugar
lemon juice.