Pancake Stew

On Sunday I made a totally delicious beef stew, with wine, carrots and swede - yes swede! Carrouf has them from time to time. They go beautifully in stew. I also have some parsnips which I'm saving to roast with a chicken, probably tomorrow.

My eldest announced not long after it was in the pot and bubbling nicely that he hates stew. I can empathise. I hated stew when I was his age too. I even wrote that I did in one of those booklet things that were devised for young ados describing their lives. We had various fiches to fill in, one of which asked to describe things that we liked and disliked. I named a food that I disliked as stew. Does anyone else remember those booklet things? They were designed to contain secrets I suppose. A bit like a MySpace page, but on a real page.

As I'm a mean and nasty mummy, I told him that even if he didn't like stew, it didn't exactly make him vomit, so he could eat it and shut up. As we had NG and her student for supper last night, my eldest forced down his stew relatively moan-free.

Tonight however, freed from the constraints of politeness before guests, he let out a wail of despair at the prospect of eating leftover stew. So... as I'm not actually that mean and nasty really although I like to keep up appearances, I suggested that I make pancakes to put the stew in, as long as all moaning ceased from that moment. The wails turned to cries of joy, so my youngest and I set to mixing up the flour, eggs and milk - well he did all the work, I just watched and munched crisps - and I rustled up a batch of yummy pancakes.

Result : dinner a huge success and they even ate the reviled vegetables that they had picked out last night and left as a frilly collar around the edge of the plate! Just goes to show - cunning is more effective than bossiness...