Life is berry, berry good

Berry season! What could be better? The photo above is from the Queen Anne Farmers’ Market a couple of weeks ago, when raspberries reigned, and blues were the berries in waiting. Now the shady, silvery bloom of ripe blueberries has replaced raspberries’ flushed pink in the flats of the local market vendors.

I haven’t yet made blueberry preserves or chutney (their time will come!), but on a couple of recent weekend mornings, I’ve baked plump, dusky blueberries into small, tender, fragrant pancakes.

These pancakes are adapted from The New Basics Cookbook‘s New Basic Blueberry Pancakes. If you want to make the original version, use 100% all-purpose flour, add 1/4 teaspoon salt to the dry ingredients, and reduce the blueberries to 3/4 cup. I can’t imagine why you’d want to do any of those things, but it’s up to you.

Beyond Basic Blueberry Pancakes
makes about 18 3-inch pancakes

1/2 cup whole grain red wheat flour
1/2 cup emmer flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg (a microplane works perfectly for grating nutmeg)
3/4 cup milk
6 tablespoons heavy cream
3 tablespoons brown sugar, packed
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest (use that microplane to get just the yellow zest)
1 cup (or even a few more) fresh blueberries

In a large bowl, stir together the flour(s), baking powder and spices. In a second bowl, combine the milk, cream, brown sugar, butter, egg, vanilla and lemon zest. (By the way, the original recipe calls for 3/4 cup half-and-half and 6 tablespoons milk; we just happened to have heavy cream instead.) Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients, and mix until batter just comes together. Leave a few lumps; they’ll take care of themselves. Fold in the blueberries. Let the batter rest for 20 minutes. (While the batter will sit quietly for that amount of time, anyone waiting for these pancakes may not.)

Do you know how to cook pancakes? If so, you might be bored reading about heating a griddle to medium-low, using 1/4 cup of batter for each pancake, flipping when the bubbles begin to pop on the top. If not, you should know that the griddle is the right temperature when a water droplet will skitter lightly across its surface, that you’ll be happy these pancakes are small when you try to turn them (large, blueberry-laden cakes being not so easy to flip), and that they’ll take about two minutes on each side to cook to a nice golden brown.

Made with exquisitely fresh ingredients — flours from Bluebird Grains Farm, raw milk and cream from Sea Breeze Farm, an egg from Skagit River Ranch, and blueberries from Jessie’s berries — and with a lightly spiced hint of sweetness, these pancakes were so luscious that they needed no topping. Oh, you could give them a light glaze of butter, or a drizzle of maple syrup, but that really is unnecessary.

If you make these as an early-morning breakfast for yourself and your beloved, you may find that you’ll have a few leftovers (which will make a fine snack later on in the day). On a day when you sleep late, have nothing but a latte in the morning, and finally cook pancakes for brunch at almost noon, this recipe will serve two quite nicely.

(Note to my family: By the time you arrive, we’ll have a griddle large enough to cook 7 or 8 of these pancakes at once. This is just the thing to do with some of those blueberries we’ll be picking.)