Pancake day

It's tomorrow - or today - depending on when you read this. I do love a good pancake. My nine year old self use to have them for breakfast everyday - about seven of them. I cooked them myself in an old cast iron pan. Mum was having none of that faffing every morning and has never understood why I couldn't just have toast or cereal like any normal child. But then - I've never been normal.

When I was about seven months pregnant I had pancakes for breakfast with sugar and lemon, I could just about keep them down. Master Jones loves a good pancake. He is most partial to the fluffy American version a la Jamie Oliver - see the recipe here, I can't be bothered to copy it today. We have them for breakfast every weekend, with bananas on them usually.

Because Rufus still isn't a fan of meat - no teeth still - which makes it hard to chew - I have to think of other ways to get iron into him. Eggs are a great source, as is green leafy veg. So I whipped up a batch of pancakes (the traditional English style ones - if you need a recipe I hear Delia's is good. I have been making my own version since I was nine - I don't measure anything so I'd be a useless source of pancake recipe)

Pancakes neatly stacked I sauted an onion and a little crushed garlic with a smidgen of grated nutmeg. Then I shoved several large handfuls of spinach into in the frying pan and let it wilt down. Then I chopped it very, very, very finely with a knife.

DO NOT under any circumstance miss the chopping step. I have first hand experience of long stringy bits of spinach. They get caught in the back of your throat when you're out for dinner with Mr Jones and his dad is a very nice Italian restaurant on Regents Park Road. You make loud, attention grabbing, gagging noises, gulp water in vain, and then end up ramming your entire hand down your gullet to remove the offending article while your boyfriend's dad looks on in utter horror at the sweaty retching mess that was moments before the "on her best behaviour and trying to make a good impression" girlfriend of his only son. Mortifying is not the word - no one should have to go through it. Moral of the tale - never order spinach based recipes on important occasions (or in my case - ever) and always, always finely chop it when you're cooking.

Anyway - chop up the spinach and squeeze out any extra juice. You can do this in a colander with the back of a wooden spoon. Then mix together with a tub of ricotta cheese and season with pepper (and salt if you're a grown up).

Spread a a good slathering over your pancakes and roll each one up into a tube. I offered Rufus these at this point and they were rejected outright. So in a "you will have iron in your diet" strop - I poured some homemade pasta sauce (crammed with additional blitzed up veg) into the base of a dish, stuck in the spinach and ricotta filled pancakes, poured over some more pasta sauce (you could use a jarred one) and finally some cheese sauce, then grated cheese on the top and baked it at 180 for 30 minutes. Et voila - Spinach and ricotta pancake bake - just in time for panacke day. He couldn't eat it fast enough and now looks like Popeye.