Snow Days and Narnia

In case you hadn't heard, the East Coast has had quite a bit of snow lately. I had two days off work (Brandon had three), and in that time I've been reading a lot of Narnia: finishing up The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, reading The Silver Chair (I think I read the whole thing yesterday), and starting The Horse and His Boy. Oh, they're such great stories. I'm currently watching the BBC version of Prince Caspian/The Voyage of the Dawn Treader which, though extremely dated and filled with bad effects (or no effects at all), holds a special place in my heart. I like to sort of mix the new Disney-fied Narnia movies with the BBC ones in my head and combine them into one perfect movie. I realize that doesn't work for everyone, and lots of people have strong negative feelings about one set of movies or the other, but oh well.

During our snowbound days, I made several different variations of pancakes (a rough segue I know, but Narnia makes me want to cook from scratch and eat rustic food, so there you go): these Yoghurt Pikelets, which are my personal favorite (especially rolled up with vanilla yogurt inside), some Bisquick blueberry pancakes, and the Pioneer Woman's sour cream pancakes (from her cookbook). (Except I didn't have a full cup of sour cream, so I used half a cup and supplemented with vanilla yogurt, omitting the vanilla extract later in the recipe.) Oh, and I added blueberries to those too. I was very excited to discover that I had a pint of blueberries still fresh in the fridge!

Y'all, those sour cream pancakes were awesome. A little fluffier than I usually like (I love thin, stackable pancakes), but the flavor was amazing. And then when I added vanilla yogurt, the rest of the fresh blueberries, and a bit of honey, and made them into 'tacos' for dinner (yeah, it was a carby day, though we did have eggs and bacon at brunch), well, wow. It was a good day, food-wise.

Tomorrow I'm going to be starting a job where I cook fairly often, and I'm super excited about it. I'll try to take pictures of what I make, and post recipes of the more successful dishes. It'll be a challenge to make not just a main dish but often a side dish and a dessert three or four days a week, but it's something I've wanted the chance to do for a long time. Hopefully it'll give me more reasons to blog!

One last Narnia-related comment: the theme music for the BBC version is one of the most evocative pieces of music I've ever heard. It brings back my childhood like nothing else: memories of spending hours putting together my map-of-Narnia puzzle (the same map that we now have framed over our fireplace, though not in puzzle form), staging mock battle-planning sessions from Prince Caspian with my dad, and constantly dreaming that I could somehow make it into Narnia myself. I love Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings, but nothing will ever be as special to me as the world of Narnia. I sometimes forget that until I venture back in.