My personal recipe: pancakes.

It's the memories of my childhood: visiting my grandparents, with grandmother cooking pancakes on Sunday morning, to have a heavy, calories-rich breakfast that is so good suited to get you prepared for a heavy, calories-rich lunch. I wrote a recipe down, from my mother, in my teen age, and never tried it till I got married and we wanted some more food variety. Since then, pancakes (or crêpe from French, or "bliny", a plural of "blin" in Russian), have become one of the dishes I cook and one of favourites of my family.

Pancakes and the sauce that we cook for them are in no way something I'd recommend to people on a diet. Atkins' followers can suffer a heart attack probably just from reading this page. So, you've been warned, right? Let's go ahead.

What do you need:

1. Wheat flour. Normally I take four cups (about one litre), by volume. Makes 10 to 15 pancakes - enough for three to six persons. I never know how many I'll get - depends on how thin the batter is and how much I put on the frying pan.
2. Buttermilk. For one litre of flour, one litre of buttermilk is a norm. I add water to make the batter thinner. Later on that.
3. Half tablespoon sugar.
4. One non-heaped teaspoon salt.
5. One non-heaped tablespoon backing soda and some vinegar, about one tablespoon, depending on how sour is your buttermilk. I use not backing powder, but just soda. Backing powder can be used if you don't have soda and vinegar.

I used to put an egg, years ago, but found that for my thick pancakes it's no use - they never break apart. I tried messing with yeast instead of soda but didn't like the process (takes too long) and also it changes the taste. Of course, yeast is the real way to go if you think about the history.

We tried different sauces or fillings, but the best one for us, in addition to high carb pancakes, is (of course!) a simple but high fat one, made of:

1. One or two eggs per person.
2. Sour cream. We take two or three plastic glasses of 150 ml each

Simple! Put the flour into a mixing bowl, add sugar and salt, dump the buttermilk and start stirring. I use a tablespoon for that. Using a mechanical mixer should make things faster, but I never tried - we are too conservative to have a mixer.

Normally I add 3/4 of buttermilk first and the rest later as needed. If the batter is thin, it's not easy to "catch" and break the flour balls by stirring. You have to stir until the bigger flour balls are all gone, otherwise you are going to find them in your pancakes.

If the batter is too thick, I add some water at the end. I also noticed that replacing some of buttermilk with water can improve the quality - pancakes become more tender. I guess it has something to do with the fat content - more fat contributes to more heavy pancakes and water dilutes that.

So, now we are ready to add a "raising agent" (if we speak like a pro). First, I put soda (one teaspoon) into a tablespoon and mix it, using my finger, with some water, to ensure that it will be evenly distributed. I put that into the batter, stir. If needed, I put vinegar then. For buttermilk we are getting here, one tablespoon of vinegar is good. Sometimes I put the buttermilk out of the refrigerator even the day before to make it more sour. I stir again and watch the bubbles to appear:

The batter is ready, and I turn to my old heavy cast iron pan that, I bet, is unheard of by an average home-cooking-loving person of the developed world (trash your Teflon folks - mine is better!) I grease it slightly with vegetable oil (spread by piece of textile). When the pan and the grease is hot - I use middle heat - it's ready for the batter.

Most of the time, the first pancake sticks to the pan, at least slightly. No problem - the next one usually doesn't stick at all. Of course, assuming that the pan is clean.

The batter is distributed to lay about a couple of milimeters thick. It's a matter of taste. If your pancake is thicker you need more time to fry each side, so it may get too dry and at the same time too heavy to turn it over easily.

Now I watch even more bubbles to pop up. This will make the beauty later:

And when the top is close to be cooked through, it's time to turn the pancake over:

First I check the bottom side with a knife, turning the pan around, to ensure it doesn't stick. Then I raise the pancake slightly and take it with four fingers and turn it over. Quite often I let the pancake to land on the rim of the pan, as you see on the first one of the two following videos. I'm not a TV-show chef - who cares? And it's not a problem at all: just wait five seconds to let the first layer to fry and move the pancake to the center.

When the second side is ready, I stack the pancakes on a big plate, covering them with a piece of a linen towel:

It's easier to stack them the first side up, just as they finish frying. But the second side is especially beautiful because of the bubbles:

So, how do we eat them? For me that was always a family tradition since I was a child. All family members take small pancake pieces and soak them into the sauce made of butter (or margarine) and sour cream that is served in a big pane with fried eggs (and you can add some fat meat, whatever you like - we just put eggs). Yes, you can recoil now, it's one pane for all - we barbarians fight for this privilege. But if it comes to a civilized meal, you can of course have small individual plates with some sauce and eggs and the rest - gets cold and therefore disgusting very fast.

First I fry the eggs - the more of them the better - why not to consume all cholesterol of your life at once? I cook them covered of course and when they are ready I put sour cream (500 gram is ok for us four) and some butter (tastes better) or margarine (poor man choice).

I cover the pan again and let the cream get heated, to the point when it starts separating into curd and whey and the butter starts melting.

Ready to serve!

Here's my stack of pancakes:

And here's our sauce:

And now we can start fighting for pancakes and sauce. Kids have never needed a reminder that pancakes are ready (for they are waiting messing around the kitchen).