Week 1: Buckwheat Veggie Pancakes

Wednesdays are another source of white knuckles and high blood pressure for me, relentlessly, every week. Traveling downtown and back in one of the worst traffic cities in America on a daily basis is one thing, but to turn around and go halfway back downtown every Wednesday afternoon for my daughter's OT appointment is just brutal. It involves snacks and sippy cups and trips to the potty and an hour of holding my almost two-year-old son back from systematically destroying the waiting room. Yes, this is every single Wednesday. Obviously, the last thing I want to do is chop and whisk and whip my way around the kitchen when we make it home at 6:30pm. So, my goal is to pre-plan for these nights, which until now, I admit have been veggie corn dog or Grape Nut nights. Enter my CSA vegetable pancakes. I call them CSA pancakes because I put an entire bunch of green onions into them, along with zucchini and parmesan cheese. And let me remind you that a batch of CSA green onions is at least two times the size of a batch from the supermarket, if not three times. The veggie pancakes were good. I say only "good" because I'm about to make a terrible health food admission: I loathe buckwheat flour, but I didn't know it until these pancakes. Buckwheat may be nutritional manna from heaven, but there is a strange aftertaste to it that repels me. But guess what? My son LOVED them. I topped the veggie pancakes with Tuesday's leftover rotisserie chicken, drizzled some maple syrup on top and honestly, I thought the child was going to make himself sick. I couldn't have been more thrilled. My daughter, on the other hand, either hates buckwheat like her mother or got wind of the green and fibrous nutrition hidden within and avoided the pancakes like the plague. I had a flashback of the kale "chips" and realized that pre-schoolers come hard-wired to sniff out nutrition in places they know, without a doubt, nutrition does not belong. Shocked that the addition of maple syrup didn't slow my demise, I celebrated the win with my son, watched my daughter dip chicken into syrup, and closed the book on Wednesday.