Something I’ve been trying to do, or get better at, is cooking. It’s a challenge to create a menu and make things for just one person. Many times it’s for two, but even then, it’s very different than the past. Thankfully, my daughter picked up the improvisational cooking skill from my wife. My daughter is a wonderful cook, and does exactly the same things my wife used to do – creating things on the fly that just seem to work.

It’s not that I can’t cook. I can. I have a relatively limited skill set, but I *can* in fact cook. I have just started trying to expand things a little. I don’t want to get stuck in some kind of dietary dead space or rut where I lose those skills. Eating out is the easy solution, but definitely not the cheap one.

I had visions of creating some kind of lengthy recipe / cooking thing here. I realized however that what I did was… figure out how to make something from scratch that many people already know.

I had a couple of bananas that were getting a little over ripe. I knew they needed to be used up, I just didn’t have the ability (or confidence) to go for a banana bread. I can cook – baking is a whole different skill set.

I went digging around the internet trying to track down something to do that wasn’t one of the 900,000 variations on bread out there. I found a site that used eggs and oats and mashed banana and was quite excited. Mix them up, follow the directions, fry them up in a pan…

When I got done I realize what had happened was I “discovered” making banana pancakes.

To be fair, they were made with oats and were completely from scratch, so it’s not like it was a total loss as far as developing my cooking skills, but in the end… pancakes. I’ll keep working on my cooking skills, and maybe even share again if I stumble into recreating a spaghetti dinner or something like that. Until then, there’s the start and finish of my pancake journey.