Of Pancakes and Apostrophes

It’s time to hone those pancake making skills ready for Pancake Day on Tuesday!  I have a special recipe for little drop pancakes that are delicious all year round.  You can keep the mixture in the fridge for a few days and just make them as you need.

I am not very good with too much dairy so this is a milk and butter free recipe – still very yummy so have a go!

INGREDIENTS

*2 cups of plain flour

*3 teaspoons of baking powder

#1 ¾ cups orange juice

#1/3 cup olive oil

#1 egg

Step 1 

Sift * ingredients in one bowl.  Put # ingredients in another and mix together

Step 2 

Combine the two and mix well

Step 3

In a frying pan put a small amount of oil just to grease the bottom of the pan and heat up until it is quite hot but not enough to have it smoking.
Put dessert spoon - size blobs  of  the mixture into the oil and  wait until the bubbles rise to the surface  and then pop.

Turn them over - they should be a lovely golden brown colour.  Briefly cook them on the second side then remove with a spatula onto a plate.

Step 4 

Serve with either jam, honey, golden syrup maple syrup (if you are feeling rich!), marmalade or whatever else you fancy.

You can do all sorts of variations:

Add chopped up dried cranberries or other dried fruit, use wholemeal flour instead of white or add bran for texture.  I’ve tried different fruit juices but orange seems to be the best.

Then – eat and enjoy!  If you don’t want to cook all of the mixture immediately, just store it in a sealed container in the fridge.  It seems to be fine for up to three days.

…and while you are sitting there enjoying your pancakes you can ponder on the great Greengrocer Apostrophe problem endemic in our society today.

Cherie, my Enquiry Unit buddy, and I get rather upset when written English is mangled by an excess of apostrophes.  You could only imagine our horror when we found a document on the university internal portal system advising us about ‘diploma’s’!.  As I read through the document I was shocked to find three more unnecessary apostrophes.  After being sufficiently revived by Cherie, I set out to draw this to our supervisor’s ( I will refer to him as Steve) attention. It resulted in the following email exchange:

Alice:

 Cherie and I are very upset about the excessive and incorrect use of apostrophes in this document - especially as it is about literacy!

Steve: 

Thank’s for bringing this mistake’s to my attention.

Alice:

Oh dear Steve - I now need smelling salts and an early lengthy lunch to re-establish my composure......

 ...and Cherie does too!!

sent from Alice's email ( note correct use of apostrophe)

Steve:

I have hi lighted you’re mistake’s below:

Alice:

Oh dear Jo - I now need smelling salts and an early lengthy lunch to re-establish my composure......

...and Cherie does too!!

sent from Alice's email ( note correct use of apostrophe)

Alice

....aaahhhhhhh.  That is not a mistake!!!!!

Steve:

This is silly. I am joking. I do know when to use apostrophe’s.

Alice:

I really think your best course of action may be to avoid  's' at the end of any word and be done with it.....

Luckily your  's' is the beginning of your name!

You could start by pluralising everything with an i!

Steve:

Thank’s for the advise.

Alice:

You are - or to abbreviate in a grammatically correct manner, you're - very welcome!

 Steve:

Okay, now your just splitting heirs.

Alice:

Not only are you continuing to mangle our splendid English language but you now want me to harm my children.  What next?

…and don’t even get us started about the use of American spellings of such words as programme, colour, recognise, apologise, grey, centre, plough and honour.  We live in England for goodness sake and English came first!