On-the-go pancakes

As all parents know, everything is easier when you have snacks.

Take it from an expert in unreasonable ambition: You’ll come up with all kinds of grand schemes for future parenting in the foggy era before your baby first arrives. I have a friend who started online French lessons with the ambitious idea of getting enough of her high school language skills back to master dual-language baby talk, and another who painted an elaborate woodland-themed mural in a room her fussy baby refused to sleep in for two years. And me? I planned a vacation.

It didn’t seem like the craziest idea. My husband’s colleague told him about how he split his six-week paternity leave into two chunks. That way he could spend a few weeks after the birth helping his wife recover, and then enjoy a little time with his child once he was old enough that Dad could help out more substantially and the newborn haze had somewhat diminished. Yes, six weeks, a miracle in America. Every day, I’m grateful I married a union man.

Around the same time, a German friend told me that it was common for new parents to use some of their 36-month-long Elternzeit, or parental leave, on caravan holidays through Italy. An idea was born. Travel had always been such a big part of our relationship—what if it became part of our parenting experience as well? We decided that my husband would take two weeks off once the baby was born to nurse me back to health as I nursed the new guy, then go back to work until the baby was six months old and more interested in Dada. At that point, ambitiously, we decided we would go to Argentina.

The baby was still exclusively breastfeeding when we left, but within a week, he’d launched himself off my lap straight onto the fat cap of a juicy ribeye at Don Julio, one of the city’s top parrillas. The look of bliss on his face said it all—the kid was ready to get into the solids. But what do you even feed a baby when you’re so far from the comforts of home, including the cute little food mill and baby-led weaning supplies so carefully prepared back home? The answer, as I quickly learned, was pancakes.

The first batch, whipped up in our AirBnB kitchen, was made of mashed bananas and eggs. Light, fluffy, and sweet, they traveled with us to the top of mountains overlooking the placid lakes of San Carlos de Bariloche, and on a road trip where we toured wine country and wanted to eliminate the whine part of the equation, the perfect on-the-go snack for a person too young to accommodate the culinary vagaries of life on the road.

Six months later, when our son was almost a year old, we tacked the last unused week of leave onto my husband’s spring break for a two-week trip to New Zealand. There, the baby and I discovered his love for the country’s famous grass-fed butter, as he took a huge chomp out of a stick I left on the counter, unmindful of his new toddler clambering strength, and a fondness for the kumara, a local sweet potato that comes in gold, orange, red, and thrilling purple varieties, all of which could be incorporated into delicious and hardy fritters. We made pancakes with mashed-up purple potato and greek yogurt, the perfect fuel for a day spent snoozing in the hiking backpack and feasting on the beach of Abel Tasman National Park on the South Island.

Back home, I refined the recipe further, adding oats whizzed up in the blender for extra fiber, yogurt and hemp hearts for protein and fat, and vanilla and spices for flavor. The pancakes went everywhere with us:, on long flights, boat rides, road trips, and more. Easy to prep and easier to carry, they’re the perfect reminder that parenting brings its challenges but rewards the prepared. Everything, always, is easier when you have snacks.

Photo note: We’re on the road, so the pancakes pictured are a recreation of the first ones I made in Argentina, because I couldn’t find sweet potatoes in the local market. To make these, just mash together one banana and one egg and fry in lots of butter.

Baby Beyda’s Adventure Pancakes

Ingredients:

One medium sweet potato, baked or steamed—or a banana works if you’re in a country where sweet potatoes are hard to come by

½ cup flour, oat if you have it

⅓ cup yogurt

¼ cup milk if you’re using a Greek or other thick yogurt

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp vanilla

¼ tsp cinnamon or cardamom

1 tbsp hemp hearts or other soft seed

Ghee, coconut oil, or butter for cooking

Method:

Mix together all your ingredients, mashing well so no lumps remain in the potato and the batter is cohesive.

Warm up a heavy pan on the stove and melt your cooking fat of choice. When the pan is hot, spoon in a few pancakes, using about a tablespoon or two of batter for each.

Cook the pancakes on one side until bubbles appear, about 3-5 minutes. Flip and cook until done, about 3-5 minutes more, repeating until you’ve used all your batter. Pancakes can be eaten immediately or cooled down and carried on the go.

Emily Beyda’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Built, Refinery29, Smartmouth, Fodors, the Thrillist, the Austin Chronicle, and more. Her novel, “The Body Double,” was published in 2021.

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