Shrove Tuesday

Prior to today, I had never heard of Shrove Tuesday. According to the ever-popular Wikipedia, "The festival is widely associated with the eating of foods such as pancakes and often known simply as Pancake Day, originally because these used up ingredients such as fat and eggs, the consumption of which was traditionally restricted during Lent."

My original plan to honor this "new to me" holiday was going to be to take advantage of the free short stack IHOP (the International House of Pancakes, of course) was offering up at all of their locations. There's one a few miles from my house, and while I didn't know exactly where it was, I thought free pancakes was reason enough to find it. But I got an opportunity to play squash tonight, so that went by the wayside.

I thought about it and wanted to stick to my plan of having pancakes for Shrove Tuesday (any excuse to have pancakes for dinner). I then remembered seeing a box of buckwheat pancake mix in my pantry. It came to me. I was going to have dark chocolate chip buckwheat pancakes. I still had chips left over from making my chocolate sauce for Valentine's strawberries. I knew that was going to be tasty. And then another epiphany. Craisins.

So in celebration of Shrove Tuesday, I made and ate a small batch of dark chocolate chip craisins buckwheat pancakes. YUM.