Pancakes and Homemade Syrup

If you're like me, a newly wed with a limited grocery budget, you can't afford to buy maple syrup at $6.99 a bottle for the occasional pancake breakfast.  I mean, I love the stuff, but it's just not worth buying unless I'm going to be using it for a few recipes.  So, instead of buying the artificial stuff (that Scott loves but I cannot handle), I simply make my own homemade syrup.  I know, I'm a posh princess food snob.  I'm not afraid to admit it.  So here's what I do:

• 1 cup of brown sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• bring this to a boil, then reduce heat to medium to let reduce by half, until it is thick and "syruppy"

you could stop here and have perfectly fine syrup, but why stop there?  Here's another idea:

• 1 cup of brown sugar
• 1/2 cup water (btw this is good for 2-4 people)
• frozen blueberries- about a cup or as much as you like
• combine everything in a small saucepan and bring to a boil.  Allow to reduce on medium-high heat until "syruppy."
• note: if you like your syrup to be thick, you can take some of the mixture out (maybe a couple tablespoons or so- I just eyeball it) and put it into a small bowl.  Then get some cornstarch out and put a little bit in the bowl  with your blueberry mix and whisk with a fork.  It might still be a tad lumpy but that's ok- just get as many lumps out as you can.  Add this mixture back into the saucepan.  This will thicken your syrup.

You can get as creative as you want with this by adding lemon zest, orange zest, and switching out the fruits to raspberries, peaches, strawberries, whatever you like.

Here is the link to a pancake mix I use (feel free to leave out the ricotta, but I often find that I have leftover ricotta because I never use the whole tub with whatever I made):

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/bobby-flay/lemon-ricotta-pancakes-with-lemon-curd-and-fresh-raspberries-recipe/index.html

Everyone's always got sugar and water!  So try your own syrup and see how you like it!  Here is a picture of the delicious pancakes I made Kate for breakfast when she came to visit.   We were fancy and called it our blueberry syrup a blueberry "compote" even though I won't pretend to know what a "compote" really is.