Pancakes for Breakfast: A Wordless Story About Cooking and Perseverance for Children

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Believe, One Network, Every Topic, Everywhere.

**Lisa Bueno** (0:07)
Okay, our friends, so you know that I like to connect a story if I can. And so yesterday's food story is leading into today's food story, which I guess I must be really hungry. Maybe we should have a snack or something. But today's story is not just a regular snack story, this story has to do with breakfast, which I think science would tell us is the most important meal of the day.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
But in tune, I think it is. I think dinner is the most important.

**Lisa Bueno** (0:38)
You do? Why?
What do you like for breakfast, though?
Breakfast is the worst. I know one thing you will always eat. If I put chocolate chips in pancakes, you love chocolate chip pancakes. Yeah. Okay. So today's story is called Pancakes for Breakfast, and it was written by Tommy de Paola, and we've read several of his stories before. He did this Triganona books. Remember the lady with the noodles? Yeah.
This story does not have noodles in it, though. This story has pancakes, so buckle up, and we will read the story, shall we? Now, this book is, I couldn't resist reading it. I'm sad that it doesn't have any words for you, really. But it does have lots of pictures, and the pictures tell the story, so I translated them for you. Okay. So we see a little old lady in her bed, cozy, cozy, cozy with a cat on her feet, and she wakes up, washes her face, and thinks of pancakes. Oh, they are on her mind. She cannot help herself but think of those pancakes, and she goes to the cookbook and pulls it out, and it gives a recipe. Two cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, three tablespoons of melted butter, three tablespoons sugar, one teaspoon salt, three eggs, and two cups of milk. And it gives very specific instructions on what to do once you have all of those things, sifting and beading and pouring and such. So, we see her go about doing that. She gets a large mixing bowl out. It is yellow. She pours in the flour. She opens the pantry. She pulls out the eggs and...
There are no eggs. This is an egg-less house. Well, that will not do. So, out she goes to the backyard on a cold and snowy day. And she has a chicken coop in her backyard. Can you believe that? And there are all the chickens, and she reaches in and grabs some eggs, and much better. So now, she gets to go inside with her fresh eggs and put them into her... But, oh dear. As soon as she brings the eggs inside, she grabs the next ingredient, which is milk, and her milk jug is empty.
What a frown. So, there's only one solution to that. Do you think she has a cow?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:25)
Yeah.

**Lisa Bueno** (3:26)
Let's just see.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:28)
She has a cow.

**Lisa Bueno** (3:30)
Yeah, she has a cow. And so, out she goes to the barn to milk the cow, and then to rush back to the house with the heavy milk pail and pour it into her pitcher, and then now she can take that milk.
And put it in a very interesting device. This is called a butter churn. Okay. And it's kind of a cylinder. It's round. It's tall. It's taller than the table, and it has a stick at the top with a paddle in the bottom. And you put the milk into the butter churn, and then you agitate. That's a good word. Agitate the milk, which means you're going to churn it. You're going to lift it up and down and up and down and move it around and move it around. And if you do that enough, your milk will turn into butter.
It's true. In fact, it'll separate into two things. You'll have butter and you will also have buttermilk. You got to have both of those things. But it does take a very long time. She works at it for nearly an hour and a half. Finally, she's got the butter and the buttermilk. And so she pats the butter down. So she's got a nice big thing of butter. And then she goes to the pantry to get out her maple syrup to put on top of her yummy pancakes and oh, oh no.
You're never going to guess.

**SPEAKER_3** (5:07)
No maple syrup.

**Lisa Bueno** (5:09)
No maple syrup. So she has to put on her clothes, her Sunday best hat, grab her bag and then haul herself all the way over to her neighbors who are selling new maple syrup for sale and buy some maple syrup.