And now its time for "Cooking with Blueberries" with your host: Daddy!

Some days it just doesn’t pay to try to please folks. Take Saturday for example. It is no small tradition in our house that dad makes pancakes for breakfast every Saturday morning. So Saturday morning I woke and began the preparations for Saturday pancakes at the Brown house. In the midst of these preparations my seven year-old son came up with a wonderful suggestion. “Dad, let’s make blueberry pancakes today!” “What a great idea!” says me. “Let me check and see if we have blueberries” says me again. I checked and, sure enough, we had: BLUEBERRIES! My son was ecstatic. Immediately he ran off to tell everyone in the house about this wonderful turn of events. Soon, I had three very happy children doing “The Blueberry Pancake Dance” accompanied by “The Blueberry Pancake Song” Since finances don’t allow for me to get the kids the exact thing they want all the time; I was feeling pretty darn good about my ability to make my children’s lives just that much happier. For everyone knows that life just goes better with blueberry pancakes. My children were dancing and singing and I was mixing and adding and pouring. Everything was copasetic with the small exception of my three-year old boy. My youngest son isn’t a big fan of blueberries however and a dilemma was born. He didn’t want blueberries in his pancakes thank you very much and began to cry after only two verses of the “blueberry song”. Luckily, dad had a problem- solving groove going on and was able to avert disaster by pouring some batter out of the original mix and saving it for the blueberry-free demographic (which also happens to include my wife, incidentally.) After making the pancake batter and adding a generous amount of large beautiful blueberries, I made about 12-15 of the most gorgeous 4 to 6 inch blueberry pancakes in recorded history. Life was good. Heating up the syrup now. Setting the table. “Don’t forget the cups and milk.” WooHoo! Blueberry pancakes! Blueberry pancakes! Blueberry . . . wait a minute. “What are you guys doing?” Says a rapidly deflating daddy. “What’s the matter with your pancakes?” “Nothing, daddy. We’re just taking out the yucky parts” “THOSE ARE THE BLUEBERRIES!” “I know daddy” says my seven-year-old son. Yea verily the same seven-year-old that suggested blueberries to begin with. “I just don’t like to eat them in pancakes” At this point a much less experienced father would have tried to reason with him and show him the missing logic of the whole situation. An even less experienced father would have tried to find out what in the world this boy was thinking. Luckily for me, however, I have the benefit of my vast parental experience and performed the only really helpful action. I slowly and methodically beat my head against the wall with the knowledge that as sure as life goes better with blueberries that there will undoubtedly be: more to follow . . .