Five things make a breakfast-related post.

• This recipe for blueberry pancakes worked well, so I don't want to lose it! And I was charmed by its conversion into measurements I could understand (understand, if not obey absolutely. 6 1/4 ounces flour? I don't think so! And I may have been a bit heavy handed with the blueberries.) Short version:

  Whisk 2 large eggs and 10 ounces milk, stir in 1 1/2 ounces melted butter.
  Stir in 6 1/4 ounces King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour, pinch salt, 2 teaspoons baking powder, scant ounce vanilla sugar, 3 ounces blueberries
  Fry

  I liked the tenderness of the pancake against the sharpness of the berries.



• I have just reached the end of a jar of S's home made marmalade: it was very good marmalade, if on the chewy side, and, because she asks her friends to contribute jars, it came labelled 'Old El Paso Hot', which also made me smile.



• Talking of breakfast, I make my toast on an eye-level grill. I'd say 'doesn't everyone?', but I've suffered enough toasters at enough holiday lets to know that no, everyone doesn't. This Guardian article in which readers boast of the longevity of their domestic appliances includes a complaint that it's all-but-impossible to find a modern cooker with an eye-level grill.



• If I'd known the Guardian was inviting stories of long-lived white goods, I'd probably have told them about donating our washing machine to Beamish museum. My favourite art historian sent me this washing-machine-related cartoon.



• Evidence - in the form of 200,000 fish bones - suggests that mesolithic Scandinavians were fermenting fish 9000 years ago.

What? Fermented fish is totally breakfast related!