Zucchini pancakes are one of the few reliable tantrum-free ways to get green food into my toddler. This afternoon felt like a good time to cook up a batch, so I got my equipment ready and then shared my plans with Twitter. As one does.

And then someone on Twitter asked me for the recipe.

Uh-oh. Think fast.

I rarely follow recipes when I cook. I assemble meals out of some fresh stuff and some packaged stuff, call it a win, and then never manage to make that meal quite the same way ever again. The zucchini pancakes are no different. I “invented” my “recipe” almost a year ago when I had some pureed zucchini the kid refused to eat, and I turned to the millions of DIY baby food blogs hoping to find a way to use it up. I found lots of pancake suggestions, but they were all from scratch, because that’s how you prove your love as a mother, I guess? They wanted me to get out flour. Baking powder. Eggs. Blah. I have a box of pancake mix right here, how hard could this be to figure out? Let’s wing it.

Lazy Zucchini Pancakes

You need:

• Zucchinis
• Pancake mix
• Water
• Big microwave-safe bowl with lid (or plastic wrap to cover it)
• Stick blender or regular blender

Wash and dice the zucchinis, skin and all. No, I didn’t tell you how many zucchinis to use. How many do you have? Use that many. We’re winging it, remember? Dump the diced bits into a microwave-safe bowl, add a splash of water, cover it tightly, and microwave until the zucchini is super squishy. 3-4 minutes usually does it for two zucchinis diced small.

Drain the water out carefully into a bowl or cup and save it in case you need to add it back in. Or dump it down the sink and just use regular non-zucchini water to thin stuff out later. No biggie, really.

Puree the zucchini. I use a stick blender, because it’s fast and much easier to clean than a regular blender, but either one will work. You can leave it chunkier or you can puree it completely smooth. I don’t mind chunks, but kiddo spits them out when he finds them, so I pretty much liquefy the stuff.

Pour in some pancake mix. Maybe about half as much in volume as the amount of puree you have? Start with less; you can always add more. Mix it all in with a spoon. Or a fork: I’m not here to judge. Then just keep adjusting it by adding more pancake mix or more water until you get a consistency that looks like a thick (greenish) pancake batter. You’ve made regular pancakes using the directions on the box before, right? You know what pancake batter should look like? If not, maybe go do that first, then come back. I’ll wait.

Once the batter looks right, you’re ready to make pancakes.

It’s hard to really screw this up – the worst that’ll happen is you’ll have too much zucchini in there and you’ll end up with really dense cakes that stay kind of squishy and taste more like zucchini fritters. If you’ve got more mix than zucchini in there, you’ll get nice fluffy pancakes, but you’ll have less zucchini per pancake that way. Be flexible and be prepared to play around with this one, because it’s such a variable process. How big are the zucchinis? How well did you drain them? What brand of mix are you using?

These pancakes freeze very well. Just lay them flat on a baking sheet or cutting board or something, and put them in the freezer. Once they’re frozen, pop them off and put them into a freezer bag. They last at least a month and can be thawed overnight in the fridge and microwaved back to warmth in the morning. They can also be microwaved from frozen, but you’ll need to flip them over a lot to avoid the frozen-middle-and-lava-edges problem.

Go make some of these pancakes and show me! I want to see you winging it!