Pancakes, Cioppino or Bibimbap

Cooking with AI

Here’s my Oatmeal Pancake recipe. The base is 50/50 Flour & Oatmeal plus all the grains that are good for you. It’s easy and it scales up and down if you have 2 or 4 or 8 to feed. The egg is the one ingredient that you can’t divide. 1 egg for small, 2 eggs for medium, 4 eggs for extra large. The good grains give them a warm color and a solid bite. They taste even better with fruit and maple syrup. I put bananas in JFran’s and she puts almond butter on top of them. That girl would starve without almond butter and bananas.

Anyway. I know it by heart, no cookbooks or recipes needed. I know the right proportions and the consistency of the batter. I can make them while carrying on multiple conversations, letting the dog out and slurping coffee with my tribe of syrup lovers.

Variety is the spice of life so get yourself a waffle iron if you can. I tweaked the recipe so it’s no fail for waffles too. Get the square kind versus round—they’re better behaved. Last Thanksgiving, I modified the recipe with leftover stuffing and we had second Thanksgiving with friends - Turkey and Waffles. They were good.

This is the Swiss army knife of pancake recipes.

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Dry stuff

1 cup rolled oats—cover with boiling water for 10 mins to cook.

1 cup flour

1/4 cup healthy grains. Chia seeds & flaxseed are my current favorites, but modify with whatever is your healthy grain du jour.

2 tablespoons baking powder

4 tablespoons brown sugar

pinch salt

Wet stuff

2 tablespoons butter

1 cup milk

2 eggs

Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add in the cooked oats. Microwave the butter a bit in a measuring cup until melted. Add the milk and nuke a little more until it combines. Add to the dry stuff and oatmeal and mix it all up. Lightly beat the eggs and stir them into the batter. If its too thick, thin with a little milk.

For pancakes, make sure your griddle is hot before you pour around 1/4 cup batter on for each pancake. Wait for the bubbles before you flip! You can add blueberries or banana’s or sliced almonds or chocolate chips or all of the above—poke them down into the batter a bit; you must do it before the flip.

For waffles, add a tablespoon of vanilla and a teaspoon of cinnamon to up the smell and the taste.

Your syrup sponges are ready.

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I’ve been tweaking this recipe over the years, passed on by my dad’s love of weekend pancakes, and driven by memories of funny shapes and flipping practice replayed with my kids. Now they’ve got the recipe; as do you; as does the internet; as does AI.

If I had a cooking blog or a YouTube channel, this reminiscing would have gone on a lot longer, to optimize the recipe word-count or video length for SEO—so you could find my amazing recipe versus the 1,200,000 others you get when you search Oatmeal Pancakes on Google. The longer the recipe, the more space for me to flash ads at you or collect your email or give you cookies. The recipe grind don’t stop.

I learned to cook from people and from cookbooks. Mostly, this cookbook:

This 1,000 page tome is more than just recipes, it has sections on how to prepare poultry, the different ways to attack a potato, and all the ways to make all the sauces. Fannie put this out in 1896 and Marion updated it in the 80’s, which is when someone gave it to me so I could feed my face in college.

Cookbooks remain a force. Check out my new roommate. Like Fannie and Marion, Kenji goes deep into the chemistry of cooking. Learning the fundamentals is how you build the skills to cook up something yummy with what’s left in your fridge sans recipe. It’s also around 1,000 pages:

Mrs. Dill, my HS chemistry teacher got it right—cooking is just chemistry.

If you open up my worn Fannie Farmer you’ll find a half dozen magazine cuttings of recipes for our annual holiday Cioppino stuffed alongside Fannie’s version in the Seafood section. Living by San Francisco, Cioppino originated on the docks as a poor mans seafood stew and so it’s become our Christmas day tradition. Spicy tomato base full of fresh Dungeness crab, mussels and clams. Serve with chunky sourdough bread. I’ve been working on my Cioppino skills for over 20 years.

The first year, I bought live crabs and that was traumatic for everyone. R was a toddler and on the drive home we could hear the crabs trying to escape the bag in the backseat. When we got home, JFran took R to the park, leaving me with stern instructions that there were to be no live crustaceans in the house when she returned.

Didn’t do that again.

I wanted to make the best Cioppino, so over the years I collected every recipe I found to supplement Fannie’s, and I experimented with all of them. What I make now isn’t any one recipe, but the best of all the recipes. It varies a bit every year by my fancy, who’s coming, and what I find in the store. Next time I make it, I’ll write it down and give it over to you all and the internet as well.

Oatmeal Pancakes and Cioppino, a Wirepine cookbook.

Between the cookbooks, the magazines, the food blogs, the recipe sites, and the YouTube channels—we’ve provided a TON of training content that makes AI a dang good virtual sous-chef. I bet it’s been trained on the recipes I pull out every December to perfect my Cioppino. Plus a few million more.

Search Google for Cioppino and you’ll get a million results. I counted. Don’t do that. Using ChatGPT (pick your favorite AI), I can chat back and forth on the ingredients in my fridge and desired outcome and quantity and sides, and get custom recipe(s) skipping the ads and the 1,000 word intro.

Last weekend, we had a triple birthday party and decided to make build-your-own Korean bowls AKA bibimbap. BBQ beef bulgogi would be the star, complete with a fried egg on top and a whole bunch of Korean pickled sides like kimchi, called banchan. All mixed up with a spicy sauce called gochujang.

I’m an expert at eating bibimbap, but I’d never made it. I am not the only Bibimbap fan—in 2023, bibimbap was the most searched recipe in the entire world. Search Google for bibimbap recipes and you get over 2 million results! I can’t read all those.

Without AI we wouldn’t have had our bibimbap feast. Not only beef bulgogi, but chicken for the non-beef eaters. Banchan sides galore including cucumbers and pickles and carrots and bean sprouts and ginger. I even nailed the purple rice.

Is it good that AI can cook now? Is it bad? I don’t know, but it is, so on we go.

I expect someone grumbled in the 1800s about the proliferation of cookbooks leading to the downfall of family recipes. I expect someone grumbled in the 90s about the blogging explosion and the excess of food bloggers. I expect someone grumbled in the 2000s about video recipes on YouTube and food influencers ruining the written word. TikTok, Reels! The horror. And so we grumble about AI.

That bibimbap was tasty; I’m definitely making it again, and next time I’ll figure out how to make the BBQ bulgogi crispier.