Camping Food, Post Three: Huckleberry Pancakes

By the time you read this post, I will be away camping on beautiful Cortes Island with my children and their cousins. I will, without a doubt, be making a giant batch of these pancakes on the trip, possibly on this very day. Apparently, a camping trip without Auntie Heidi’s huckleberry pancakes is unthinkable.

 Sometimes we put the huckleberries ON the pancakes

What I have noticed about Huckleberry Pancakes is that they are memory-making. For the many children in my life, this is not about liking the taste of the pancakes, it’s about the whole experience – from being sent (unsupervised!) into the bush to pick berries, to eating the giant pancakes around the fire or out on the beach. Whether or not the children enjoyed picking the berries or eating the pancakes, they always, always talk about the experience with great enthusiasm.

That this easiest of camping recipes is also the most memorable has me thinking that I should start serving pancakes for dinner, too, and forget all about the Bison Burgers and Tandoori Chicken. Hahaha…ahahahaa….ha….

So, let’s talk about huckleberries. I continue to be amazed, actually completely shocked, at how few people know that these berries are edible. I notice that huckleberry bushes are still loaded even in the busiest campgrounds, even after the best picking weeks are over. I have had well-meaning adults come over to my site to warn me that my kids are eating wild berries. I know, shocker!

This is in stark contrast to the camping of my childhood when, as I remember it, we had to seek out the un-picked huckleberry bushes in areas distant from the campground. As second-generation Islanders, all local edible berries from blackberry to salal were familiar to me and my sisters, as well as to most of the other children camping nearby. What has changed? More families moving to the West Coast from distant parts? Increased fear about allowing children to harvest food from the wild unsupervised? I just don’t know.

I do know that once any person over the age of, say, three, has been shown what a huckleberry bush looks like and has been allowed to pick and eat from it, they will never make a mistake about it again. Off you go, young ones, and pick us some huckleberries!

The huckleberries around here are more formally known as the Western Red Huckleberry, to distinguish them from the more widespread and familiar blue huckleberry. Both red and blue huckleberries are in the same plant family as blueberries. Red huckleberries grow all over Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and the mainland; for many years, that was the only kind of huckleberry I knew of. But I have since picked blue huckleberries in Strathcona Park and at higher elevations in places around the coast.

Since there is at least one other red huckleberry look-alike (small-leaved bush with round red berries) to confuse the issue, here is a foolproof tip to help identify a huckleberry from an impostor. Look for the “navel” on the blossom end of each berry. Navel = always a huckleberry!

The “navel” of a huckleberry. Can be big or small.

Now, on to turning your kids’ wild berry labour into pancakes: I mix up all the dry ingredients a day or so before we leave and put it in a ziplock bag, making sure to write on the label how big of a batch it is so I know how many eggs to add and how much buttermilk to bring. Next, make sure you pack the appropriate wet ingredients (eggs, buttermilk, butter) and toppings (syrup, jam, yogurt, extra fruit) and definitely make sure to pack at least two frying pans and a bowl big enough to mix the whole batch of batter.

Not much else to it, other than making sure to cook one large pancake at a time in the center of each frying pan. Please. Otherwise they will be burned on one half and raw on the other. Those campstoves concentrate their heat in a 4-inch circle in the middle of the pan. I make the pancakes big enough that most people are full after one.