Lost Art

Years ago I undertook a challenge and spent the better part of a week trying to make pancakes. While I'd always enjoyed pancakes, I'd never thought much about making them, but after Stefania decided that the key to her happiness would be to have a world not so filled with Russells I found myself exiled to a small apartment near a supermarket I'd never before visited.

It was a Hughes Market, sort of a chain, and I always called it the Huge Market because I thought that was either funny or cute. They had everything supermarkets do, but I remember most was that they'd sharpen my kitchen knives for free and they carried a pancake mix that I loved, even though I only used it for waffles.

After dropping off some knives to sharpen, I bought some of this pancake mix that came in a simple brown paper bag. It required eggs, oil, and milk to be turned into batter, and I think it was some sort of whole wheat mix, which was new to me.

My mom occasionally made serviceable pancakes, but mostly I remembered all the ones from the pancake breakfasts that Little League, DeMolay, and the Indian Guides held. One of the kid's fathers would always spend the morning grilling pancakes while others worked sausages or hash browns, and the pancakes were always as perfect as a marketing photo.

My own attempts were quite a bit less succesful, and I was determined to do better.

At the time I had two sets of cookware: Le Crueset cookware and regular cast iron. The Le Crueset was blue, not that that matters, and the cast iron was as black and shiny as obsidian. After a week of struggles and failures and more than one bottle of maple syrup, I was able to produce very good pancakes and pretty much retired.

I thought of that earlier today when I tried, again, to make pancakes. Not only can't I find a mix I like, I've forgotten how to make pancakes. I needed something soft to eat because of my tooth, number 26, which is seriously loose and causing me much distress, but I hadn't realized that, unlike bike riding, it's entirely possible to forget how to make pancakes.

The first one refused to stay in one piece when I flipped it, and the second one did the same. I ended up with a pile of fried pancake batter that looked not unlike my early attempts at omelettes, but it served both important requirements:

1) It was filling

2) It was edible

The fact that it looked like shit hardly matters at all, but I think I'd best return to using the cookware on which I had my earlier successes. It can only be that, and not that I've forgotten how to make pancakes!