I enjoy cooking. It’s something I find relaxing and, well, I love to eat a good meal, so cooking is the right task for me. I especially love cooking when there are other folks around to keep Pie off my legs while I’m doing things involving a hot stove or oven, so you’d think a trip to my parents would create the ideal cooking situation. After all, my parents liking cooking? Not so much. Liking eating? Yep! Who doesn’t?
Every time I come home though, I’m reminded why I learned to cook in the first place: self-defense. It’s not that my parents are bad cooks–when they actually deign to do any cooking, the food is quite delicious. My mom’s beef kabobs are the best I’ve ever had and I still use her spaghetti sauce recipe from my childhood. However, they prefer not to cook and so over the years, as they’ve grown their reliance on Epicure and Citarella and as they have spread their lives over a Miami apartment and a New York apartment, they’ve divested themselves of many of their cooking implements. Need to mix something? Better have strong arms because the electric mixer mixed itself out of here years ago. Want a good bowl to mix in? As they’ve broken over the years, they haven’t been replaced. It’s a regular hodgepodge. Remember those expired medicines I just posted about? It’s even worse in the kitchen. A few visits ago I insisted the baking powder be replaced as the one they had expired over two decades ago.
So, this past weekend, tired of eggs, I decided I’d make everyone pancakes. I follow Mark Bittman’s recipe, as it’s nice and easy and reliably good and I can tweak it enough as I’m cooking to make it my own. The ingredients are fairly simple, right?
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar, optional
2 eggs
1½ to 2 cups milk
2 tablespoons melted and cooled butter (optional)
Flour, right? Who doesn’t keep flour in the house. I asked Adam to check for flour as my dad was making a shopping list. “There’s flour in here!” Adam called back.
Lesson: Never trust a husband to do a thinking person’s job. Because the inch of flour in the container was nowhere near enough for one simple bowl of pancake mix.
I saw the egg carton. I know there are eggs. But how many eggs? My fault. Didn’t think to open the egg carton and actually look. Because that one poor lone egg really wasn’t going to do me a lot of good.
And then there’s the butter challenge. Find butter. I know it’s in here. But I can’t find it behind all the “smart blend” for butter. My mom is a big fan of the fake stuff. Then there’s the sugar vs. Splenda thing…
Eventually, the pancakes got made. And they were fine. But, oy vey, next time I’ll just go to Epicure for breakfast.
