Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Shrove Tuesday = Pancakes!

It's Shrove Tuesday!

And that, of course, means pancakes. If'n your Episcopalian it does.

So tonight I made pancakes for my dad.

Pancakes, in fact, are the dish that made me famous.

My senior year of college, I moved off campus with two friends of mine, Lou and Florence. Florence was quite the party girl, and was always up for inviting half the school over to party down. I would come home from my poetry reading or Black Flag show or whatever and find our suave digs filled with co-eds drunk on beer. I'd be the one to say "Yo! It's late! The music goes off! We have neighbors! And I'm going to bed and I don't want to hear you."

So of course, I ran the risk of getting a reputation as a huge Party Pooper. And we couldn't have that.

So when I got up in the morning, I would run to the grocery on the corner and come back and set to work.

Pancakes for a crowd.

It would take a whole box of Bisquick, but I'd use just about a whole carton of eggs. And my secret ingredient: I'd find an open bottle of beer (not a hard thing) and add that to the batter. It made the batter rise like crazy and gave a nice flavor of the hopps. But here's the clincher. In a pot, I'd melt some butter, then add diced apples. (Granny Smiths work well.) When the apples get soft, I add some brown sugar and cook till it gets all bubbly.

Get it? It was syrupy from the brown sugar, and there was plenty of butter in their, too, so I din't have to deal with people using all that butter and and syrup on my pancakes.

So that's what I made my father for supper tonight. And to make sure I got my protein, I sliced up some Aidell's Chicken Apple Sausage, tossed it with some walnut oil, and cooked them off in a 450° oven.

A plate heaping with sweet, savory, and, most importantly, pancakes.

And tomorrow begins the season of Lent. Forty days. The Baron asked me what I was giving up, and I hadn't given it much thought. I'm big Big BIG on Lenten devotions, so I'll think of something.

3 comments:

Norskybear said...

You could give up striking out at the plate for Lent! Love you; mean it!

Anonymous said...

Hey Drew! I'm a "whiskey-palian"! And last night I had rubber pancakes. Can you believe it, we live in the heart of maple syrup-production country and my church served--TABLE SYRUP!!!!!!!!!

But damn, the sausages were delish!

Rob (lthruniform@aol.com)

alterboy said...

Given the word coming from Dar es Salaam, it looks like the Episcopal Church is being asked to give up its queers for Lent. Therefore, i'm not giving up anything of the usual sort. Although we are taking on putting aside pocket change and spending money for Global AIDS relief.