DR Cooking Attempt 2/?

PANCAKES.

Easy, no?

Well...

I had a sudden craving for pancakes a few days ago. I was in my apartment, and didn’t have internet, so I called my mom to get an easy recipe. She found a pretty basic one in my Betty Crocker cookbook (I’ve got quite a cookbook collection… for a few years, I would get at least one for my birthday and one for Christmas. No complaints, I love them all) and read it to me over the phone.

Easy Pancakes

1 egg

1 cup all purpose flour

3/4 cup milk

1 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp veg. oil

3 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Butter or cooking spray

Beat the egg with a fork until the yolk is broken up. Mix in all other ingredients, except the butter. Butter/spray the pan, drop batter onto skillet ¼ cup at a time. Flip once bubbles start to form and edges darken.
(To make banana walnut pancakes, I doubled the recipe but only put in 1 ¼ cups milk, mashed two medium bananas, and added probably about ½ cup of chopped walnuts.)


Most of the ingredients.

Problem #1: We didn’t have any baking powder. I dug through all of our cabinets, trying to find at least something that resembled baking powder, with no success. Most of the things in our kitchen are in bottles and containers that are labeled incorrectly (example: the sugar is in a coffee jar), but even my host mom said we didn’t have any.

So I had to wait. This was Sunday.

Monday I wake up and I feel like someone has punched me in the sinuses and shoved a pinecone down my throat. Sorry for the detail, but that’s the truth. Fortunately, my first class was cancelled, so I went back to bed. I ended up going to the ISA office for a bit and used the wifi, returned home to eat lunch, then took a two-hour nap. After this, I was feeling a lot better, so after my 4pm class my friend and I took a walk to La Sirena to buy what was still needed for the pancakes.

The walk is pretty long and I didn’t want to drag all of my school stuff with me, so I left everything but my cell and my money at my friend’s house. Including the list of ingredients.

Problem #2: Even though I only needed to remember to buy one thing, my memory often sucks and it turns out that I forgot what I needed to buy. I swear, sometimes I feel like I have the memory skills of an 105 years old. After pacing around for a few minutes, I remembered that my friend’s roommate was home, so I bought some more minutes for my piece-of-crap cell phone and called her so that she could go through my bag and find the list. Okay, so it was baking powder that I needed, not baking soda. Glad that that’s cleared up.

I had decided to make banana walnut pancakes, so I picked up a packet of walnuts as well. I remembered that there was one banana left when I had left the house this afternoon, so I texted my host brother and told him ”¡No comas el guineo!!!” (“Don’t eat the banana!”). I picked up a few more things (including some mad pricey decongestants, what the heck La Sirena?!) and we headed back.
The walk from La Sirena to my friend’s house is about 15 minutes, and from her house to my apartment is about 20. So, 35 minutes later, at about 8, I head into the apartment… and I see my host mother making herself a Gyro.
”Ay… dije a [my host brother] que iba a preparar la cena para nosotros… ¿él no te dijo? (“Hey… I told [my host brother] that I was going to make dinner for us all, didn’t he tell you?”). ”Sí, pero… tenía hambre…” (“Yeah, but… I was hungry”). Okay… I guess that is a legit excuse.

I asked her where my host brother was, and she said that he was out at his girlfriend’s house, about 45 minutes away. She was just about to call him when I realized…

Problem #3: Someone had eaten the last banana. It’s not that my heart had been really set on banana walnut pancakes from the start, but I had bought walnuts just for this dinner.
I asked to speak with him, and I told him to steal a banana from his girlfriend’s house. He said okay, but then my host mom told me to tell him to stop at the store and buy five. (“Okay,” I thought, “even more time that I’m going to need to wait to make these freaking pancakes”) ”Ella quiere que tú compres cinco.” “Cinco que?” “Guineos” “Oh, okay, nos vemos a las nueve”. At this point it was still a bit after 8, and now I learn that yes I’ll be able to make pancakes, because yes I’ll have some guineos, however… I have to wait another hour.

So 9pm comes… and goes… and my host brother and his girlfriend still aren’t back. After preparing as much of the batter as I could, I headed into my room and watched some quality television- E! True Hollywood Story: Kendra. I’m sure a few of my brain cells died as I wasted 45 minutes of my life away watching this.

When I hear my host bro and his girlfriend arrive at about 945, I sprint into the kitchen and start digging through the grocery bags to find the bananas. “¡Ay, suave!”, my host brother yelled as I ran by him, "Calm down!"
I mashed up one banana and threw it into the mix, tasted it, and added one more. I also sprinkled a bit of canela en polvo into the bowl, a secret ingredient that my good friend Lizzy adds into pretty much everything she makes. (What does it mean? Pick up a dictionary!)
I scoop the batter onto the… flat-hot-thing (I can’t call it a skillet, it was just this flat metal thing) and wait. And wait. Finally my first pancake starts to bubble, and I anxiously flip it and wait for a few more seconds. I take it off of the heat a bit prematurely, spread a huge glob of peanut butter onto it, and take a bite. Mmmmmm…



I make about 9 more and call everyone in. My host mom and my host brother’s gf (my cuñada, my ”sister-in-law”… this term is used even though she’s not married to my host brother) have already eaten and only take one each, so my host brother and I devour the rest.
“Mantequilla de maní, que raro” (“Peanut butter, how strange”) my host brother says as he sees me spread more and more of it on my pancakes. “Yeah, I know, most people don’t eat pancakes with peanut butter. My sister and I are the only ones I know who do it. Waffles too”, I respond. “No… I was being sarcastic. You put peanut butter on everything.” At this point, everyone else in the room chipped in with weird things that I coat in peanut butter. Apples. Bananas. Saltines (okay, that one isn’t that bizarre). Oreos. Chocolate bars.

I thought that the pancakes turned out pretty good, for the most part. They probably could’ve used a bit more banana. I kept asking my brother how they were “y no me mientras!” (and don’t lie to me!) and he said that he really enjoyed them. I’m not sure how much I believed him. I’m oddly incredulous (big word) about other people’s reactions to my cooking/baking, I usually believe that people are just pretending to like what I prepare because they’re my friends/they’re family/we’re dating. However, when I saw even my host mom return back into the kitchen and scrape the bowl to get the last of the batter, I knew that pancake night had been a success.

...How corny.