Friday, February 29, 2008

Thanks + Forks and Butter

Thanks
Well folks, I want to thank all of you for reading the Antarctica posts. My site statistics show over a 200% jump in site visits per day during our vacation. It's nice to see so many new readers and I hope that you will continue to visit my blog to see what's going on. I like to think I can be entertaining and perhaps even insightful even if I'm not in Antarctica......
I'm planning to do some modifications to the blog to hopefully make commenting a little easier. Stayed tuned for that. Dena and I are also working on a slide show of pictures which we'll post to flickr or somewhere for all to view.

Now on to Forks and Butter
I decided to make pancakes for breakfast the other day. Something I don't do very often because of all the carbs, but once in awhile I just get a craving. I make them out of a box though I wish they were as good as my mom's who makes them from scratch. In this day and age doesn't that sound so far out there. Making pancakes from scratch. Like, how do you even do that? But my mom assured me that it was quite simple; just flour, water, an egg and a little salt and sugar. Sugar?! What? There's sugar in pancakes? Watching my mom put sugar in the pancake batter certainly raised my awareness of sugar in pancakes in general. Of course, there would be sugar in the syrup, but the batter? You and I both know that those big conglomerates making our processed pancake batter put a lot more sugar in them than my mom does!

So the pancakes are done and I'm ready to put butter on the tops. Yummmm, spreading butter on a hot pancake. Doesn't the thought of that butter melting and dripping down the sides make your mouth water? So I'm standing there, knife in hand, and this thought hits me upside the head. "Use a fork, you're an adult now, use a fork to spread the butter." Huh? Where did that come from? When I was a kid living at Gram's house we'd have homemade pancakes all the time. My uncles would use their fork (yes, clean....) to slash into the butter and then use it to spread the butter on the pancake. When I tried this at Gram's once I was yelled at. It's not proper form and it's bad manners. So I'm standing there, knife poised and I think, "why not?" Dammit, I am an adult now and if I want to use a fork to spread butter on my damn pancake I will! Besides I thought, it's more efficient. I'm all about efficiency. I will only dirty one utensil instead of two, thus saving time and resources. Yes, using a fork would save the planet. Believe it or not, that's the actual conversation that happened in my head .....so I did.......

And you know what? It's terribly inefficient. The butter wouldn't come out of the tine spaces. It spread in clumps and generally pissed me off. Apparently, my Gramma was right. Imagine that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

for some reason, and it's probably because I've now been at work for 12 hours, I really laughed and then really cried when I read this post...

Dawn said...

Well Sis, you laughed because we've all had that conversation in our heads about how we can, if we wanted, do something that we've been told all our childhood we cannot. And you cried because Gram will never make us pancakes again and we'll never be kids again, sitting at that long bench at the kitchen table at Gram's eating handpicked blueberries and homemade goodies. It's the end of an era. It's up to us now to pass on some memories and traditions.