Pancakes And Politics

This Christmas, while shopping, I did buy myself one other present besides the dog-collar scrunchie. This one was far more expensive but not nearly as senseless.

I bought myself a cast-iron griddle that goes over two stove burners on which to cook, oh, say pancakes. The other side of the griddle is ridged so that I could conceivably cook fish or sausage or hamburgers on it and perhaps sometime I will but mainly I want it for pancakes.

I've wanted one of these for years. My Lis has one and I am always fraught with envy when she uses it. But they are relatively expensive and I have so many cast iron pans and skillets and I've been making pancakes, three at a time, in the giant iron skillet that came from my Girl Scout troup (I am not kidding you- so I've been cooking on this thing for about forty-three years now) ever since I've been a mama and now the kids are gone so really? Do I need one?

Yes. Yes I do and I bought one and today was its maiden voyage to sail across a Sunday morning bearing loads of pancakes (six at a time!) from raw to doneness and oh, it is a joy.

And here is how I make pancakes which, after you eat them, you will never, ever be satisfied with plain pancakes again, even the lightest and fluffiest because they will be dull as dirt. My pancakes are never dull and every Sunday we pronounce them to be quite possibly the best I have ever made.
Today was no exception.

I start out with oh, maybe a cup of self-rising flour. I add about a teaspoon of baking soda because I use buttermilk and for some scientific reason, this is necessary. I think.
Then I add about a quarter of a cup of ground flax seed because it is the current "miracle" food. Why not?
You can't see either of those ingredients in that bowl, can you? That's because I add so much more!
Today I took some frozen berries and put those and some pecans in the food processor and ground them up to a fine chunkiness. Not into dust- I stopped far short of that. I added those to the bowl. I grated an apple into the mixture and then cut up a banana and added that. Next, maybe a few tablespoons of oil, an egg from my hens, and enough buttermilk to make it all a lovely, spoonable, spreadable consistency. Don't ask me how much! I do not know! Enough!

I had heated the griddle and I spooned out the batter. It looked like this:

Nice, huh?
And when I flipped them, they looked like this:

And I put the done ones in the oven at a low temperature to keep warm while I make the next batch and it went so quickly today. I always put a glass of milk in the freezer while I make the pancakes because that's how Mr. Moon likes his milk- really very cold. He grew up on a dairy where they kept the milk at one degree above freezing which would explain that. He had a little Bozo cup that hung from a hook over the cooler and he could go dip a glass of almost-freezing milk whenever he wanted. This may also explain why he grew to be almost seven feet tall.

Anyway, I served him his pancakes this morning, fresh off the new griddle, and gave him his cold milk and his piece of venison sausage and he is now ready to take on the day. Whatever that involves. Right now he's changing the oil in a car. In the rain.
I wanted to take his picture as he ate but he refused me. He said that he did not feel pretty enough. "Well, that's not what I mean," he said, but I think it is. I kissed his head and put the camera away.

You know, as I have said before, Hank had a girlfriend whose main contribution to our family was that she gave Mr. Moon the title of Zen Glen. She was right. And he proved that this very morning as we were reading the newspaper in horror. There is an article in it about our soon-to-take-office governor, Rick Scott. He used a third of his personal wealth to buy the office and if his personal wealth was like a million dollars, that would be one thing but NO! his personal wealth (reported, at least) is $218 MILLION DOLLARS which means that for $70 million dollars, you, too, could probably be governor of the state of Florida.

"Why would he want to be governor?" we wondered.

I said, "Oh, those rich guys, they always say they seek public office to 'give back'."

"Well why didn't he just give Florida seventy million dollars?" asked Zen Glen.

Indeed.

This may be one of the first First Families to move into the governor's mansion and think, "What a dump!" You should see the picture of their house in Naples. On the Gulf Coast.

Well, pancakes and politics. It's Sunday.

Love you...Ms. Moon

Not Your Normal Sunday Although Pancakes Were Involved

It's only a little after one in the afternoon and I've already made a lovely pancake breakfast for the family AND...
Auditioned for a film maker.
(Yeah, that's me, blowing on my nails and polishing them on my bosom.)

Okay, okay. It happened like this:
Our dear Marcy who plays with us at the Opera House actually explores acting possibilities and she met and auditioned for a local film maker named FC Rabbath.
YouTube him, babes. Or just click on the picture above.

He does very short, no-budget-whatsoever films and uses the local talent. Some of it is actual real talent of actual real actors but I guess he's always looking for people who might possibly want to work in front of a camera for free. So Marcy sent us all the link and Kathleen and I loved the idea and I told her to call him and if she went, I'd go too, not thinking that she would call him that day and that we'd be auditioning today. Because this was like three days ago that we had the conversation.
And at first I was all, But I have to make pancakes and blah, blah, blah and then she's like, Look, I have CANCER! which she keeps doing. She's going to wear out that damn cancer card before she even gets a complete diagnosis. But. Whatever. Use what you have, etc.

So she woke up this morning pain-free and raring to go and came over and ate pancakes with us and then we left, airily saying, "Oh yes, me must go audition for a film maker," and left the dirty dishes behind.
Because. You know. That's important stuff.

And we had such a good time. I wasn't nervous at all because I had no expectations of any sort. We did a few scripted things and then some improv and my favorite part of that was when he asked me to be an older Southern Woman. What a stretch! Right?

And he said he'd call us tomorrow and could we be available to shoot next weekend?
So, maybe. Who knows?
It's just fun. He shoots fast and he works fast and it seems like it would be a hoot.

So now I'm already home and Brenda and Mr. Moon are doing something together having to do with a car on two different computers and here I am. I have no idea what we'll be doing today. Not much, I'm assuming. I was disappointed when I got home to find that Mr. O had already gone home. Dang. He had his first pancake breakfast at Grandmother's and he sat up in that highchair and ate pancakes and bananas and then we set him down and he walked his bandy-legged little drunk-walk around the dining room and my heart swelled up with the joy of him. I swear. He has me wrapped around his tiniest finger, crushed completely under his thumb, and I spoil the living crap out of him and I can't help it and that's all there is to it. I'm sorry I talk about him too much but I simply can't help it. It's like when you first fall in love and every conversation somehow ends up mentioning (at least) your new beloved no matter where the conversation started. It gets steered to the place where your love can be mentioned and just saying his or her name makes your arms ache for them, your heart yearn for them and it's torture and it's joy at the same time.

Okay. Okay. I'll shut up. But when YOU become a grandparent, you'll know what I'm talking about and you'll remember this and you'll think, "Shit. She was right."

If you want to see the video that Marcy was in, go to http://www.youtube.com/user/fcrabbath?blend=2&ob=1 and click on Modern Gods. She plays Hera.
And maybe someday I'll be on YouTube.
Although, when I think of how much the STILL camera hates me, I sort of get the willies and a real bad feeling when I think of what the video camera will feel about me.
This could be a REAL short career if it even begins.

Oh well. It was fun just to go play with Kathleen and some other folks I enjoyed meeting. A fine thing to do on a Sunday after you make and eat pancakes with the people you love.

I highly recommend it.

Another Sunday Morning At The Church Of The Batshit Crazy

It is Sunday morning here at the Church of the Batshit Crazy and that means one thing and you know what I'm talking about- pancakes.

Before I even had them mixed up, Jessie called from her bed in town to ask if maybe, perhaps, I was making pancakes this morning.
"I'm just about to start," I said.
"Really? Could I come and have some too?"

Oh my heart.

Nothing make me happier than a child-come-home for pancakes.

When I was a child, we, too, had pancakes on many Sunday mornings. Now, having said this, I wonder why in hell I do that too. Sundays were bad, bad mornings for me then and you'd think that pancakes would only remind me of that. However, the way I do pancakes and the way they were done in my childhood home is so different that it is hardly the same thing at all.
My mother, for some reason, decided that an electric skillet was the thing to cook her pancakes in. It was coated with Teflon, of course, so the spatula had to be that plastic kind which wouldn't dislodge the coating and the pancakes she made were begun with Bisquick and ended there, too. And despite the nonstick pan and despite the generous use of sausage grease to increase the nonstickiness, the pancakes always stuck.

But we ate them, we enjoyed them.

I start my pancakes with about 3/4 of a cup of self-rising flour. To this I add about 1/4 of a cup of ground flax seed and that much oat bran, at least. Then an egg or two, depending on whose eggs I use. If Betty's, I need two. If Carol's, I need one. To this I add about 1/8 of a cup of canola oil, little bit of sugar, about a teaspoon of baking soda and then, oh, I don't know. About a cup of buttermilk? Enough to make a nice liquidy batter. Then the fun begins. I grate an apple into the mix. I throw in a handful of blueberries. I smash a banana with a fork on a plate and scrape that in. I toss in some pecans. I mix it all up and spoon out three nice pancakes into my iron skillet which has been sprayed with Pam.
It looks like this:

They never stick. Never.

I have some venison sausage cooking in another skillet. It looks like this:


I keep the pancakes which are done on a plate in the oven heated to about 250 degrees. And when it's al done, if it's a beautiful morning, like it is this morning, we eat outside so we can watch the birds


and enjoy the sweet air. The dogs gather around, even hopeful that we'll toss them sausage (we do not) and we eat.

Jessie drove up right as we were about to pour the honey and syrup. She was wearing the overalls I gave her. The dogs were joyful to see her. So were her daddy and I.
She got a plate and joined us. It looked like this:


And she had brought camellias from her Aint Liz's house. They look like this:


and this:


No. Pancakes at the Moon house on Sunday morning are nothing like pancakes in the house I grew up in. At all.
Which is why it doesn't make me sad to make and eat them. No. It makes me happy.

Sunday morning at the Church of the Batshit Crazy and this is how we take our communion, how we glory in the day.

Grab a plate and pass the honey.

Amen, y'all.

Keeping the Sabbath

It's Sunday afternoon and I always used to hate Sundays. Sunday was the day that was the worst for me as a child. Abuse in the morning, followed by pancakes, sausage, then church, followed by the rest of a day set aside as God's. The All-American Grand Slam!

Then I grew up and Sundays held no abuse, no church, and pancakes only if I wanted them. And yet, I would find myself waking up on Sundays, sad and crying, weeping over some pain I couldn't locate, couldn't pinpoint or describe. Finally, I realized the pain was my inside-baby girl's pain; she was still there, she was still hurting.

Oh. Well. I see.

Got myself off to therapy which was wonderful, in the way that vomiting nails would be wonderful, because of the relief of not having those nails in the belly any longer. Still, though, Sundays were hard. I would tiptoe around the land mines always lurking there, no matter how thorough the digging had been to locate, disarm, and defuse them. Tricky business for me and for my family, too and I frequently bemoaned the loss of one seventh of my week to such ridiculous and needless sadness.

Then one Sunday, a good friend of mine died. She'd been sick for a long time and her death was as beautiful and grand a death as anyone could want. She was surrounded by friends who loved her. We held and stroked her, whispered our love for her. And she went like a rocket! onto the next level. Into the place where babies come from and where we will all return someday. Birth, in reverse, a tidy packet of here-to-there, instead of there-to-here. That's exactly what it felt like, including the joy.

After that I was fine for a long, long time on Sundays. It was if my friend had given me, with her profound gift of such a holy death, an erasure of the pain that day had always brought me. I could wake up on Sunday morning without the heaviness in my heart that foretold the heaviness in my eyes that preceded tears. It was beautiful. Divine, even. That was twelve years ago, and I am still mostly fine on Sundays. Mostly. That's how powerful my friend's gift was.

But there are still some Sundays that a trace of sadness can cast a tiny shadow over me. It's as if that inside-baby girl sometimes sighs on a Sunday morning. She doesn't wail anymore, or scream or even weep silently. She simply sighs a little breath of despair of ever being rid entirely of pain. But so what? We all have pain. How could we know the joy of release if not for the pain?

And I get up and make pancakes (real ones, not like the Bisquick ones of my childhood) and serve them up to the family I have now and we like to eat them under the trees in the back yard next to the bird feeder with the dogs lazing around our feet, hoping for scraps, panting softly in the building heat of a summer day.

No church for me, thank-you.

And I think ALL the days are set aside as God's, if by God you mean that net of life that connects us all- that web of quarks and sparks the universe is made of.

Or something like that.