How to get skinny eating pancakes

This insight actually came from my pre-Raw Bar-B-Q days. Suffice to say I was a HUGE (in every sense) fan of the smoky deadals back in the day and that my quest to find the perfect baby back led me to revelations about food that stick with me (and in me) to this day.

The biggest one relates to flavor-shock. That is, the best part of eating a Bar-B-Q rib or what not was that first bite. Each subsequent chew diminished the pleasure of the incisive snap such that by the 4th or 5th chew, what was once a poignant delight had now become a banal chore.

Why was that?

Well the answer was largely in the flavoring. That vinegary sting from the first bite had largely worn off by the second. And so as one continued in the chewing one was left with only the smoky meat in one's mounth, which, though potentially delicious in its own right, was inevitably lackluster when compared to the zingy, tangy Bar-B-Q sauce which excites beyond what mere flesh can do. (this is getting kind of gross. sorry)

It seemed unavoidable. Short of injecting sauce into the meat itself, somehow, it appeared that we were all doomed to enjoy 4/5 of out Bar-B-Q experience in diminishing turns less than that 1/5 at the beginning.

As an Ameican, of course, I found this conundrum impossible to accept. There must be a way out of it. There must be progress.

And then I found it: Bar-B-Q Soup.

My friends all laughed at me at the time. . .oh the burn. . .but my beliefs held firm. With the bar-b-qed meat separated from the bone, shredded, and doused in a blood red soup of bar-b-q sauce, the pleasure could go on forever. Each soupspoonful would provide a sauce to meat ratio that allowed for swallowing all the flesh before the sauce's tang wore off. The thrill of each zesty moment would be repeated over and over again without relenting, liberated, as we had become, from the tedium of chewing past the point of pleasure.

To me this was the American dream. A limitless supply of stimulation with the absolute bare minimum of actual effort. What could be better?

Bar-b-q soup would be my ticket to immortality, having freed the masses from their slavish addiction to chewing and suffering through boring tasting meat. . .a hero amongst the people.


Ahhhh. . .the road not taken. Hacked soup, ground soup, brisket soup, duck soup, pork soup, vinegar, sweet, sour, vegan. . .the road seemed endless. Perhaps another day.



But you wanted to get skinny eating pancakes, right? Otherwise you would have been reading the one about dads calling their kids buddy.

Well, I may have mislead you a bit there. You're still going to get fat eating pancakes, there's not much to be done about that. But there is a way you can get less fat while eating pancakes and at the same time save the environment.

The principles are the same as in bar-b-q: What makes most pancakes tasty is not the cake itself, but the smack of sugar you receive when first biting in to that drippy, buttery maple syrup. No matter how good the cake tastes on its own, the syrup will always taste better.

Some of you may have discovered that when you pour your 1/4 cup standardized serving of syrup all over your pancakes, by the 5th or 6th bite, you need to reload, as it were. Where did all the flavor go? Did it disappear?

No, but it did get absorbed into the cakes and its flavor dispersed. So while the syrup-soaked cakes may be mushier and floppier, they have yet lost much of their flavor, thus requiring you to re-douse them with another shot of maple syrup to get your fix.

Now this might not seem so bad- until you realize that while you are only tasting one serving of maple syrup, you are nonetheless eating both that syrup and the syrup that was already absorbed in the pancake! You're double dosing.

And even if this, gentle reader, doesn't seem so bad- just wait. Because by the 10th or 11th bite, that second dose of maple syrup will have been absorbed, and you will be left to add yet one more "serving" to your plate. Now, though you are tasting only one, you are actually eating three servings of maple syrup in one batch- though two are merely filler.

Now, depending on how big your stack is, you may go through this ritual four or five times- or more- particularly if you are engaged in conversation, thus allowing more time for the syrup to withdraw into the bread. So for the intent of eating one serving of maple syrup, in the course of a sitting, you may in fact find yourself eating 6 or more. Unbelievable.

Fortunately, the solution to this is easy. And I thank the cheap-ass restauranteurs upstairs at Fariway for showing me the way out. At Fairway, they serve real Vermont maple syrup with their silver dollar pancakes. And being super tight, they don't give you one of those syrup pitchers but basically what amounts to a plastic shot glass filled with syrup. What I quickly discovered was that if you want to have enough syrup left for your last pancake at Fairway, casually dumping the shot glass over the stack wasn't going to cut it. You had to conserve. And the easiest way to conserve was to just leave the syrup in the cup and use it as a kind of dipping sauce rather than a topping. Ingenious. In this manner, much like out bar-b-q soup, you get the up-front hit of the syrup with each bite you take. There's no double-absorption, there's no waste. Just smack after smack of deciduous goodness.

So for those of you who want to lose weight (or gain less weight) while still enjoying your pancakes in the morning, give this notion a try. Ask for your syrup on the side. Apportion your dipping appropriately, and voila! You will be amazed at how little syrup is actually required to coat an order of pancakes- but that's just the point: "coat" not soak. It's the flavor-shock to the tongue that gives you the stim, not the dull processing afterwards or the deep innards of the cake.


So I'm glad I've gotten that one out of the way, immortality or not. Oh. . .did I mention something about saving the environment? Probably a stretch, but think of all the sap you're saving from those poor maple trees- or the corn you're saving if you use Aunt Jemima's. That should make you feel better about getting skinny right away!

Thanks,

D-Blog

"Hey, Buddy"

I'd like to register my objection now to the current trend of fathers calling their sons "buddy." (You can hear one such utterance here.)

What's up with that? Is this but one more abdication of parenthood roles for modern Americans? Maybe kids can start calling the TV set 'dad' and maybe the microwave 'mom' so their parents can just get back to being pals. As it is, 21-year old school teachers spend more time with kids than parents do. Is this just an admission that we no longer have any idea how to - or perhaps any desire to - parent? I guess that would be something. Or perhaps it says something about the modern American male and his total lack of paternal backbone. Couldn't say, but like I said before- my objection is hereby registered.

D-Blog