Pancake Day

As I write this, it is National Pancake Day. We went to IHOP to celebrate with their free short stack of pancakes.

I am not really writing about that though. I am writing about pancakes. You see, I love pancakes. I really do. I am not sure I LOVE to eat them, but as they are a bread with butter and something sweet, I really don't usually turn them down.

I am NOT a syrup fan. In fact, syrup has never been on my list of favorite flavors; not even the butter pecan kind at IHOP, the syrup I like best.

My mother, despite being a fabulous cook, did NOT make good pancakes. They were often burned or flipped too early or under done on the inside. Not an auspicious beginning for pancake love.

There was a pancake house in an old mill house looking thing in Annapolis on the way to the bay bridge that I really liked, with silver dollar pancakes and multitudes of flavored syrups. I think we only went a few times though. My family wasn't big on eating out when we were very young. Full of kitschy stuff that engages a child, like the cow shaped milk pitchers, it was a place to build fond pancake memories. If it had stayed longer or we had eaten out more, then that probably would have been the case.

My pancake love came from a book. This children's book, title forgotten and I try to find it every so often in vintage children book lands, but can't find the right one. I find others about kids and pancakes but not this one. This book told the story of a child, maybe two siblings who built a pancake machine that went out of control. It talked about eating millions and millions of pancakes. The whole book created this incredible orgy of a food consumption utopia. I read it over and over again in the days when reading truly didn't seem like something for me. Maybe pancake magic brought book and reading magic into my life...maybe not...but I know that I think of the book when I eat pancakes, share the magic of them with my children and when I choose breakfast.