Greetings y’all.
This morning, Squirrel and I were chatting about pancakes. You know the ones - fluffy, buttermilk infused, butter-soaked, blueberry-loaded pancakes stacked to the ceiling and drizzled in real Vermont maple syrup?
Nom, nom, nom... Soooo much NOM. ^_^
During the conversation, we got around to discussing other toppings and ingredients like strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, every other kinda berry, pumpkin spice, custards, pecans, walnuts, peanuts, coconut, and just about everything else you can imagine. Then I realized we'd forgotten one important variant - chocolate chips. And that forced me to review... When was the last time I had chocolate chip pancakes?
Well, let's see (queue the Wayback Machine montage here)... Holy flapjack, it was over FORTY YEARS ago.
It had to be 1984 or so, when my friend Tommy's parents took us down to San Antonio for the Cinco de Mayo weekend. I remember seeing Judas Priest advertised on the marquee at the colosseum. If you've never been to San Antonio or celebrated Cinco de Mayo, do yourself a favor and do them together. It's an amazing experience. The festivities, the people, the FOOD... It's all incredible.
Except for the chocolate chip pancakes. For the record, I'm not disparaging IHOP. This instance is the only time I've ever been to one, and I can't judge a franchise on one restaurant's offering, but they were memorable only in the sense they were terrible. And I LOVE chocolate.
Perhaps it was all the delightful street vendor food that crushed them by comparison. Maybe they snuck a sort of sly carob in, or the syrup was some shoddy Canadian brand (wink). Whatever the case, they were anything but good. I finished them only because Tommy's mom spent good money on them and I wasn't about to be the bratty little friend who didn't appreciate the free weekend vacation.
Even though our motel was a bit on the budget side (we had to clean the leaves out of the pool ourselves before using it) and we had no tickets to the superstar rock concert in town, we ate REALLY good. And there was no shortage of music, it was everywhere. People danced in the street, along the river-walk, and were happy in every place. There wasn't a park or even parking lot that didn't have some kinda festival going on. I can't tell you how many parties we moved through over those two days or how many piñatas I swung at. All I know is I had pockets full of candy a week later. It was an incredible time.
It doesn't feel like four decades between me and that experience at all, but it IS weird to think about how mutable time can seem. My hope is that same mutability applies to THIS place when I get to go home.
Which ironically, by an odd quirk of fate, is likely San Antonio. Maybe I'll see if that IHOP has improved their chocolate chip pancakes.
Prison pancakes just aren’t the same…