I can cook meat. Meat is easy. Poultry is easy. Even fish isn't really difficult. Vegetables are a complete doddle.
Every time I cook, I stand in the kitchen looking at it all coming together, and I smile broadly and am delighted with the results.
Today, of all the days in the year, is the day which is most likely to find me looking at the stove and saying "oh dear".
Eggs have a mind of their own. I never cook with eggs. Ask
scarlatti -- I'm sure she's never seen me cook with eggs.Today is the one day in the year that I cook with eggs.
It's pancake day. Two eggs, about the same volume of flour, about the same volume of milk, put into the wanky pudding maker and shaken vigorously. This quantity of batter makes about three pancakes in a ten-inch pan. It would probably make two of US thickness, or six European-thickness crêpes. A new (new today!) frying pan, nice and hot, and some hot fat. When it's cooked on one side, you're supposed to throw the pancake up and catch it back in the pan after a half-turn, a process known as "tossing", but I'm congenitally unable to toss pancakes competently (a condition called dyspraxia) and so I have to turn them using one of those wooden spatula things.
kevinrtaylor says that one of the basic rules of pancake making is that the first pancake out of the pan should disintegrate -- that only happens if the pan's not hot enough. Use very highly saturated fat (on this occasion I used beef dripping) because it means you can cook at a higher temperature.As noted previously, I had my pancakes filled with some of the huge quantities of bolognaise sauce I made the other day. The stepson had his bolognaise sauce separately, and followed it with pancakes served with honey and lemon. I had the final pancake with caramel sauce.
Pancakes this year were a success. Sometimes they're a disaster, for reasons which are completely opaque to me. I'm convinced it's because eggs, as I've said above, have a mind of their own. I don't cook with eggs, they give me The Fear. I won't get good pancakes two years running.
