No, this post isn’t about gluten-free cuisine, exactly, though it may figure here. Yesterday I posted about making serious change, in the guise of cooking and flipping pancakes. (It was a stretch, but whatever…).  Today I’m starting my list of the things that I need to change…to “cook,” and bubble/think about, and  hopefully flip…starting with this, since the morning did not go well, after a very good start last week and the week before:

1) Remain Disciplined, Even in the Face of Other Pressures, About Bedtime and Morning Schedule.  Continue reading →

My son, who is 4, likes to cook. He especially likes making eggs and pancakes (and thankfully is happy with the gluten free mix that’s replaced the standard kind in our kitchen). He not only wants to crack open and beat the eggs, or mix up batter, he is determined to hold the spatula and make sure everything is cooked to perfection in the pan. And he’s rather good at it…and cautious, too (more than his sister at this age, to be honest), or I wouldn’t let him do it.

The other morning he poured eggs into a pan, and after a few seconds, asked when they would bubble.  It took me a moment to realize that he was trying to apply our lessons on pancake flipping to scrambled eggs. Eggs don’t work that way, I explained. Eggs are different. You can just keep stirring them until they’re ready. But you’ve got to keep pushing them around, or else they’ll get stuck or unevenly cooked. You want scrambled eggs to be cooked all over, but you don’t turn them the way you do pancakes. You just keep them on low heat and in pretty constant motion.

With pancakes, you’ve got to let it sit, and you’ve got to choose the perfect moment.  Once you’ve spooned in the batter, you’ve got to let the heat work its magic for a while without trying to force the issue. When the batter starts to bubble, you still have to be patient–until the moment when it’s bubbling all over. You can test the edge with the spatula to see if it’s ready, really ready. And then you flip. If you’ve done it right, the batter will have become a pancake, the bottom will be golden brown, and the turning will be easy. If you let the batter sit in the heat too long without turning, bubble and bubble until it bubbles no more, it will burn, and get stuck to the pan, and never turn over. Then it can even be hard to remove from the pan.

We were reviewing these principles, my son and I, in the week leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the Jewish New Year, and a time of introspection and change.  Continue reading →