Things you only cook once a year.

Turkey. Toffee Apples. Anything to do with Pumpkins. My bi-annual attempts to make jam, mayonnaise and veal stock (actually that's probably once a decade). Lentils. Pancakes. Ok, I made up the bit about lentils. I never cook them, the vicious little buggers, but tonight was my yearly pitch battle to make pancakes. An ongoing struggle of good versus evil, an eternal battle to get the batter right, get them to cook evenly and yes, I'm ashamed to say flip the little fuckers. I just told the girlfriend on the phone that I was cooking them. There was a pause. "How's it going?" was the tentative reply. Forefront in her mind was the year I exploded into an apoplectic rage when my pancakes were all lumpy and tasted like cardboard. Years of therapy and a much better frying pan later, this year's effort was well, pretty effortless.


Of course, I doubt anyone actually remembers the recipe for pancakes; I got mine from the rather unwieldy "How to cook bloody everything" (or something along those lines) by a committee of home economists (You know the kind of thing, basically every recipe you could conceivably want described in the same dry tone I imagine a surgeons instruction manual might describe a vasectomy) and it worked a treat. I was a touch suspicious at first but it proceeded along uneventful lines until I had a stack of steaming golden brown discs sat upon a plate. Here's hoping next year is as easy. Happy Fat Tuesday everyone.