I Don't Stop At IHOP

I think everyone has a food they don’t like, can’t eat, don’t want to be near. It’s the smell, the taste, the texture, the aroma wafting through the air that dulls the appetite, turns stomachs and make us want to be somewhere else. It’s a real back-ended diet technique I’ve tried to avoid. You know what your food is. Mine is pancakes. And I blame my mother.

Feeding seven kids can put a strain on any food budget and my mother was always trying to find ways to stretch our food dollars. She found one solution on a table at the supermarket. The table held packets, hundreds of them, of pancake mix. Add some water, the directions claimed, and each packet could produce enough to feed a village. The packets cost ten cents each. The brand name, as I recall, was Generic. My mother bought five dollars worth and that started our pancake era.

We had pancakes for breakfast, pancakes for lunch, pancakes for dinner. On week days she’d give us the left-over breakfast pancakes to snack on while we waited for the school bus. At school, we’d open our lunch bags to find a peanut butter and jelly on pancake sandwiches. Yum.

It took months to work our way through the packets but we finally made it. It took years before I could look at a pancake dead on. Years more before I could actually eat one and then it was just to be polite. I still only eat them to be polite but it takes less effort. Either my palate is settling or I’m getting better at the polite thing. I think it’s the palate.