Pancakes ( Our diabolical regression in the Art of cooking)

Of course, our eating habits have changed. Who would have thought mums now buy a plastic bottle with the advice ‘just shake it’? The ‘just shake it’ seems to be a prepared kind of pancake mix. I would imagine the intending cook fills up the empty space in the plastic bottle with milk and then ‘just shake’ it, with mixture ready for pancake making. It probably makes about five or six pancakes and at $ 1.85 works out at the outrageous price of 30cents a pancake, not including the golden syrup or jam on top. Perhaps the ‘just shake it’ has been embedded from a latent subliminal message from eager husbands pestering tired wives late at night. A clever use of product enhancement.

It must be back-breaking work to put flour in a bowl, and then add some milk, a couple of eggs and whisk the lot together and get the old fashioned pan-cake mixture for a quarter of the cost. Walking slowly past the supermarket’s shelves there were other similar products. A cheese in a tube, some powder that turns into instant mashed potato, but the most irksome of them all, and H is so sick of me commenting on them, are…simmering sauces. My eyes forever keeping guard on our dietary habits, I even spotted a kind of meat-spread in a tube. It was called, I think, devilish spread which came in mild and spicy.

Yet, again, I switched on the telly and it’s almost obligatory now to find and watch a cooking show. No matter what time, there is someone with eyes turned heavenly upwards, saying ‘oh, how yum’ or ‘wow’. Fresh ingredients are tossed together; fish, meat, snails, frogs are being infused, thrown about and cooked almost to the point of a kind of Le Mans’ car race.

It’s all very confusing. There are options in watching French, Italian; Spanish cooks either cooking away in their own country or in top restaurants in Britain. They seem so enthusiastic, you wonder if they have mattresses tucked behind those huge gleaming stainless steel stoves and just take quick naps in between the stacking of delicious looking char-grilled hearts of goats and noodles with infused ginger and deep fried shreds and strips of celeriac with chanterelle-shiitake mushrooms on giant plates.

Then there are culinary delights shown in Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, even Thailand. Fresh fish swimming, frogs are croaking and eels or snakes still slithering about. Within minutes it is all cooked and on the table with huge smiling families feasting away.

If pancake making is the only thing my grandkids will remember me by; so be it. It would be nice to have an epitaph on my pebble crete slab; “here lies the greatest pancake- maker” (but keep off the grass).

Cooking needs to be an act of love. You can never cook something in total indifference. When the kids are over, pancake making has almost religious overtones. Their own parents’ pancakes seem to lack ‘crispy edges’, I was told by Max who is the youngest of the three grandsons, adding, ‘they are alright though’, not wanting to dob in his parents.

It is not as if I swoon over every pancake but I do hand mix the dough adding water and pinch of salt. I use real butter and cook on two cast iron solid pans on high heat. When I gently lower the mixture into the pan, the edges frizzle and sizzle out into the much desired golden crispy and crunchy edging. While hot, I rush them over to the kids seated at the round table, fork and knife in hand and at the ready. I squeeze some lime juice and sprinkle a light dusting of sugar.

I leave the rest to them.

My old ‘Stamping’ around Revesby (Selamat Makan)

The old ‘Stamping’ will never stop. (This NOT from le salon des ABC refuses)

Isn’t it sweet and proof of the conviviality of the readers including those ‘Pigs Arms’ patrons that my writings are never purely judged by its spelling? There I was happily ‘stamping’ away at my old ‘stamping’ grounds of Revesby being haughtily dismissive of lawns and petunias. And yet, with the dawning of another day and with more words urging me on, I remain humbled, (doing a Rupert Murdoch)  by the kindness and tolerance of the readers, not only allowing me to dwell on these pages, but also being presumptuous enough in thinking those words worth reading, including the ‘stamping’ around.

Perhaps this stamping around in suburban Revesby has some basis in happenings at earlier times.

I was given a stamp album for Christmas in 1948. I have kept it ever since but no stamps have been added since 1956, the year of our arrival in Australia. I started saving postage stamps as soon as I could walk (my mother told me). They used to include stamps from all over the world. It became far too complicated and I decided with my new album to concentrate on The Netherlands and its colonies instead. The colony of Indonesia (former Dutch East Indies) was then tottering on the edge of becoming independent under Sukarno and I remember tens of thousands arriving in Holland taking with them the world’s finest cuisine and different cultural habits. Many could not hack the colourless Dutch climate and its relentless damp weather and moved onto Australia. This eventually resulted in many Indonesian restaurants popping up in Sydney and elsewhere. One of those was called Selamat Makan in Victoria Street, King’s Cross.  Much later another one opened up in King Street, Newtown ‘The Safari’. I can sometimes still taste the spicy ‘Rendang’.

The date of this Christmas gift stamp album from my parents of 1948 is written on the front page in lovely long- hand writing. Do kids still learn long-hand or has that gone overboard as well? The world of the abbreviated language is now much in vogue, with C U LTR or LOL with ROLFING being bit more expansive. I remember in the late fifties the start of texting with the 4 SALE signs arrivals in front of second hand car sale yards stretching mile after ugly mile on Parramatta Rd, Sydney.

Going back to my album,   I used to get a yearly stamp catalogue specifying and updating the latest stamp issues and, more importantly, the value of stamps. The value of some stamps, depending on the numbers issued, would drastically increase as the years went by. I kept a little book with their updated values. Sadly, while I still have the album somewhere, the book of updated stamp values has gone, disappeared. Perhaps my parents chucked it out or left it behind in our house at The Hague together with the lovely tropical fish aquarium and all those Neon-Tetras.

Now, with the likelihood of more years past then coming still, the inclination to dwell on what has been, have to be resisted somewhat. The temptation to finish up being called ‘a boring old fart’ by many will surely become the incentive to look afresh at the ever changing world and its many colours. There is no other way and so many words might still be queuing.