Sunday Brunch

Maybe it's related to the satisfaction of being needed but there are few things I enjoy more than cooking for other people. Case in point, brunch this morning. Dancing around the kitchen to Irish music I stole from my mom (who would have been 57 today, happy birthday mom!) while alternately flipping pancakes and sipping coffee and knowing that people were going to come over and enjoy all the food I was making made me about as happy as I get. There's also something viscerally satisfying about pancakes. They sizzle when you ladle out the batter, bubble as they cook, and then you get to flip them. I have wonderful memories of cooking pancakes with my dad as a child and being allowed to flip them (I wasn't very good at it at first and often mangled them). Sometimes, we'd make pancakes in the shapes of letters so that I could arrange my pancakes on my plate to spell my name. Of course, it was difficult to decide what order to eat them in. One is tempted to go left to right across the plate as one would read and yet the first letter of your name is more meaningful than the others so one wants to leave it for the end. Today, I avoided such dilemmas by making your standard round pancakes. They were delicious, especially with the bananas sauteed in butter and rum. The silence of happy people eating food I made has filled me with joy. So if you ever want to cheer me up, bring me a vegetable and ask me to cook for you.