Pancake Rant

I woke up this morning and decided to make pancakes, not crepes, not blini, but real fluffy pancakes.  One problem, for some reason something so easy to make takes about an hour and a half and by the time you’re finished you too annoyed to even want the thing you created.  Like so many Americans, I go through fazes when I really miss American food like pancakes, key lime pie, gravy and broccoli cheese soup.  There are days when I’d give a pint of blood for I-HOP or even a Denny’s.  Yearning aside, something like pancakes should be easy to make here, should being the operating word here.

About a year ago when I was in Moscow with my mom and dear, dear friend Justin in a Georgian restaurant, my mom was venting about not being able to find cold water in kiosks.  Yes, it’s 90 degrees and yes there is cold beer- and there is water there, but it’s not cold.  How did/ does this happen? Refrigeration equals cold, that’s how it’s supposed to work.  Justin answered, “You see, you need to get the word ‘should’ out of your system here.  This is Moscow, and any time you want to use logic you should be zapped.  They should make a logic zap collar for this place.”

Fast forward to me trying to make pancakes for the zillionth time.  I started this project because I have all these berries and thought I’d amazing and make compote or at least a fruit sauce thing to put on top of the pancakes.  My berry knowledge is very limited, I can successfully identify about 6 types and figured that I had acquired blueberries and currents; however in retrospect I’m now thinking they are something quite different.  The ‘blueberries’ have a strange spiciness to them and the red ones are a little sweet but more sour.  No problem, I’ll just use the technique my mom taught me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, I’ll add a little salt.  Then I added some sugar and this amazing sauce did eventually make itself, but the berries are still strange.  Taking some Justin advice I stopped playing with it and decided I would leave the berry thing alone and create the fluffiest pancakes ever.  Only to remember that my stove isn’t level and the oil tends to gather in the part of the pan.  Damnit.  I started this whole endeavor at 11am and it’s not 1pm and I have a small batch of tea saucer sized pancakes and questionable fruit sauce.  As much as I’ve love to blame my kitchen, it’s possible this culinary fail is my fault, and not the ingredients fault.  So this is my zap moment.  Blueberries are not blueberries and red berries are not always currants.   

However, a zap moment for Russia is salad.  There is great debate about what makes a salad.  In my book, a salad is fresh vegetables you can see and identify topped with a little dressing.  Here, it’s canned vegetables drowned in mayo and sour cream.  Say what you will about generalizing American food, but that kind of salad is far from popular and is generally avoided by all children.  Salads should be healthy, not give you a heart attack.  Everyone knows that if you want to have a heart attack you eat fried macaroni and cheese or something from Paula Deen’s cookbook.   

This brings to mind another culinary disagreement which I will blame on ingredients; my battle trying to make my beloved broccoli cheese soup.  I learned a while ago that Russian cheese has two very important things missing from it, salt and a melting point.  Russian cheese simply doesn’t melt.  I’m sure you’re thinking, ‘but it’s cheese, of course it melts’ and if you think that, you should be zapped.  It doesn’t melt, it congeals and becomes a blob that will someday spring to life and declare war on yogurt.  Finding cheese that melts requires a lot of reading and patience because in all supermarkets there appears to be about 50 types of cheese, but upon careful examination, you’ll quickly discover that 30 are all the same.  I got tricked into buying чеддар- cheddar only to skip home and discover it was a weird yellow swiss cheese.  Just because it’s yellow doesn’t mean you can call it cheddar.  And just because the label says it says cheddar doesn’t mean it really is. 

Keeping that in mind, you really have to ask yourself how strong the label laws are if things are packaged as one thing and they really sold as another?  Russians are really quite anxious about buying domestic vodka for fear that they will be sold something like isopropanol alcohol or something even worse.  I used to laugh off this concern as people being genetically pessimistic and paranoid, but after reading several articles in Russian newspapers and other various places I’m beginning to think there may be something to these concerns after all.  The only logical thing to do at the end of the day is to get a cow and make your own cheese and then you can be sure that your dairy products are the best in town.