BAKING

Sunday Breakfast

Jean Dubuffet (Le Havre, 1901)
Dhotel nuance d’abricot, 1947
Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou (a.k.a The Gerbil Cage), Paris

For me, Sunday breakfast has always had a special place in my heart. When I was growing up, Sunday was always the day I’d wake up to the smell of bacon frying, coffee brewing and the sizzle of my mother making blintzes. Oh those blintzes my mom would make! They were just one out of perhaps hundreds of examples in which my mother could wield gluten perfection. The crepes of these heavenly breakfast treats were delicate, symmetrical ovals that my mom would fold over like a piece of ivory silk, bundling the frothy cottage cheese filling into a pocket of sensory stimulii. After eating one, my brothers and sisters and I would impatiently stand in line waiting for the next blintz to slide out of the skillet and onto our plates. With five hungry kids elbowing each other for the place in front of us, you can only imagine the wooden spoon threats my mother could yield that would silence us within seconds. “No, no! I’m sorrry! My I pleaaaaaaaase have one more blintz?”

Then there were the pancakes. Pancakes? Yes, today, I woke up with a hankering for pancakes. Even though I’ve been waxing poetic about my mother’s blintzes, I have yet to perfect a gluten-free version, so I too am settling for the pancakes. I awoke this morning with a specific ingredient in mind: buckwheat. My son eats buckwheat cereal nearly every morning when it’s cold and lately, I’ve been wanting to try my hand a buckwheat, the flour. Unfortunately my husband, Tim, wasn’t in the mood for pancakes so I fried up some Da Becca Bacon, made our Nespresso coffee (the most ingenious coffee invention since Starbucks), and asked him what he would prefer.

“A Boggy Creek egg,” he replied, from over the top of his reading glasses without lifting his gaze from the Sunday Times.
“With or without toast?”
“With,” still not looking up.
“One slice or two?”
“One, and I’ll have the egg fried, like yesterday.”

So I got to work on Tim’s fried egg and toast which took next to no time at all, and since my son, Leo ate his Honey Nut Cheerios (neither Tim nor Leo suffer from Celiac, thank god) over an hour ago, I had a window for experimentation. But since Tim never looked up from his paper, I could tell my window was going to be a short one. These aren’t what I would call the perfect pancake, but seeing how they were made up on the fly, they definately aren’t bad.

February 11th, 2007 — 9:24 am

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