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Ceci n’est pas une recette aux crèpes. 20 February 2007 11:20 pm

Posted by Tracy in : breakfast,cooking,eating,Marion Nestle,Morning Glory,work , trackback

It’s not a pancake recipe, either. Though really, if I had wanted to post a recipe for Pancake Day/Pancake Tuesday/Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras, I should’ve maybe gotten on that plan a little earlier. Like two weeks ago maybe, when I ate pancakes in some form for four days straight — or was it five? That was the weekend of Jen’s special crèpes at Morning Glory (in two words, entirely awesome). But I digress. If you’re interested in reading about some of my favorite pancake recipes — and there are many — please post a comment (or email me if you’re feeling shy).

I will definitely be writing about buckwheat crèpes, because they are near and dear to my heart. Other possibilities include:

I also have an as-yet-untested recipe for polenta pancakes, and I think there’s something similar in Jack Bishop’s A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen (corn cakes with spiced honey maybe?) If everybody wrote in and gave me an extra excuse to give either of those a try, I wouldn’t mind. Yum. I think they’d go well with black beans.

In other news, I’m currently too lazy to go look up the details on Jack Bishop’s corn cakes because I worked a pretty long shift today, by which I mean only 7.5 hours, and that “only” is not sarcastic. Long shifts at Sundance meant 9 hours (albeit almost always with almost an hour of paid break) — at the Glenwood it meant 10 hours. Yay for cooking someplace that’s only open for 8 hours a day! Also, yay for the phenomenal homemade vegan mushroom burgers we’re currently selling as one of the all-organic specials of the week. I brought one home for dinner tonight — just the burger, bread, and fixings, no sides, to keep it under my allotted $7 per shift meal — and it was awesome. So awesome that I’m more sure than ever that we’re not charging enough, and dread the day our prices change (or we go out of business — either of those would suck).

Um, I seem to be rambling about only vaguely-connected things, which is really what Monkey Monday is for, but my excuse is that yesterday I actually had a story to tell, so it’s okay if I use my weekly allotment of random today, right? Um, yeah. ANYWAY. I’ve only got two more points to make tonight, so hang in there. The penultimate thought is pithily summarized by one of the many awesome things I heard Marion Nestle say on Saturday: food is cheap, labor isn’t. (Post a comment or email me if you’re interested in reading more words of wisdom from my hero; I’ve got plenty! A collection, even! Some in autograph form! And did I mention I took notes on her talks? Um, I digress.) It turns out I have a lot to say on the subject of food and work, so expect it to become a recurring theme. Look for the phrase “can’t cook, won’t cook,” which I got from these essays at Everything2.com. Another pithy way of phrasing it might be: food is cheap, time isn’t.

And speaking of time, that’s as good a segue as I’m going to make into telling about a shining proud moment of mine this afternoon. It was dead slow for the first hour or more of my shift, so I sent the guy who opened home, only to regret it when the first of two huge parties walked in just as I had finished the tantric mushroom gravy and was starting to consider the rest of my not-inconsiderable prep list. Just for the record, depending on the order, I can cook maybe five or six individual items at once, if I’m careful. A table with four or more people around it is going to slow me down, unless they all ordered the same thing (preferably something easy). You see where I’m going with this.

My biggest order today was a ticket with ten items on it, and I was lucky because several of the items overlapped (i.e. I can fit more than one order of tofu scramble in a pan). Where I wasn’t so lucky was that there were other people in the café besides that ten-top, and some six to eight of them were all together in another big group. That second big group decided they were in a hurry, and demanded all their orders to-go, and then there was some kind of critical mass effect involving mass crankiness mostly directed at the gal working the floor all by herself. I might have to learn the cash register, if only as another way to shut people up, but today no one could teach me, and instead I was forced to resort to my awesome customer service skills. Yes, gentle readers, I actually carried food to a few tables and bought Shannon a little time to ring people up. The world did not end. Which may have been why I was completely fearless a few minutes later, when through my window I spied yet another crush around the register. Some of them were waiting to pay their tickets, but I was right out of sympathy for the one who was just there to whine. To me. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “We’re not fast food.” Then I went back to work.

Later, when things had finally calmed down and there were no customers to overhear, Shannon thanked me repeatedly for saying those words. I’m pretty sure they’re my new work mantra, and yay for cooking someplace I can get away with saying it to a customer. “We’re not fast food.” We should put it on the menu. “We’re not fast food.” Hell yeah.