TheBanyanTree: Fear of Pancakes

[Julie Anna Teague]

You are not alone, with the milk or the pancakes.  I, too, abhorred 
milk, except as a medium for cereal.  I haven't drank it, other than on 
cereal, for forty years, and yet when I had my bones tested, I had the 
bones of a person half my age.  I do eat yogurt, ice cream, and 
cheese--the delightfully palatable forms of milk.  I was lucky in that 
my mom did not foist glasses of milk on us.  She seemed to be appeased 
if we doped it with Hershey's powder and choked some down every now and 
again.  She was reasonable to think that we'd probably live without it, 
and in fact she hated milk too, as do my kids.

The pancakes were another thing altogether.  My mom was onto the whole 
wheat trend before whole wheat was big in the Midwest.  (And I still 
don't think it's big here to this day, unbelievably.)  We ate Roman 
Meal bread, the only non-white bread brand available at the time, and 
she made grainier, non-gooey pancakes. Sometimes we'd put applesauce 
and cinnamon on them, along with the syrup.  I did fear them horribly 
at other kid's houses because I would go in blindly, thinking I loved 
pancakes, and eat a big stack of white goo with sticky sweet syrup, no 
doubt choked down with an obligatory glass of milk, and that was a 
recipe for instant stomach cramps and a bout of sitting in their 
bathroom for longer than normal, horribly embarrassed.

I don't order pancakes in restaurants, that's for sure.  Most of the 
time they are highly reminiscent of those gooey gut bombs, and even the 
scent of that corn sweetener based syrup starts my stomach a-heaving.  
But they are my favorite Sunday treat at home, with grainy grains and 
blueberries, and either maple syrup or yogurt and fruit on top.  My 
kids, oddly enough, won't touch them with a ten foot pole because they 
don't like fruit, for crying out loud.  I should force some fruit on 
them every single morning...nah.

Julie