Bowl me over

So, the other day I was sitting outside my rig, staring at the mountains and I’d let my mind off its leash. The old gray mass was wandering around, listening to the wind, looking at cloud shapes, sniffing the fresh air—when all of a sudden it whirls around and rushes back to me with this question:

Why do we serve pancakes on a plate?

Then you spend the entire meal chasing down errant syrup with the pancake bits you’ve impaled on your fork. Even expending all that effort, there’re still puddles of pancake syrup scattered about the plate when all the pancakes are gone.

Now I’m sure you, like I, learned in high school physics that pancakes and waffles posses the requisite properties allowing them to soak up all but the most over-thickened, bland-tasting, maple syrup substitutes. And I’m sure you, like I, have carried out the experiments proving these properties, taking note of how the bottom-most pancake absorbs the sucrose or fructose suspensions (i.e., syrup) with which it may come in contact.

How best, I wondered, to take advantage of these properties?

Eureka! I thought, serve pancakes in a bowl!

Concentrate the syrup to the center. Then, when you cut down through a stack and lift a section past your lips, you’ll be transferring saturation-point layers fully laden with maximum syrupy succulence.

I tried this out, using fried shredded wheat (Yes, Fried Shredded Wheat.) as my test medium. Works perfectly.

;^)

Fried Shredded Wheat

Recipe: Prepare shredded wheat as you would French toast. Then eat it like French toast.

Large biscuit shredded wheat,
un-fried.

This was one of my favorites growing up. But I think only my Mom and I really liked it, so we didn’t have it that often. I found the nutty taste, the crunchy texture and a near-mushy interior to be an excellent vehicle for slurps and slurps of table syrup.

That was back in the day before spoon-size mini-wheats. And bite-size mini-wheats. And frosted mini-wheats. Back then, there was just one size of shredded wheat biscuit: large. One cereal company made them into oblong pillows, another into round pods. Either way, maximum occupancy by a large cereal bowl was two biscuits.

Those large biscuits still work best for this recipe, however, any size or type of shredded wheat will work. There are just two things to keep in mind:

1. The smaller the biscuit, the longer it must soak in the egg-milk mix.
2. Frosted biscuits will burn sooner because of the sugar surfaces.

Oh, one more thing. The big, old-fashioned biscuits were manufactured without any ingredients other than wheat. That means no salt. So check your brand’s ingredient list. If there’s no salt (“sodium” on the nutrition label) listed, adding some to the egg batter may improve the taste, depending on your own salt habits.

;^)