This pancake recipe is a hand-me-down from an old chemist, Alex’s grandfather. If you take the time to hunt down the required wheat germ and some proper flour, you will resolutely swear off pancakes from a box until the day you die. Granddaddy Brown did. Never again will you contemplate a $6 stack of fluff that will languish in your gut for the rest of a lackadaisical Sunday. Not that these thick flapjacks won’t send you flying into a food coma—they will—but it will be a rocking-chair-on-the-stoop coma you can relish with old-time vigor.
My wife and I just got a basketball-sized head of purple cabbage from a local farm. We like fish tacos and coleslaw, but it would take us three cabbage-laden meals a week to finish all of it before it goes bad. I’m just not prepared for that kind of gastrointestinal assault. Do you have a good sauerkraut recipe, or some other advice for preserving our leafy lode?
—Cabbage Patch Kid
Dear Kid: My ancestors are from Russia, which means three cabbage-laden meals a week would have been nothing. So quit complaining and take it like a man.
My first 24 hours in Albuquerque were a nightmare. From the moment I drove the moving van off the exit ramp I felt like a can of beer at a church picnic, and I made so many mistakes with the locals I wondered if I’d ever fit in here. I remember mapping out my journey before I left and thinking that there were some weird street names, and when I stopped to get directions, I asked for “Ju-wan Tay-bo” and “Men-u-el.” The gas station clerk looked at me, shook his head, and told me to take “Central Avenue” south until I found it.
