So for Rachel Huebel's birthday, I made her pancakes after we finished wrangling children at church. We've had a great deal of success in our pancake adventures of late: cinnamon and Clif Bar pancakes, walnut and toffee pancakes, Reese's peanut butter cup pancakes, and so far her personal favorite strawberry and chocolate chip pancakes.
I had the idea to take one of her other favorite foods and mix it into pancakes. Rachel loves cheesecake, so I took a recipe of healthy cheesecake that I found from Fuel the Fighter and folded that into the pancake batter.
Marketing genius Seth Godin warns business owners and marketers about making meatball sundaes. That is, a lot of time, we'll take two things that we really like and mix them together and end up with something that is completely inedible. This certainly had meatball sundae potential.
Pancake batter on the left, cheesecake on the right.
Two pancakes, wondering how they'd taste.
So they kinda turned out more like crepes than pancakes
Rachel, posing happily as requested
Me enjoying the results of the experiment. As we ate the pancakes, each bite was an experience. Some started out tasting like uncooked pancake with a little cream cheese to only a few chews later tasting like peanut butter cup. While I certainly would not be able to defeat the Iron Chef with my cheesecake pancakes, It was the most fun I've had cooking in a long time. I haven't made a cheesecake from scratch in over 11 years. These didn't quite have the fluffiness of pancakes, nor the creaminess of cheesecake. But it was a fun experiment.
The cheesecake pancakes didn't quite turn out like I thought they would. The same can be said of my life.
I was hoping to take that "next step" with my life and start on masters, but instead have stepped into a limbo wide and broad, a limbo I thought I left four years ago. I went from making $20 an hour to $8 an hour, by no fault of my own. To say it's caused me to readjust my budget a bit is an understatement.
Rachel finished college a semester early and is entering into the same post-college/pre-career limbo that I have been drifting in and out of. She's weighing choices, completing applications, scheduling interviews, and all that crap that I hated and still hate to this day.
We spend far too much time wondering if we're making the right decisions, and end up too afraid to do anything. Tim Keller once said, if we knew the entire consequences of our actions, we'd just lie on the couch all day. Free will is the most crushing burden we could ever have. Keller went onto illustrate with his own life. If not for one door left three inches a jar in the Watergate Hotel, the circumstances would not have unfolded for him to eventually plant Redeemer, a church of 5000 in New York.
I considered a culinary career once. The circumstances did not unfold that would have allowed me to go that route. Based on tonight's culinary experiment, that's likely for the best. And honestly, I'm grateful that I live in a country with enough food that I am able to experiment and I don't have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. And even though last year didn't turn out the way I hoped it would with me going back to school, that opened up an opportunity to deepen a long running friendship that is blossoming into something that will be truly beautiful.
With the freedom and opportunities that we have, experiment. Explore. Challenge yourself. Move. Dance. Get off the sidelines. Fight. Dare. Dream. Create.
Even though tonight's culinary adventure didn't turn out the way I expected, it was okay. They were still pretty tasty, really filling, and I got to celebrate another year with someone special. It was a learning experience and that alone was worth it.
