Absolute crêpe
THIS WEEK: Pancake Day Special
THING: Pancake Day
I know it’s tomorrow, but I just wanted to be the first to say:
For Britain’s supermarkets, Pancake Day - otherwise known as Shrove Tuesday, otherwise known as a shit boring Tuesday in mid-February - is their best chance all year to turn milk, eggs and plain white flour into sexy must-have items.
Oh, they might not look very impressive now, but by 6pm on Tuesday you’ll be ready to sell a kidney for a pint of semi-skimmed and an enormous, smooth, Jupiter-sized lemon. Nutella will be sold on the black market for £60 a jar, and you’ll have to text a guy called Psychedelic Ray to deliver 50gs of Silver Spoon to you on a Lime bike. So for the love of God, do what Aldi tells you and:
How do we get Pancake Day ready though? Are any of us truly ready to spend our precious free time working as an untrained short order cook for a bunch of feral family members, all of whom want different toppings and have different dietary requirements?
Well, first, we’ll need some kit that we’ll use once and then put in the charity shop. Pancake Day is a wonderful way to sell people a HexClad Ultra Steel Responsive Intelligent Sex Pan for £79.99, but let’s just assume we’ve got a cooker and a frying pan as standard, and move onto the real essentials. Tesco is way ahead of the game here with this baffling Tefal pancake shaker, which is a plastic cup with lots of random drawings on it.
Of course, if you can’t be bothered putting the eggs and the oil into the cow and the wheat to make infinity pancakes minus 8, you could just buy some ready-made pancake mix. After all, food is fast becoming nothing more than optimised gym fuel to facilitate long healthy lives of logging into the Microsoft Authenticator and watching your favourite places get knocked down and turned into anodyne student accommodation. So why not go mad and eat two small discs of high protein joylessness?
Surely M&S has some pancake joy for us, though. Percy Pig’s Pink Pancakes, perhaps? Colin the Caterpillar Pistachio Katsu Pancake Medallions? Seamoss and Marmite Pancake Sandos with Parmesan Honey Crumble? Joan Collins wrapped in a giant pancake with a red rose in her teeth?
Oh.
Okay, we’ll just have to concentrate on smothering them with loads of delicious, indulgent toppings instead. Like this stuff from Asda which looks like an unholy mix of Sandwich Spread, tartare sauce and… something else.
Or maybe a bottle of Elphaba’s phlegm, available from B&M, which for some reason looks even bigger than that lemon.
It’s no good, though. I’ve looked at all the Pancake Day offerings and I still don’t feel Pancake Day ready at all. In fact, I feel so overwhelmed that I just want to lie down under my pancake blanket and read a book with no words in it.
And after that, maybe I’ll have a nice cup of tea.
Actually, I’ll just have a glass of water.
VERDICT: Tossers
You can smell the clutching at straws desperation from retailers as they try to MILK every feeble event on the calendar. I've just received a press release from some pet nourishment company with a pancake recipe for dogs - 'so they don't feel left out.' WOULD they feel left out?
Pancakes pshaw. I'll be on the wine. If the rest of the family want a punt at them, good luck