It's About Flippin' Time

It's a hard life in Paradise, my dears - my dim but well-meaning Merrrikan friend is futzing around (really most annoying of her) preparing to make something called "Mac Pancakes." This has something to do with a gentleman named Macadam or somesuch, but what a maker of road building materials hs to do with cooking I don't know.

The previous evening's meal was even more dubious - the gentlemen in the party eventually produced all the necessary combustibles to produce fire (after some discussion and fingerpointing about just who was responsible for reemembering to tell the men that the grille thingy required charcoal bricks and not a "whoosh" of natural gas} ((yes, it was my dear dim friend who forgot to mention this important fact at the time we were all at the local chandler's shoppe)). After triumphantly producing fire, and drinking some wine, eventually some rather delicious onion burgers were created, but all the participants absolutely refused to wash dishes aferwards owing to the fact that they had suffered mightily in standing around on rough ground getting choked by smoke and cooking by flashlight. So my dim friend did penance - and the dishes.

We are currently in a small village that follows the old Hawaii ways, but with some new twists - for example, on our first night here, we went to one of two (2) eateries that were reliably supposed to be open for business - one of them being an extremely pricy and exclusive hotel, and one of them a simple take-away window attached to a not-very-good second restaurant that's only fully open 4 days a week. This take-away window offered our best option, if we didn't want to get all smarted up to go to the toff spot. So there was a certain amount of whipping-in done at about 6:30pm, as the proprietor of our inn had mentioned that the take-away window closed at 7pm sharp.

After some dithering, we all made our way to the take-away place at a few minutes to 7 o'clock. We placed orders, but there was some confusion about just what we were getting, so my dear Mr Blubridge got back in line after realizing that he had just ordered a very small bowl of soup (he was expecting something more like the locals eat, a "plate lunch" which includes extra scoops of exotic foods such as rice and macarone en salade (I find it most intriguing that many foods in the States, or at least in old Mowee, are served by the scoop).

Alas, poor Mr Blubridge was denied - he was second in line when the tutu (an august personage approximately like an auntie, but with more personal mana, closed up the shutters with a "slap-bang and away you go!" leaving several hungry people in line and several more just arriving with desperate hope in their eyes that they had made it to the take-away in time. Many were sent away unfed, very much NOT like the multitudes after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, as we heard in the lovely island service I attended last Sunday.

Fortunately, the rest of us had ordered a bit more food than we could eat, so there was plenty to share around. Unfortunately, the soup was vile, the chicken was a leathery little beast, the rice was quite, quite gummy, and the macarone en salade was chalky. The soup was much improved with the addition of a little hot water (really, I've tasted seawater - quite recently - that was less salty ).

It appears that my dim friend is actually about to start cooking brekkers (about flippin' time - pardon! A most apropos commentary on the tardiness of pancakery, however) so I shall sign off for now, my dears, and supervise the flippantry.