This has never happened before. Its been three months and this will be the first time I will be posting on the blog! Work, Instagram, and life has just been crazy. Both happy and hectic events have taken place but really its been mostly happy busy times. I’ll be resuming my highs and lows blog entries moving forward but this dutch baby needed a special entry since its the first time I ever used a cast iron pan (courtesy of pots and pans) and because this recipe has been a very long time in the making! So let’s get started.

The lockdown has been a weird time— one filled with loneliness, anxiety, and a lot of self-introspection. It has also been a time of some very unique challenges that resulted in doing things against the grain. Some that come to mind has been the sudden increase in people’s intent to cook, the meteoric rise in small businesses, and the ever-increasing demand and acceptance of content made with low production value in lieu of high quality messaging. All of these seem a little vague but I’m just going to leave these thoughts in your head and hopefully use these as talking points for future blog entries haha.

This is, however, a not so clean segue into a conversation I do want to have— the idea of doing things in a way that may not seem normative but is in fact the best way to achieve your goals. Essentially doing things against what you are taught or told to achieve a result that is in fact better or at least the same in the long run. Recently something happened at home that kind of went this way. This year, I finally made some commercials with this blog. With the huge demand for content, I somehow got commissioned to do a lot more work. This meant that I actually had some savings that I really wanted to invest as soon as possible. I involved my parents in this conversation who in turn sought the help of a family financial planner. As the planner came home, his first question to me was, “Do you see yourself studying further this year,” I was sitting with dad across from me and almost instinctively I looked at him and through our gestures, I realised that for the first time since my return from college we were finally on the same page— “no.” I felt this sigh of relief. As if for the first time, I not only felt in control of my decision but I also had the backing of the household. Now, don’t get me wrong my family has been nothing but supportive of my decision to work on the blog which I am genuinely grateful for. What the lockdown changed was that it truly defined what content creators actually do and it brought in numbers that verified the time and effort I spent on my craft. The “no” doesn’t mean that I don’t want to pursue higher education. It merely means that for now, I want to ride the wave. Build a community, make more of what I love, and most importantly drive decisions that stem from my needs and skillsets and not one that needs to come through from the mandate of the normative.

That no was powerful. It built some autonomy and grounded my own belief in myself and the work I do. It also meant that there was some more added pressure. The cushion of what I can do with my life was getting less wide and getting deeper and heavier into the skill sets that I am working on day in and day out. But such is life. If you can’t gamble on yourself, there is nothing else that is ever going to be worth gambling for. That “no” was special to me. It was quick but difficult to verbalise. It was short but impactful. It was the right decision and it has pushed me to work on what I love for years to come.

A dutch baby is nothing but a pancake. However, it’s a true rebel. It breaks the normative steps you take to make a pancake. Every step of the way, the process seems more and more improbable of a successful ending but the end result leaves you more satisfied than you really thought you would. A normative, boring old pancake begins with batter whipped up in a bowl and then placed in a non-stick pan on medium heat. A Dutch baby on the other hand is whipped up in a blender with all of its ingredients just dumped in. This is followed by a transfer to a cast iron or stainless steel pan (such pans that rarely come out of a cook without some food stuck to them) and then a quick bake in a 220-degree oven for that explosive cloud of crust that looks like a freeze-frame shot from the nuclear mushroom cloud. This is all to say that sometimes, it helps to beat the norm— both in life in food (though the food will always be tastier haha).

Glimpses from the week

Ingredients

4 eggs

1/2 cup of flour

1/2 cup of milk

1 Tablespoon of sugar

4 tablespoons of butter

And a pinch of nutmeg

Method

1. Preheat oven to 220 degrees celsius

2. Combine eggs, flour, milk, sugar and nutmeg in a blender jar and blend until smooth. Batter may also be mixed by hand.

3. Place butter in a heavy 10-inch skillet or baking dish and place in the oven. As soon as the butter has melted (watch it so it does not burn) add the batter to the pan, return pan to the oven and bake for 20 minutes, until the pancake is puffed and golden. Lower oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake five minutes longer.

4. Remove pancake from oven, cut into wedges and serve at once topped with syrup, preserves, confectioners' sugar or macerated strawberries.