Anger Burger

Man, I have hashed this over in my head so many times I feel like I’m breaking up with the damn cup.  How do I say this?  Am I making a mistake?  Am I actually an asshole like everyone keeps telling me I am?  Can I even find a better cup?

First, the beginning: on various blogs around the web I’d read about the Keep Cup, an Australian company with a plastic – yes, plastic – travel cup.  No gimmicks, other than a claim at environmentalism (which in turn is just: use our cup instead of disposable ones).  But it hooked me:

1. It comes in an 8oz size
2. It does not have a handle
3. It has a sippy cup lid that appears to actually work.

I hate travel mugs, and having been a barista for nearly a decade, I’ve handled pretty much all of them.  I can taste metal.  The drink holes are messy.  They don’t break apart in enough pieces to thoroughly clean.  They’re all too big.  You get the idea.  And here was the Keep Cup, which, despite sounding like a retrograde feminine product, was sitting there quietly defying every single hate-point I have for travel mugs.

The only problem is that they aren’t sold in the US.

I think to myself, big deal, I’ll order one.  I send and receive international packages semi-regularly, and mail from New Zealand takes about five days.  I gulped and re-thought the whole thing when I saw that shipping was going to be the same price as the cup itself (about $10), but I forged ahead.

Now we are to the part where I am not sure what to say.  You see, nothing wrong happened, exactly, but I just… I guess I got rubbed the wrong way by the company.  I’m not sure how else to explain it.  First, an email went totally unanswered.  I tried again a week later and got a rather flustered email back about how busy the company was.  Then, three weeks later when the cup had still not arrived, I sent another email and was told they’d do tracking on it for me and get back ASAP.  Which I guess stands for something else in Australia, because no one got back to me.  A month after my order, the package arrived and looked like it’d been carried on a raft at sea after a long donkey ride through the desert.

Which, okay, whatever.  Shipping is a game of dice, especially international shipping.  And the cup arrived, and all is well, so what do I have to complain about?  Nothing, really, except for that feeling where you have to work really hard to give someone else your money, which is a feeling I dislike greatly.

I had planned to take photos of the cup and out about, a kind of documentaire vérité of the cup doin’ its business, but the truth is that I’ve forgotten to take a photo of it in use for two months now, and the cup and I are still a little frosty toward each other.  It works fine.  It’s great, in fact.  To someone who doesn’t value physical lightness the cup might seem cheap, but this is a positive for me.  It’s plastic.  For once, something isn’t overbuilt into absurdity (see also: toothbrushes).  The whole lid pops apart for cleaning.  The silicone band is grippy and insulates fingers from heat.  On the same subject, the plastic doesn’t insulate nearly as well as one of those steel monstrosity travel mugs you can give a concussion with, but again, for me it works.  The simple summary is: if other mugs are Hummers, the Keep Cup is a Prius¹.

I sincerely recommend this cup to you, provided you’re anything like me.  I guess my reservation is: be prepared for a difficult birth, but the baby will be great.  And let’s hope Keep Cup can find an American distributor.

¹Which is also to say: in a streetfight I’d much rather be the person with the insulated, 20-ounce. stainless steel travel mug, but I’ve come to accept I am not a predator in my species.

***I tried to work some comment about iPads and Keep Cups into this post, but I’m just failing today.  Maybe you guys can help me out.

I hope.

Please, please ignore the grout.  I’ve bleached it so much I burned my nose.

Like a lot of cooks, my mom and I have holy grails.  We occasionally reach them, and this is why we keep cooking rather than break down into lurid CMYK Hamburger Helper purgatory.  One of my mom’s big ones was one-at-a-time pancakes and I remember the day she called me, voice raised in gloating victory.  I’VE DONE IT.  I’VE FINALLY DONE IT.

I wooed a boy with the promise of banana pancakes.  True!

Store-bought pancake mix, for being so simple, is alarmingly disappointing.  And really, pancake mix is basically just flour and leavening agents — your inability to do this yourself marks you as a noob more than your Mario Batali cookware¹ does.  Sorry, betty.  Get used to it.

Chocolate-bar  pancake for me.  It was that kind of day.

Originally the pancakes were for camping, when the ability to mix just two individual pancakes for her and her husband was the difference between making them and skipping them in favor of something less wasteful.  After the great formulation she realized she could be making herself a single pancake for breakfast at home as well.  But that is neither here nor there.  The point is this: with the dry parts mixed and stored away and a jar of the wet mix kept in the fridge, a single pancake is only a small bowl, a spoon and a hot skillet away.

Again with the grout.

So what’s with the forgiveness part?  Well.  Let me tell you.  I didn’t exactly ask my mom if I could share her master pancake recipe with you guys, but I’m sure she’d say yes.  I mean, it’s you guys.  We love you guys.

Starr’s Pancakes
a single pancake is simply 1/4 C. of dry mix with as much wet mix as needed to make it thick but still barely pourable, about three spoonfuls or something, it depends on your buttermilk.  and the buttermilk is crucial, in my opinion, don’t substitute it with plain milk or something else.  vegans have their own blogs, go find them.

dry mix
2 1/2 cups flour
2 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. salt

wet mix
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
2 Tbsp. melted butter.

• There’s really not a lot I can teach you if you don’t know how to make pancakes.

• Also, the wet stuff keeps for a little over a week in my observation, depending on how sterile your container is.

• I also replace the butter with flax oil and add maybe 1/4 cup of ground flax seeds to the dry mix, but that’s only for people who are obsessed with their brains being lubed with enough Omega-3 fatty acids.

• You might also notice there is no sugar in the mix.  This is intentional, and a reminder to soak the cooked pancake with so much maple syrup that it drips all over your shirt.

• I almost forgot! Don’t mix the wet and dry together until just before cooking — the baking soda reacts with the acid in the buttermilk and poofs it up really quickly, which is in large part what makes fluffy, lovely pancakes.

¹I actually own a Mario Batali spatula that I hate and should just give to a bum and get  over it.  Whenever it gets warm, it curls.  True story!