The Debut of the Pancake Merienda

One of the things I am looking forward to the most this summer is that I will finally show my mother in law that I can (sort of) cook.  Or at least make pancakes.

My mother-in-law's delicious paella

My mother in law is truly one of the best cooks in Spain, and most what I know of Spanish cuisine was learned at her dining room table, eating her artfully prepared meals.  She has been cooking for her family since she was a very young girl and keeps her recipes entirely in her head.  Cocido, chuletas de cordero, lentejas, and albondigas –all the staples of the Spanish cuisine she prepares have become comfort food to me.

During my very first trip to Spain in 1994, my future mother in law asked me to show her how to make pancakes.  I had to admit that I had no clue how to make them – or any other American meal for that matter.  For all those years of living at home and then in my college dorm and sorority house, the cooking had been done for me, and I never had a reason to learn.  So I was kind of embarrassed to admit that with all my schooling, I couldn’t make a simple pancake.

I’ll be honest - seventeen years later, I still don’t cook very much (or very well), but I am proud to report that through a lot of trial and error, I have finally learned to make a decent pancake thanks to a recipe snipped from a magazine in 2004.  Even though Spanish food is the center of our daily diet (Pedro does most of the cooking, using variations of his mom’s recipes), my orange pancakes are the center of our snowy weekend mornings.  And now I feel I am finally ready to cook the pancakes my mother in law requested all those years ago.



Can these pancakes stack up to my mother-in-law's cooking?



So one afternoon this June, I plan on establishing a new tradition and making the entire family my pancakes for the traditional afternoon snack – “la merienda”.  It will be the first of what I hope will become Marianne’s annual “pancake merienda.”   I envision being in my mother in law’s kitchen, cranking out batch after batch of pancakes for a loud, happy crowd in the dining room, just as my mother in law has cooked for her family – and myself - for so many years.

I still can’t cook…. but I can do a pancake merienda.  I hope Mamá enjoys it.

La Primavera in the Sierra Nevada

Pedro and I under the Spanish flag in 1994.

It is now springtime in the Sierra Nevada and that can only mean two things:  First, it is really still winter here in Reno (we had snowfall this past week), and second, Marianne and Pedro are preparing for their summertime trips to Spain. 

I married my Spanish husband, Pedro, in 1995. From that point on, my life took on a decidedly different tone:  over time, my conversation has become punctuated with “palabras y frases españolas”; I no longer have dinner at 6pm - I have “merienda” or “meriendita”;  I eat my main meal at lunch (which explains to some of you how I can chow down a monstrous sandwich over the course of a lunch hour);  Cola Cao has become a staple in our kitchen cupboard, along with olive oil and saffron, and afternoon siestas have taken on a defining role in my daily life.  And summertime trips to Spain are the norm.

 In those 16 years, I have gone from an American sorority girl to a “chica” living on the bridge between the American way of life and the Spanish way of life, which can be a pretty tricky thing to navigate at times. For the most part, the two cultures are at odds with each other: one focused on living to work and the other on working to live; one focused on doing and accomplishment, the other on spending time with family and friends; one so focused on acquiring money and possessions and the other, well let’s just say that most Spanish people are happy having enough to live on and taking a nice beach vacation every summer… and have no desire to attain much more than that. Except maybe more vacation time.  

For the most part, Pedro and I have managed to take our opposite cultural values and fuse a life together, taking the best of both cultures and blending them into the compromise of everyday life. Now that we have mastered this existence, we talk about moving to Spain permanently and starting over again - which might be out of necessity - but mostly out of the desire to grow old together in Spain, where seniors lead vibrant lives, playing prominent roles in their families and in their communities.

That, however, is a few years down the road.

But for now, it is springtime in the Sierra.  We have bought our tickets for this year’s trip, and I now anticipate the day in June when I can abandon my workaday American life and for at least a month, exchange it for the Spanish life…if only for the time being.