My father loved buttermilk. Unfortunately my mother did not. This meant that my father didn’t get buttermilk very often because my mother just didn’t purchase many things that she didn’t like, even if someone else did. She was in charge of the kitchen, the shopping and the cooking and there just wasn’t room in her cart for things she wasn’t going to consume. Fish, liver, brussel sprouts, mushrooms – none of these ever saw the inside of our fridge.
So my father would often order buttermilk when we ate out. This got troublesome occasionally. At Perkins in particular, he always asked for buttermilk and was always told they didn’t have it. He would immediately point out the buttermilk pancakes on the menu and ask for buttermilk again. It didn’t matter that every single time the waitstaff explained that the pancake mix already had the buttermilk in it, he just couldn’t understand how you could have buttermilk pancakes but not have buttermilk.
I was thinking about this a few days ago. I had a morning appointment up in Robbinsdale and the doctor agreed to an 8 a.m. time slot even though the office didn’t normally start taking appointments until 8:30. To thank her, I stopped at a bakery/coffee shop up the street from the office to pick up coffee for both of us (and a doughnut for myself, who are we kidding). It was quiet in the bakery; I was the only customer. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see the cream/sugar nook so I asked the guy behind the counter. He pointed out a table in a corner but then said “but we don’t have sugar”.
I was sure I had heard him wrong so I said “you don’t have sugar?”. Nope, they had sweetners, but no sugar. I started to suggest that you can’t have 20 kinds of doughnuts and pastries along with cookies and cakes and not have sugar but then I remembered my dad always haranguing waitstaff about buttermilk and I decided to zip my lip. But five days later, I’m still wondering about it. No sugar in a bakery?
Any little mysteries bugging you this week?
Trail Baboon 