No yolking matter

If you can’t make a pancake without breaking eggs, Paul Carter is going to have to go without

The reason being, today is Pancake Day. Which I hate. All over the country, people are stood in their immaculate kitchens laughing and flinging batter around with gay abandon, while little old me has to make do with sitting in front of the telly with only a TV dinner for company, watching David Attenborough worrying a newt.

How can anyone hate Pancake Day, I hear you ask? All that sugar and lemon juice. It’s great fun!

Actually, you’re wrong. It’s rubbish. I detest pancakes mainly because of their main ingredient. Eggs. My culinary nemesis.

You see, to me, eggs are the food equivalent of a flight of wet steps and no lift. I can’t get in. I can’t break them. Well of course I can break them, I just can’t break them in the right way. There’s no separating egg whites or yolk beating going on in my kitchen.

(Actually, there’s not much of anything that goes on in my kitchen but I’m trying to sound all helpless and vulnerable: Valentine’s Day is just around the corner.)

I’ve always known that I’ve not been able to use eggs, but my voracious contempt for them and Pancake Day stems, like many of my life’s most crushingly humiliating moments, from my time as a student.

One year, I tried valiantly to make pancakes for my flatmates. Nice gesture, huh? I thought so too until I managed to end up with egg all over my face.

Literally. Everywhere. Even in my eye.

You see, with a degree of quite staggering idiocy from someone allegedly among the country’s educational élite (Get me! Hah!), I decided to try using my nose as a hinge. Yes, yes, I know, but you live and learn.

Once you’ve suffered the ignominy of picking eggshell out of your eyelashes, you lose a bit of affection for eggs.

But back to the pancakes. Now, as far as I’m concerned, if you’re going to have a day dedicated to a food, at least make it a good one. Like a full English, or steak and chips.

And while we’re at it, can we have a dish that doesn’t involve throwing it into the air while cooking it. What’s that all about?

Firstly, its main ingredient comes in its own impregnable packaging and then when/if you manage to get it out, to cook it in the “traditional” manner, you need to have enough manual dexterity and disregard for human safety to flail around with a searing hot pan, tossing scalding fat around; it’s madness. I haven’t chucked food across the kitchen again since the eggshell incident.

Maybe the EHRC can look into bringing an action against pancakes. They must breach the DDA in some respect. Ridiculous food.

I think it’s time we campaign for a far more accessible national food day. Preferably one involving things I can microwave. Speaking of which, all this talk of food has made me hungry. Now where did I leave that chicken tikka massala…?