Sarah Nigbor

I have pancakes on the brain for many reasons. No. 1, it’s pancake breakfast season. The Prescott Fire Department’s world-famous pancakes truly are unforgettable. Make sure you stop into the Prescott Fire Hall if you can. My daughter will be working at our church’s Palm Sunday pancake breakfast with her Confirmation classmates this coming Sunday at Ezekiel in River Falls. And Dave Wood’s column this week tells us a tale about his mother’s April Fool’s pancakes.

And when I think of pancakes, I think of the old South Fork Café in River Falls, where I worked as a dishwasher during high school/college. The cooks would mix bucket after bucket of pancake batter on the weekends, and I would wheel cart after cart stacked with syrupy, sticky plates back to my dish station. I wonder how many plates I washed during my career there. Granted, I sprayed them off and ran the racks through the dishwasher, but it was still a lot of work. I took great pride in keeping up with busy rush, with plates seemingly disappearing from the shelves the minute I stacked the clean ones. Same with glasses and coffee cups. As I carried towers of glasses out front to the waitresses, regular customer Francis Johnson was more often than not parked at the counter with a newspaper. He often commented on how many glasses I was carrying and wondered how I didn’t drop them all. Dropping them wasn’t something I was about to do, since then I’d have to wash them all again.

Doing the dishes was a chore I didn’t mind. Growing up, it was expected that I would dry the dishes each night after supper while Grandma washed them. I was forbidden to leave the house until those dishes were dry and put away, much to my chagrin on warm summer nights. Didn’t Grandma understand that Meghan and I had bikes to ride and creeks to swim in? I tried to make a game of it by making sure I had no more than three dishes in the dish drainer at a time, racing Grandma as she efficiently washed. Sometimes she won, sometimes I did. The dishes always got done.

When I worked at South Fork, the dreaded part of the supper shift was tearing down the steam table and washing all the pots and pans. Brown gravy, sausage gravy and soups were kept warm in those blasted pots all day, and as they were emptied, the residue left behind hardened into a tough mess to scrub clean. There wasn’t time to soak the pans for long as everyone wanted to get their cleaning done and go home, so I tackled those things with a vengeance with steel wool and stubborn determination. My teenage heart swelled with pride when a gruff cook told me I was their fastest dishwasher.

I don’t consider myself a chef by any means, but South Fork was where I learned to cook. I started by chopping and dicing onions, peppers and tomatoes and eventually learned my way around the line. The cooks taught me how to beer batter cheese curds and fish, how to poach and fry eggs and how to make omelets. To this day, I am the expert wrap/burrito roller in my house and no matter how often I try to teach Hubby and the kids, they just can’t get it. We baked pies and cinnamon rolls and in between my carts of dishes, I helped prep for the lunch crowd. I didn’t know it at the time, but those were the good old days.

So whenever I think about pancakes, I’m automatically drawn back in time to my years at The Fork. It’s where I learned that each job deserves your best, whether you’re a dishwasher or a CEO. I think I’d rather be a dishwasher.