Crying over spilled (or curdled) milk

Don't you just hate it when you have a vision of how you think things should turn out and then one thing goes awry sending everything else on a wayward path? 

Many days, when things aren’t going how I envisioned, I find myself shutting down and failing to see how miniscule (and ultimately unimportant) my plan was.  Usually, my optimistic husband finds himself working very hard to buoy my spirits and within a short period of time I am completely embarrassed by my immature behavior.  I realize that I am in fact acting like a child having a tantrum.  What’s worse is that I believe that God has plans for me … I get even more embarrassed by thinking about how He must see me, having an internal tantrum when perhaps He’s protecting me from something or trying to teach me a valuable life lesson or just teaching me something about myself.  I am s-l-o-w-l-y coming to realize that even at my worst, He still sees me as His beloved child.

I had a vision yesterday… I was going to make Maui pancakes (I know … this is a pretty small vision).  We'd stopped at our fruit stand the day before and bought my favorite combination of fruit (pineapple, strawberries and bananas).  Afterwards, I suddenly envisioned the unbelievably delicious pancakes that I had eaten near a beautiful bay in Maui six years ago.  It is strange to me that although I’ve thought about those pancakes and the gorgeous setting many times, I’ve never tried to re-create them.

Yesterday was the day.  Jason rode his bike to the market and got some whipping cream while I made the batter, chopped nuts and cut up pineapple and bananas.  As I remember them, the “real” ones (from The Gazebo at Napili Bay in Maui) are pancakes with macadamia nuts in them topped generously with a concoction of whipped cream, pineapple and bananas.  I was substituting with walnuts, but thought I could get close to a decent recreation.

We don’t have any kind of electric mixer and I have whipped cream by hand with a whisk twice while we’ve been here – it is not an easy task.  For some reason today I wondered if it could be shaken in a container instead and I set Jason onto that task.  Everything was coming along perfectly… but when we pulled the shaken cream back out of the fridge to mix in the pineapple and bananas, Jason says ‘huh, it seems more watery.’ I look at it and it had curdled!  I had no idea how that happened or why?

Normally, this would be my giving-up stage … thankfully there were pancakes still on the stove that needed flipping which gave me a moment to figure out a different vision.  Walnut pancakes topped with bananas and cinnamon sugar (minus the embarrassment of a meltdown).  Not what I envisioned, but still delicious :).

… after a bit research, it seems we let our cream get too warm and may have over-shaken it – better luck next time I hope!