Last week after my first ever Shamrock Shake, my buddies and I passed an IHOP with a sign that read "never-ending BM pancakes." Now I don't know about you, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see the letters "BM" is bowel movement. Just what in the Hell IHOP meant sadly eluded me until my friend texted me "BM=Buttermilk" the following day. It was so obvious and yet, without his message, I probably would not have figured it out, all the more because I like the way it sounds my way.
I remember quite well the first and last time I stepped to IHOP's never-ending pancake deal. Some friends had come up to visit me at school during my sophomore year of college and somewhere around eleven at night we decided it would be a good idea to see how many pancakes we could handle. We nearly hit a roadblock since not all IHOP's are twenty-four hours, including our first stop. None of us knew where a twenty-four hour IHOP might be as we were in foreign territories of Connecticut, but luckily the cook leaving his shift at that IHOP was on his way to another shift at a twenty-four hour joint. Not only did he lead the way and have us follow him, he also got us a huge discount on our check. The real beauty there is that you get to leave an extra generous tip, which is what really matters.
So there we were, sitting down to our $2.99 never-ending pancakes and, yes, that was the real cost...2003 was clutch like that. Now, with competitive eating there are a few factors that are always essential for me: 1) eat quickly before your stomach can tell you it is full; 2) be hungry but not starving as you otherwise fill up too fast; 3) variety; too much of any one thing without variety can be difficult to manage. Pancakes are brought out in stacks of three, so in order to satisfy the first criteria, you have to order the next stack pretty much immediately upon working on the previous. When I eat pancakes, I also cut up every single piece before my first bite. This might slow me at first, but greatly increases my pace thereafter.
The second criteria was fairly well satisfied, but with the third I was going to encounter problems as all I was eating was pancakes. Now here is where I may have slipped up, attempting to switch syrup flavors in an effort to interest my palate with variety. As sweet as syrup already is, I found all of the flavors other than original far too sweet and otherwise revolting. I quickly changed back, but the damage may or may not have been done.
Now, out of curiosity I had weighed myself before the pancake effort, a healthy 158 pounds. Thirteen pancakes later I had ballooned to 163, admitting of course that some of that was probably water weight and pancakes can be spongy. Still, I considered it a rather unprecedented turnaround when I awoke at around ten in the AM and managed to produce a BM that put me right back down to 158 pounds. The manner in which my mind typically operates, coupled with this strong pancake dump memory clearly influenced my reading of that IHOP sign but can you honestly say "buttermilk" is what comes to mind when you see BM?
In light of the fact that pancakes tend to make me really sleepy and put me into a short-term diabetic coma, and prompt me to utter statements like, "I'm never eating pancakes again," I think I'd like to take one more shot and see if I can't break into the upper teens (say seventeen) pancakes. Probably silly, but then so is the Cy Young Award winner only signing to a $650,000 contract...
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