It was another great year for pancakes at the Airport. A lot of people made it a success. Ed, Dan, Jen, Julie, Eva Marie, Suzizzle (on her birthday, no less) Doodlebug, Brian and several others that jumped right in to do whatever needed to be done. Thanks to you all.

We don't have an exact count of breakfasts served, but judging by the quantity of fixin's we went through, I am guessing it was close to 400.

For those that didn't notice, the State of Nevada had their health inspectors on site and we were inspected. He only had a couple of things to mention. The first was that I had negleted to 'prominently display ' the health permit. I had it with me and took care of that. The other thing was that the paper towels for the hand washing station were moved to the cooking table. Again, an easy on-the-spot correction. These and a few other things will be easy to correct ahead of time next year.

Thinking of next year, a couple of us went out to check out some of the other pancake breakfast operations on the playa to see how they are doing things. The Pancake Playhouse has been doing this thing for a long time on a larger scale than ours and have things down to a nice system. The first thing I noticed was that they were mixing their batter in 5-gallon buckets and then filling several pitchers at a time. They were cooking on griddles set on 2-burner stoves, pretty much like we had. Instead of cooking oil, they were using Pam spray, which seemed to be faster, easier and probably more effective. None of the other pancake operations we saw were using margerine and I am thinking that we won't bother with it next year. It is the only ingredient we had that needed to be kept in coolers with ice, starting with when I left Seattle on the Friday before. Squeeze bottle Parkay may be just too much of a luxury to deal with in the future.

All but one of the other pancake places we saw expected folks to bring their own plates, cups and utensils in the interest of reducing garbage and waste, not to mention the cost of putting it on. That one was serving their pancakes on 'souvenir' BM06 frisbees, so they weren't really contributing to waste either (I brought mine home with me).

I'd like to hear any comments, suggestions of observations about our breakfast this year. If we capture them now , before all the dust gets washed off, we can be sure to make FFIII even better.

Jhim