Back in the day when I was a little tot, my favorite mealtime was breakfast. My favorite food was (and still is) pancakes. Plain, blueberry, ice-creamed, or chocolate chip, I liked them all. I remember my family would take occasional trips to IHOP for breakfast and dinner. The first things I always looked for on the menu were the pancakes with steaming eggs, perfectly seasoned with salt and pepper, the warm, freshly cooked bacon, and most importantly, those deliciously fluffy, mouthwatering, mind-melting chocolate chip pancakes.  

I remember before we even left the house, I’d know exactly what I wanted.  All that was on my mind was getting there, sitting down, and stabbing a huge stack of pancakes with my silver trident. Sometimes, I thought that forks were jealous they couldn’t eat it, poor things. I would sometimes daydream about being able to venture into a land full of pancakes. I imagined seasoning my eggs off in the Eggland Mountains. Savoring each bite of the smoky, succulent Baconache Canyon. I was even drinking syrup from the Sappy Falls and various lakes and rivers around the realm. Then I would drizzle that syrup on my fresh plate of chocolate chip pancakes. 

Each bite felt like an ocean of sweet ecstasy in my mouth; truly epicurean. All I could do was just very because of how good it tasted in my mouth. But then, I knew it was time to snap back to reality. Back to where I'm sitting with my family, waiting for my plate of chocolate chip pancakes. 

Even though we stopped going to IHOP years ago, I will never forget the amazing times I had there when I was a little boy. Over the years, my endearment towards chocolate chip pancakes waned. I now just prefer plain homemade pancakes drizzled with some maple syrup and butter. Even now pancakes are one of my favorite foods of all time (with pasta (red or white sauce) being in the #1 spot) and I plan to keep eating it for the rest of my life. Before I end this, I invented a quote: “Pancakes are love. Pancakes are life.”