Leah Kugler! Deena fired back. Have you ever seen anything so ugly in your life?

It’s easy to say you’ll wake up ten minutes early tomorrow, but when morning comes… Argh. It’s not easy at all. BUT. If you do it — if you manage to part from your pillow when your alarm clock rings — MAKE THESE PANCAKES.

I got this inspo from a picture book I was reading with my kids, where the mom made these amazing-looking pancakes, you know, dripping-molasses-topped-with-blueberries type. (Obviously from a mother who never raises her voice and picks veggies from her garden, which her kids happily eat.)

I decided to turn fantasy into reality. After playing around with ingredients, I finally got this recipe right.

Wake up early. Make them. Serve them. Then go plant tomatoes.

Perfect Pancake Pileup

Deena saved the post to HootSuite and exited the program. She was working backward. She’d tried the recipe only once, and she still hadn’t gotten it right. But she would, sometime that week, and her kids would eat pancakes. Writing these blurbs was somehow a bigger pressure than cooking, so she was glad to have it out of the way.

Deena had 15 browser tabs open: two shopping sites, some feeds she wanted to catch up on, one secret frenemy’s blog. But really, she was working, checking out the latest party photos, hoping to come up with ideas for the Frydman bas mitzvah party that was happening a week after Pesach. She should probably do some laundry first, but also probably not. Work came before laundry, didn’t it?

When she finally tore herself away to throw in a load, her phone rang.

“Hey, Shaina, how are you?”

The pause before her sister-in-law’s response gave Deena the creeps.

“Baruch Hashem. You?”

“I’m good.”

Again that pause. Deena stuffed laundry into the washing machine. “What’s up?” she asked cautiously.

“Nothing, nothing.”

“…Except?”

Shaina sighed loudly. “Your story... for The Top Rack...”

Deena mustered her greatest acting prowess. “You saw it? Cool, no? It was a tough one, but thank G-d it came out really good. 3,800 views.”

“I need you to take it down.”