A Story and a Recipe

I have a new recipe for y’all today, but first, let me tell you a little story.

My story begins about 10 years ago.

Ten years ago I found myself in an interesting situation. The situation was my life and, goodness, life for me then felt like I lived in a snow globe. A snow globe that someone persisted in picking up and shaking. Not just a little shake, either.

I had a 3 year-old son who had been recently diagnosed with autism, a precocious 20 month-old son who kept me really busy, and I also had a newborn baby. Whew. The fatigue, I tell you. It’s fortunate, I suppose, that I just sort of roll with things. Had I realized at the time how emotionally and physically exhausted I was I probably would have cracked. Lucky for me, I didn’t really notice my own state of exhaustion and so just kept going, and going and going. For example, back then, when I would lay my head down to sleep and close my eyes the world behind my eyelids would automatically start spinning. Did I think this unusual? Did I tell anyone? Nope. I just enjoyed the spinning for the whole 3 seconds that would elapse before sleep would take me. It was like my own little merry-go-round.

Not that things were bad. They absolutely were not. I actually remember smiling a lot in those days. Why wouldn’t I smile? I had this precious little easy darling baby, my 20 month-old was cracking us up with his voracious thirst for knowledge and keeping things interesting by climbing everywhere and locking us out of rooms, and my 3 year-old was doing a great job with his therapy and taking the hundreds of words that he had learned over years of being read to and actually using those words to communicate with us in original ways. He began using verbs. He started answering questions in ways that just astounded us. I’ll never forget how he told me that he was playing outside at sunset only he didn’t call it sunset, he said, “I played outside while the dark came down.” (Now, think about it for a minute…the dark does come down at sunset. See?)

Now, during this season of life, we didn’t go out that much, like, out to eat. But, occasionally, we would go to Sonic. Sonic, for us, was the perfect place to go because everyone stayed in the car — STRAPPED IN. We would all eat quite happily and then go home for a couple more episodes of Blues Clues before we called it a night.

During one of these trips to Sonic, Jon and I ordered our normal cheese burgers and got the boys what they wanted. We also got an order of onion rings to share. The food came and we all began eating. We were about halfway through the food when a little voice piped up from the back seat,

“I want some of those heshial circles!”

It was J. He wanted onion rings but didn’t know the name for them. So he called them heshial (he mispronounced special) circles. To this day, Jon and I call onion rings heshial circles. Sometimes, an onion ring really hits the spot, you know? So, here, I give you a recipe to make your own. They are delicious. They are wonderfully crunchy and easy to make. They really are special. J was right.

Heshial Circles
1-2 onions
1 cup flour
1 recipe pancake batter, made up (either use a boxed mix or you could make P-Annie Cake batter with ingredients you probably have on hand)
several cups plain bread crumbs
1/4 cup sesame seeds, optional

Peel the onions and cut them into 1 inch wide rings. Put them in a bowl of cold water. Place the flour in a small bowl. Place the batter in another bowl. In a third bowl (fourth if you’re counting the water bowl) place the bread crumbs (mix in the sesame seeds here if you’re using them). Get out a big cookie sheet to put the rings on after you’ve battered them. To batter the rings, dip them first in the flour, then in the batter, and finally in the bread crumbs. Place them (not touching each other) on the cookie sheet and proceed until you have battered all of them. You can either put them in the fridge for up to 24 hours or you can fry them right away in canola or peanut oil. It only takes a couple of minutes. Fry them on each side until they are dark golden brown.

Mmmmmmmm.