Dad Food : Secrets of a Pancake Hero and Other Cooking Notes : Cook: A dad with a willingness to experiment and an architect’s sense of proportion.

Corny as it sounds, my father always told me that the Air Force made him into a man. Before he enlisted he was just a skinny 19-year-old who had never been more than 60 miles from his parent’s house in Nogales, Ariz., a little town right on the edge of the United States and Mexico. Then he went to boot camp in Lincoln, Neb., and the mysterious man-making process began. I say mysterious, because he never mentioned exactly what he learned there. I do know that once, after being shot down, he floated in the Adriatic Sea for 12 hours before he was rescued by a British frigate. Otherwise, my father wouldn’t talk about the war. I had to fill in the blanks with images that I’d seen in World War II movies on television.

But my father did share one anecdote about basic training, one which had to do with the fact that upon his arrival he was put on kitchen detail. This was an assignment of great significance, he always said, because it was where he rocked the entire United States Armed Forces by reinventing the institutional pancake.

My father had been raised on my grandmother’s Jewish-Mexican cooking and on spicy carne seca tacos fried to order over hot braziers on street corners across the border. So you can understand how it shook him up to be at least partially accountable for the gray meat and mushy vegetables that showed up on the military chow line.

It was the pancakes that truly offended my father’s sensitive palate. Because of their thickness and astonishing elasticity, these bulletproof breakfast treats reminded him of tire patches. But all that changed the day he decided to thin down the batter with an abundance of fresh cold milk. This batch of flapjacks turned out to be serious masterpiece--thin, airy, golden-brown examples of fine pancakery. Although the addition of this single ingredient was a simple enough breakthrough, it was a secret he would share with no one. By the time he received his orders and shipped off to Air Force cadet school, he was a culinary hero.

This was a tale I heard so often throughout my childhood that it took years before the sight of pancakes stopped conjuring in my mind a garish Technicolor vision of the part when the jodhpured colonel bursts into the mess hall, tears streaming down his cheeks, demanding to congratulate my father on his gastronomic brilliance.

My father would tell this story to my brother and sisters and me while he made Sunday-morning breakfast. The one meal he cooked all week consisted of individual towers of dollar-sized pancakes that he would cover with maple syrup or clear, melted butter, over which he’d sprinkle a light snowdrift of white powdered sugar. His back would be to us as he’d describe the chain of events, his eyes focused on the griddle, waiting for the minuscule pinholes that signaled that it was time to flip the pancakes over.

I know that the Pancake Story was told and retold largely to temporarily hypnotize four fidgety children, and that’s probably why the details are so overblown. But time has proven that the story was also about my father’s willingness to experiment. This was the man, after all, who during his college days would borrow his landlady’s clothes iron to hold forbidden weenie roasts in his no-kitchen apartment. The trick, he said, was to turn the dial up high enough to heat the thinly sliced hot dogs, then scour the iron before returning it. This continued until the day the meaty fragrance seeped out into the hallway. When the landlady broke into his room, she was surprised to see her model tenant holding her household appliance upside-down with his half-cooked dinner sizzling on the flat end. From then on, he ate out.

Four years ago, my father figured he was ready to leave his architectural firm to his partners and retire. Although he immediately rented an architectural studio workspace and started taking watercolor classes, it seemed to me he was initially disoriented by his new-found freedom. Or maybe he was just interested in reconnecting with his children. He would show up at my doorstep unexpectedly, looking vulnerable. Was there anything around my house that needed fixing? he’d ask.

One of the hobbies he took up around this time was cooking. He bought some simple cookbooks, a razor-fine cleaver at a hardware store in Little Tokyo, a white plastic cutting board.

Like everything else he does, my father masterplanned his approach, which means he asked more questions than a homicide investigator: How do you hold your knife? Is boxed pasta better than fresh pasta? Do canned tomatoes really make better sauce than fresh ones? Why? Why? Why? The thing is, his approach seemed to work.

Around this time, my father began a Wednesday-morning ritual, one that he continues today, of grocery shopping at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market. He returns home with armloads of white plastic bags of fruits and vegetables and a brain full of recently acquired advice. My father got the woman at the tuber stall to explain how to rub the golfball-sized White Rose potatoes with garlic and olive oil for roasting. The guy selling leafy greens had him off of dull iceberg and into salads made with baby romaine, soft red oak lettuce and nutty-flavored arugula. The Tupperware containers in the family refrigerator are full of baby corn and sweet-tasting blue artichokes from the Central Valley, soaking in lightly herbed marinades.

His cooking style quickly emerged and it was one that combined freshness with a passion for structural uniformity. Maybe it’s a holdover from his architecture days, but my father thinks that things taste better when they are equally proportioned. In his hands, an ordinary Maui onion is precision-diced into white bits that have the industrial symmetry of C&H; sugar cubes.

My mother would never forgive me if I created the impression that my father had relieved her of all domestic responsibilities. If you want to picture the distribution of actual meal-making between my parents, my father has a walk-on performance in my mother’s epic-length feature film. But as the one with less experience, my Dad tends to be more celebratory about his output. When a concoction of his turns out particularly well, it receives his ultimate double-barreled accolade: “This is a party dish, “ he’ll say, savoring his handiwork. Then he’ll give the creation a name.

He made one such party dish (“I’m going to call this . . . Enchilada Stack Fred . . .”) on the evening of his 67th birthday. First, he took tortillas the size of mini-frisbees just made at the Gallegos Brothers Mexican delicatessen in Santa Monica. Then he quickly dipped them in hot corn oil. After draining them on paper towels, he set them in a bath of fiery, rust-colored chile sauce. Then, instead of the traditional roll-up enchilada, he made what looked like little layered cakes out of tortillas, crumbled white Mexican cheese, chopped white onions and sliced black olives.

Like many purists, my father believes that if enchiladas are assembled quickly enough, the heat of the tortilla will warm the stuffing--oven baking can give them the consistency of soggy Kleenex. That’s the reason why we ate in shifts that evening, with someone starting on his just-prepared plate of food as someone else was finishing. My father hadn’t yet worked out the timing.

I can still picture the way he would pop his head into the dining room just long enough to see what kind of reception he was getting. Our empty dishes made it clear to him that timing isn’t everything.