The Waffle Quest

Organic Waffles: The Next Chapter

2011-09-15T00:52:00.001-05:00

I'm learning to eat again.

I've had the remarkable fortune in my life to be challenged by food. I worked for a short time for a fascinating man who would go on to become a prominent personality in the world of foodie television. I was pretty much a disaster at that point in time, a neurotic woman in my mid-twenties with a catastrophe of a marriage, three tiny children and some chronic health issues. I didn't have time to think about anything, and so it might never have occurred to me that I was bumbling through life pretty blindly. In my mind, I was doing anything I had to do in order to survive the challenges of my situation. I hadn't bothered to think about what it takes to thrive.

This was before the ubiquity of thought-provoking food shows, at a time when giant freeway-side chain restaurants were easily confused by the masses for fine dining, and my exposure to real culinary culture was limited. TV Food Dude was, not surprisingly, the first person with whom I ever really discussed the implications of cuisine. I had always enjoyed flavors and admired quality preparation, but those conversations helped me to see food as something more. It was a perfect lens through which to view a culture, or a person. The rituals involved in selecting, preparing, and sharing fare can offer insight like no other into the world around us.

My diet at the time was as inconsistent as my life. Some days, I'd put tremendous effort into preparing a good, healthy meal for myself and my family. Other days, I'd load up on McSnacks and ramen noodles in an effort to finish the task of feeding myself in the quickest and easiest way possible. But that's not what I wanted.

I left that job, and later that marriage, in part because I realized that I couldn't make myself healthy without a pretty dramatic whole-life turnaround. And while I built the beginnings of a career for myself, I stumbled into another job that would teach me about the world, through the filter of food.

It was at a tiny cafe in a tiny suburb of Minneapolis, and I waited tables on and off there for almost five years as a side job while I worked toward The Dream Job. The menu wasn't overly ambitious, but every one of its simple entrees was creative, authentic and well-executed, a perfect reflection of the restaurant's owners.

The first winter that I worked there brought snow almost every Monday, like clockwork, hard enough to slow business to a crawl. To pass the time, The Boss and I developed a tradition of trying to perfect the grilled cheese sandwich--he'd cook, and I'd eat. In the years since that winter, I have had the opportunity to dine at some of the finest restaurants in the country, and to be honest, there's not much that tops creamy, melted chevre on flawlessly grilled whole wheat bread, served with thinly sliced pears and a dallop of date reduction. I learned a lot from that sandwich--that flashy presentation is cool and all, but there's no substitute for good technique and honest, real ingredients.

I'm a little bit older now. I've taken some of those lessons to heart, I think, and for the most part I'm pretty sure that the ingredients that I'm offering the world are of a higher quality than those I used to share. But every now and again, there are reckonings. And so I'm learning to eat one more time.

The dark side of my exposure to the world of food is that I've accidentally learned more about food production in this country than I ever wanted to know. Some of it is pretty common knowledge--our food is making us sick, and fat. But I also know that factory farm conditions are deplorable, that our present methods of food production represent an enormous portion of our country's dependence on foreign energy, that our approach to food in the United States is creating shortages in sustainable food supply elsewhere in the globe. And yet, I've maintained that eating "pretty healthfully" was good enough.

I got called out at the Minnesota State Fair. By a cow.

In the dairy barn, a beautiful black cow with curly, fluffy fur made eye contact with me from her display stand. She looked awfully soft. I gave her a good pat on the neck, and then a scratch behind the ears. And then she did it. She dropped ecstatically to her knees, and she leaned into my legs so I could scratch her more effectively. Like a great big puppy dog, she laid at my feet for several minutes, basking in whatever attention I could give her. It was hilarious.

Also, it was a moment of truth. At that moment, the idea of eating beef at all was off the table for the short term. She just reminded me too much of my own big, black puppy. But the idea of a creature like her, confined to a miserable, diseased life on a feedlot seemed unthinkable on the long term, as well.

I have no illusions about the facts that we are part of a food chain and that humans are omnivorous. But we have become such a production-based society that we have forgotten about everything but the bottom line. We've forgotten about the honesty of our ingredients.

The truth is that Americans consume about three times more protein than our omnivorous little bodies require, and that our methods for the production of this quantity at a price we can afford are dangerous both to our bodies and to the planet. While it's impossibly to accurately determine whether there are causal relationships between food additives and any number of diseases that are on the rise, we absolutely understand the relationship between our agricultural practices and the recent prevalence of outbreaks of foodborne illnesses like E. Coli O157:H7, and that the vast majority of water contamination in this country happens as a result of industrial agriculture. We know that it is better for our bodies and for the earth to consume livestock that is raised in ways more consistent with nature. And yet, I've been more or less pretending not to know, and eating in ways that were in direct opposition to my conscience.

Fine, Damn Cow. You win.

I'm on a temporary hiatus from meat, until I can do enough research to figure out the best place to source humanely and responsibly produced livestock. It's been two and a half weeks, though, and truth be told, I don't miss meat even a little bit. It's actually been a fun challenge to prepare meals that I feel good about, and that my kids can get excited about. I'm paying more attention to properly nutrition than I ever have, and mastering ingredients and flavors to which I'd never paid enough attention. I have much more energy. I dropped a pants size in two weeks, all the while stuffing my face. It's frankly pretty awesome.

Farmers' markets have always been among my favorite places, and Waffle Guy and I stopped by a small market this morning. It's a good time of year for this sort of shopping, and we left with bag after bag of gorgeous produce: peppers, leeks, parsnips, eggplants, beets, scallions. On the way home, we giggled about the quantity we'd purchased, and realized we'd need to share in order to consume it all before it went bad.

We invited my parents over for a Harvest Feast, and set about to cooking a marvelous meal with the kids. We had warm oatcakes with garlic-chive creme fraiche, served with a country tomato soup made with parsnips and leeks. On the side, there were mushrooms with caramelized onions and fresh basil; thinly sliced zucchini sauteed with white wine and mint; and roasted golden beets in a maple-balsamic glaze. It was some of my best kitchen work to date. I'm kind of giddy about it.

Best of all, everyone had a part in it. The Littlest Waffler rolled out the dough for the oatcakes, while her big sister seasoned the soup with salt, pepper, and a hint of nutmeg. Waffle Guy put his formidable knife skills to use, slicing and dicing furiously. Mom sliced mint leaves into thin, perfect ribbons. I was the queen of the burners. It was magic.

I watched my family as they gathered around the table to eat, and I remembered those conversations with TV Food Dude. If it's true that you can learn a lot about people by what and how they eat, then I was proud of who we were as a family tonight--laughing, talking, savoring, contributing. We were alive and appreciative and real.

Waffle Guy could not stop talking about how good the food was, comparing items in the meal to some of the more notable dishes we've shared in restaurants. It's likely that he's awfully biased because I'm his wife, but I will say this: the technique was good, the ingredients were honest, and it was made with love.

I'm grateful today for food, and for the people who taught me to understand what it means. And I'm grateful for the chance to learn to eat all over again.

Decency Desperately Needed: Life as it ought to be Lived.

2011-08-06T02:42:00.002-05:00

A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to meet Paul Rusesabagina very briefly. If you don't know of him, it is worth noting that Mr. Rusesabagina is a delightful man with an easy smile, and the author of an incredible memoir called An Ordinary Man. A movie was made about him in 2004. It was called Hotel Rwanda. It was nominated for several Oscars. Maybe you've heard of it.

Mr. Rusesabagina was a hotel manager at the time of a genocide that lasted for approximately 100 days in Rwanda in 2004, killing between 500,000 and a million Rwandan people, depending on whose estimate you use. While the Hutu majority slaughtered fellow Rwandan citizens who were (or were suspected to be) of Tutsi ethnicity, Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu, sheltered over a thousand Tutsi men, women, and children in his hotel. It was a decision made at great personal peril, but with little question. To Mr. Rusesabagina, it was the only decent thing to do.

It's easy to think of atrocities like genocides as things that happen to "other people." Mr. Rusesabagina describes pastors murdering their congregants, teachers murdering students, doctors murdering patients. Neighbors killing neighbors. It seems mad, savage. Something that could only happen somewhere else.

The beauty of the memoir, An Ordinary Man, is that it very eloquently describes a sort of "frog in the pot" syndrome that can so easily happen to anyone, anywhere. If you toss a frog in a pot of boiling water, the adage goes, it will immediately leap out for fear of being killed. But if you take that same frog, and you put him in a pot of cool water, he will stay. And if you slowly turn up the heat, he will hardly notice.

Eventually, there will be no more frog.

In Rwanda, millions of reasonable, thinking, intelligent people fell victim to absolute madness. It began with ethnic tension, enhanced by economic imbalances. Slowly, it played out on talk radio, where menacing pundits referred to the Tutsi minority as "cockroaches" and defined Hutus who protected or sympathized with Tutsis as "traitors." As time went by, the radio beckoned Hutus to "exterminate the cockroaches." With the help of a militia leader who smuggled more than half a million machetes into the country, it cultivated in unimaginable atrocities, with Hutus attempting nothing short of an extermination of an ethnicity.

Frogs in pots.

Rwandans, by African standards, enjoyed a good quality of life. Rwandans place a high degree of value on education. It is culturally important to know the history of one's country there. These are a people who understood the perils of war in the past, and the ethnicity which perpetrated the 1994 genocide was a majority with quite a bit to lose. And yet.

Reports vary on exact numbers, but militias recruited massive numbers of average joe citizens to commit their dirty work. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of human beings died at the hands of machetes, wielded by people they knew. Reasonable people. Thinking people. Frogs in pots.

So what went wrong?

I had the chance to ask Mr. Rusesagabina a question, and I'll never, ever forget his answer.

"What is the difference between the people who will murder their neighbors, and people who won't?" I think my motivation was selfish--I am haunted by this question every time I read an account of the Holocaust, or of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, or of the genocide in Darfur. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I know that much of the Nazi rank and file started off as little boys who picked flowers for their mamas; who grew up to be regular guys that made love to their wives and went to church and paid bills and were just people until some horrible ideology became so precious to them that they would give up every last shred of their humanity to prove some insane, awful, unforgivable point. What happened there?

I think I asked that question because I wanted Mr. Rusesabagina to assure me that I would never be evil. I'd never be "weak" like that. Maybe I wanted him to tell me the key was to be enlightened, or smart, or educated. I wanted him to tell me there was some intrinsic part of my being that was immune to becoming a monster.

But that's not what he said.

"The difference," he said, "is that some people realized that soon enough, this would all be over, and they would have to answer for who they were when things were not sane."

It is important to remember that the decisions you make, the behaviors in which you engage, can have consequences that you cannot see. Hate wins temporarily. But ultimately, civility returns, however briefly, and those who have descended into hatred in the meantime are left to answer for their words and actions. It is only a matter of time.

Paul Rusesabagina said the same thing in his book, too: "This is why I say that the individual's most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency."

It's true. For every person I can think of who will lie, or cheat, or steal, I can think of a dozen who have made my life better. For everything that you see or hear about how corrupt and awful a world we live in, I bet you see more examples of basic human decency, whether you realize it or not. Food shelves are everywhere, run by volunteers and stocked by quietly thoughtful people. Driveways are anonymously shovelled for neighbors with limited time or mobility, leaves are anonymously raked, lawns are anonymously mowed. People fall in love and hold hands and feed babies and tithe and deliver meals and throw surprise parties and get married and give to charity and pay their taxes (even if they grumble) and send sympathy cards. We are kind, most of us. We care for one another.

And yet, there are frogs in pots.

"We are all born with a powerful herd instinct and it can force otherwise rational people to act in inexplicable ways," writes Mr. Rusesabagina.

And that is what scares me.

You see, today Fox Nation, a FoxNews affiliate, ran the following headline:

"Obama's Hip-Hop BBQ Didn't Create Jobs"

I would link to the page, but they don't deserve any more hits. You can find it yourself, if you require proof. The New York Times and The Washington Post both covered it.

Beneath the slug, photographs of three celebrity party guests, all black, surrounded the president's own photograph. There were no photographs of any white party guests, nor any allusion to any ethnically-white stereotypes.

Fox executive vice president of programming, Bill Shine, defended his network's decision to air the headline, citing Politico's reference to kids who "stole the show doing hip-hop dance routines" as grounds for choosing such a headline.

My heart is broken.

I am sad that my country has reached a point in its history where common decency at the highest levels seems to be lost, and where the citizenry of my country is willing to accept that loss of common decency as a routine part of the political/social/economic/human game. What has happened to our standards, when we accept racial/socioeconomic/religious bigotry as normal? Because it doesn't matter which side of the political fence you sit on. Racism is wrong.

I am heartbroken that we are willing to give airtime to candidates who will say, as Michele Bachmann did, that "Gay marriage is probably the biggest issue that impacts our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years. I am not understating that." As millions of unemployed men and women struggle to feed their families, while the most essential lifelines for our working poor are being slashed from government budgets in order to keep tax loopholes for corporations wide open--why then are we pointing fingers at the behavior of "other people"? The private behavior of "other people" is really our biggest issue? What has happened to our backbone, when we are willing to ignore our needy in favor of federalizing the rules for interpersonal relationships? Because it doesn't matter which side of the political fence you sit on. Hypocrisy is frightening.

I'm devastated when I read the transcript of Glenn Beck comparing the attendees of a youth camp in Norway to the Hitler Youth in the very earliest days after a right-wing terrorist shot and killed more than 90 children at that camp, which, in fact, was not Fascist by its very definition. I am apalled by the cruelty we will allow in our media, and hurt that my fellow Americans will pay money to support a man who would so willingly dance on the graves of the innocent. They were youth. They were a future that is no more. Why aren't Americans of every political stripe boycotting every product and network that has any affiliation whatsoever with this man? Why aren't we demanding at least a very, very basic level of decency? Because it doesn't matter which side of the political fence you sit on. Cruelty is evil.

I am crushed by the fact that we cannot collectively seem to treat those with differing opinions, lifestyles, socioeconomic conditions, or ethnicity as equally valid human beings. I am afraid of the implications.

I'm no Chicken Little. I don't think the sky is falling. This is not a call to action against an imminent American genocide, and I am not insinuating that you are the sort of person who does not realize that "soon enough, this will all be over, and you will have to answer for who you were when things were not sane," as Mr. Rusesabagina said.

But I'm wondering if we don't realize that we, too, are frogs in a pot of one sort or another. I'm wondering if there is some wisdom in the idea that we should pause in this challenging time and consider the consequences of the finger-pointing and the hatred and the blame that we're allowing to thrive in our culture.

Somehow, we have forgotten that underneath all the ideology and rhetoric, underneath every empty theory (they're all theories, remember--different than fact), underneath all of the heat and the vitriol and the anger, there are very real, very human beings.

Actions matter. So do words.

But other things are important, too. Our quiet cultural acceptance of a complete lack of human decency is perhaps more terrifying than those who so vocally spew their contempt. What matters isn't whose theory is right or wrong, or to which system of over-hyped rhetoric you most closely relate. Those things are temporary, and they change. How much you lost in the stock market doesn't matter, nor does the number of dollars you pay in taxes. What matters is who you are, when everything seems insane.

One more quote by Paul Rusesabagina:

"Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived."

I'm ranting, I know. And I'm not particularly qualified to preach. But it's important to me that we all consider that when this vulnerable time in our nation's history has passed, when we've returned to the "resting state of human affairs," there will be some of us who have wielded all sorts of unnecessary arms. Hostility and agression and extremism are weapons of a very dangerous sort. The problem is, we rarely see the damage that such weapons can cause until it is far too late.

And so we must ask ourselves:

Who are we, right now? What are we willing to accept from our politicians, our media? From our beer buddies? From our families?

For all its imperfections and missteps, our country was founded on some pretty basic principles of human dignity, and for more than two centuries that country has strived and worked and grown to overcome that which stood between its flaws and its future. When did we stop striving and working, and start pointing fingers and shouting?

I really, truly believe that decency and civility win, in the end. In the meantime, I think we owe ourselves something better than this animosity we're feeding, all in the name of politics and the television stations that make money because of politics.

I am a liar.

2011-08-06T00:05:00.000-05:00

I didn't pull the last post down after a day. See, all the friends I thought would mock me didn't actually mock me. They thought it was badass.

So, the Snark Song will stay.

(You guys are strange.)

For One Day Only

2011-07-26T13:41:00.000-05:00

I'm pulling this down tomorrow, but someone told me they'd pay good money to see this.

Don't worry about it, dude. This one's gratis.

Scenes from the Hana Highway, Part 1

2011-07-20T23:51:00.001-05:00

I heart Maui.

Of course, I am obligated to love Maui. If one does not love Maui, it is proof that one has a soul made of glurpy, bubbling tar. But that's not why I love Maui.

I love Maui because its inhabitants are slightly nuts, and its roads are terrible. Someday soon, I'll (hopefully) amuse and delight you with dramatic retellings of Cafe Romantica and the Van In Which It Is Housed, The Really Pretty Scary Lithuanian Farmer and the Really Big Knife She Wields, The Thai Restaurant Owner Who Screams At You From the Toilet, and perhaps some other fun stories from the Hana Highway.

Right now, fresh off the heels of my nuptials, I'm still feeling kinda sappy. So tonight, I'm a-gonna tell you all a sweet little bedtime story from the curviest road on Earth.

Once Upon a Time, on a far-off island, a girl consumed a ripe young coconut full of juice immediately before embarking upon the return trip from Hana, Maui, to her hotel in lovely Wailea. A handsome prince drove the bright red Jeep-shaped chariot in which they travelled.

Within about a half an hour, the lovely maiden realized that she really had to pee. Like, really.

"OH MAH GAHHHHHHH!!!!! PULL OVER!" the maiden cried in desperation, and her handsome prince obliged. Darting off into the woods, the fair lady sheepishly took care of bidness. Don't worry. It was worth the indignity. She felt much better after that.

Mere moments after the couple returned to the road, the handsome prince abruptly pulled over again.

"What are you doing?" asked the maiden, noting that if Prince Charming needed to take his turn in the woods, he should have thought of that a quarter of a mile ago. Geez. But the maiden was wrong.

"I am letting this police officer pass me," said the wise prince. "Being followed by a police officer on the Hana Highway might be less than ideal. It's bad enough having to drive this road without having to watch my rear view mirror and check my speed constantly."

The couple pretended to be busy looking for something in the car so that the officer wouldn't realize that they had pulled over for fear of being pulled over if they didn't pull over. They waited a few minutes longer than necessary, and then resumed their drive.

For about ten minutes.

You see, as the prince and the maiden rounded a(nother) very sharp curve, they noticed that the police officer had parked on the side of the road.

"[Drat]!"said Waffle Guy--I mean, the prince. "He's going to be behind me again!"

The lovely maiden was about to complain, when she and waffle guy noticed it in unison. There he was, a handsome, young Maui police officer, standing at the edge of a giant, lush, green gorge, coffee cup in hand, simply taking in the view.

Following his gaze, the couple noticed the view that had commanded the officer's attention.

"OH MAH GAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! PULL OVER!" the maiden cried again, as though it was the only thing she knew how to say.

There, over the gorge, was a rainbow. A flippin' double rainbow. On the Hana Highway. In gosh-darn Maui.

On perhaps the most dangerous corner of perhaps the most dangerous road they could find, the charming-but-dim couple got out of their Jeep-shaped chariot to photograph the prettiest thing they'd ever seen.

If you look very closely, you'll see Waffle Guy--ahem, the Prince--shooting photos of the
double-flippin'-rainbow on the side of the road in this photo. Darwin Award to follow.

And, yet, they lived happily ever after.

Thanks, Maui Policeman, for showing us the way.

The Wedding: A Summary

2011-07-18T23:24:00.000-05:00

We had a tiny wedding in a far-off place, attended only by immediate family and a handful of lifelong friends. I highly recommend this strategy, by the way. It was relatively stress-free and positively delightful, I didn't have to introduce myself to any coworkers' husbands' sisters' dates at the reception, and the smaller crowd kept my tendency toward social anxiety at bay on one of the most important days of my life. It was great.

However, since we've been home, lots of you have had lots of questions for Mr. Waffle and me as to exactly how it all went down. I've been trying to tell you all, but words don't really do it justice. All I can tell you is that everything about it was perfect.

I thought I might show you a bit. These photos were taken by one of my oldest friends, the brilliantly talented Natalie Champa Jennings. When you're done here, do yourself a favor and check out her site.

A Wedding Story
(cue cutesy violin canon here)

We got married at a place like this: