Stick With What You Know: The Lesson of the Hagel Zucker

In recent weeks, we've been busy to the point that we've missed two Waffle Days. Between kids' sports and lessons, an impending move, a trip to the cabin and a tenth birthday, it's been nuts.

On Saturday morning, the middlest kid announced that she'd had enough. Come hell or high water, we'd be making waffles for her. Simple enough, right?

Nope.

See, the credit for our mad waffle skills must be given primarily to a magic ingredient: Hagel Zucker. After unsuccessfully scouring Belgian stores for the elusive Belgian pearl sugar, we decided to hunt for it in Germany, at a grocery store near a friend's house.

Heartbreakingly, we never did find our pearl sugar, but we decided to take a chance on Hagel Zucker. Literally translated, it means "hail sugar", and that's a pretty apt description. These little clumpy balls of sweet, crunchy sugary goodness were indeed shaped like hail stones, and they were our last hope.

They did not fail us.

On that trip, we brought home several boxes of Hagel Zucker, and we were delighted to discover that the crystals worked perfectly. They gooified the outside of our waffles and added tiny crun-chewity flavor explosions to the inside of our perfect little confections. Hagel Zucker was a life-altering discovery, and we've been breakfasting in heaven ever since.

In October, our German friends came to the United States to get married, and we requested that they bring us some new Hagel Zucker to supplement our stash. They arrived with a suitcase full, God bless 'em. But Hagel Zucker goes fast: each batch of waffles requires a whole box, and the time has come when our once massive stash of the crystal wonder-balls has dwindled to a meager fourteen boxes.

Saturday morning, we made a gut-wrenching decision. We decided to ration, which might have been sensible enough. But we didn't just ration. We took the easy way out, and made waffles from a box mix. What were we thinking?

We learned an extremely valuable lesson. First, the Spirit of True Belgeezian Waffles is a spirit with high standards, and it resented the fact that our boxed mix batter was in no way actually Belgian. It demonstrated this to us by causing our batter to stick cruelly to the inside of The World's Best Waffle Maker, tragically resulting in a massive plate of crumbs. We threw away half the batch.

The waffles, as expected, were solidly mediocre, and tasted best when drowned in massive quantities of heavily flavored syrup and powdered sugar. Sigh...

The overall theme of the Waffle Quest has been alive with a much greater truth, however: Whenever you truly seek to understand anything in life, you'll ultimately learn more than you bargained for.

Here's what the waffles taught us this time: When you have the capability to succeed on a grand scale, it's a darn shame to half-heartedly embark on a journey. Victory tastes sweeter when you give it your all, even when your reserves are low.

Dang it, Waffles. How do you know so much?

A Taste of the Cabin

I opened my email this morning to find proof that someone reads this stuff. 

(Ahem)

A reader requested a recipe. 

Woah.

Waffle Guy's Easy "Brownies"

2 c. Graham Cracker Crumbs

1 8-oz. can Sweetened Condensed Milk

Halfish bag Semisweet Chocolate Chips (Okay, so we used 2/3 of a bag. So?)

A daring spoonful of high-quality vanilla extract

Combine all ingredients until they make a cement-like dough, taking extra care to sample the sweetened condensed milk (you know, for quality control purposes...and stuff...). Mix until your arm is stiff--this shouldn't take long. Bake at 350 or so until the top is ever-so-lightly golden and the edges are a lovely golden brown. Allow to cool for a bit before cutting, or you'll make a mess.

Waffle Guy's Candied Nuts

2/3 c. granulated sugar

3 T. cinnamon

3 T. water

1 1/2 c. of your favorite nuts (the kind you eat, not the kind to whom you're related)

In a preheated pan, combine all ingredients, stirring rapidly and constantly until you truly believe your nuts are destined to be contained in a slimy layer until the end of time, at which point you actually have only 20 seconds left to stir. All of a sudden, the liquid will turn into a grainy, pretty candy layer. Remove pot from heat, adding 1 more tablespoon of water to separate your newly candied nut confections. Stir some more. Lay flat on a cookie sheet to cool, or go street vendor and serve them warm, from a paper cone. Eat until satisfied. Follow with nap on couch with a warm, soft puppy.

There. How's that for precise writing?

Dispatch from the Tundra: In Luck for Tasty European Snacks

In the tiny town of Luck, Wisconsin, on the shores of Big Butternut Lake, lies the cabin where Waffle Guy's family has been retreating for nearly three decades. The Waffle Kids and I have been fortunate to have experienced the cabin on several occasions in the summer, and have enjoyed its offerings tremendously.

With real life doing its best to interfere with travel planning (it's been nearly two months since Waffle Guy and I have left Flyover Country, and we have no current travel dates on the horizon), we've been getting a little stir crazy. Thinking a midwinter cabin adventure might relieve some, uh, cabin fever, we decided to spend New Year's in Luck. Trust us. It made sense at the time.

So we planned. We packed sleds and snowpants for all. We discussed our best sledding options. We dreamed about crafting snowmen and warming up with hot cocoa by the fireplace. It was all perfect, in our heads. But Mother Nature had some ideas of her own, and we wound up learning that sometimes the best weekend is one with no plans.

Day 1: Waffle Dog enjoys some of the freedoms that cabin life affords her. We play Single Digit Snow Fetch until our arms are too numb to throw the squeaky tennis ball. She romps in the crunchy snow, stopping only to sniff rabbit tracks or dart after a squirrel. Noting that it's gotten quite chilly outside, Waffle Guy suggests that we may want to remain quiet about sledding unless a Waffle Kid mentions it. I agree, although I am disappointed. This is, after all, why God made quality gloves. 

Waffle Guy distracts us all from outdoor fun by teaching the girls to bake his "Easy Brownies", which are not, in fact, brownies at all. Rather, they're what any good Minnesota church lady would call "bars". But they are delicious, and they are addictive, and they are easy, and I find myself concerned that I will be eating a lot on this trip.

Day 2: We awake to find that our bedroom is cold. Really cold. Like, the kind of cold where you can't get out of bed without wrapping yourself in a blankie, burrito style. I would have simply stayed in bed all day, except that Waffle Dog is whining. 

Stumbling out of bed, I open the sliding glass door to let her outside. That's when the magic happens. The outside air is so cold that you can literally see it coming in as it meets the comparatively warm air of our bedroom. A cloud of steam curls in through the doorway in an ominous manner, and Waffle Dog looks at me as if to say, "Hell, no." I cannot force even a dog to go outside.

We look up the local temperature to discover that the air was a whopping -18F. The Guy gazes at me with pleading eyes. Sledding is officially out of the picture. 

In lieu of sled time, we decide to cook. The morning starts with Jungle Animal Pancakes, molded to be shaped like monkeys, elephants and lions. They aren't waffles, but they are pretty darn good with bananas and chocolate chips. 

For lunch, we attack the arsenal of powdered mixes that the Guy has collected from Germany, and so it is that the Waffle Kids learn the lesson of the Frickin'Awesome. See, Waffle Guy and I once stopped at a rest area cafe in Germany because I was starving and whiny. His attempt to silence my grumbling was successful: this particular cafe gave birth to my first frikadelle, a perfect little wad of meat, mixed with bread crumbs, seasoned to onion-y perfection and pan fried in plenty of greasy deliciousness. I renamed the meatloaf/meatball/burger/miracle  the "Frickin'Awesome", and I've been craving it ever since.

We have to doctor the frikadellen a bit to make them kid-friendly, but a slice of cheese and a dallop of Heinz ketchup go a long way, and the Little Waffles were delighted. The Guy and I have ours with delicious brown mustard, and I find myself drifting away to a picnic table on the side of an autobahn, somewhere between Neuschwanstein and God-knows-where. Heaven.

For dinner, Waffle Guy transports me back to Germany yet again for a visit with my old friend currywurst. With delicious sausages he procured from a rural Wisconsin grocer, and a powdered sauce mix he obtained from a grocer in urban Deutschland, we have a proper German greasy-spoon dinner. I might have died from fullness right there, but we aren't done. 

You see, Waffle Guy has been hanging on to a nut-roasting pan, and it is time to candy some nuts. And candy nuts we do: almonds, cashews and pecans all fall victim to cinnamon-sugary snack-tacular joyness. 

I eat gluttonously, and then proceed to lay in bed and plead with the gods to forgive my indiscretions. Secretly, though, I intend to relive that day's menu as soon as possible.

Day 3: It's Sunday, so of course breakfast is waffles. In this case, it's pre-packaged imported Belgian waffles that my Guy found at a grocery store in Luck. They are dry, and they've got nothing on our waffles, but they'll do in a pinch.

We have to return home early to get Thing One to piano lessons. Plus, we have tickets to Disney's Beauty and the Beast at the phenomenal Ordway Center for the Performing Arts.

Before the show, we stop at Cosetta in St. Paul for our quarterly mostaccioli fix, and for poignant punctuation on the weekend's theme: Even in life's coldest moments, my world is full of warmth and flavor. 

My soul is fed. My heart is warmed. And my cheeks are flushed, for the thrill of it all.