Abundance, or The Place Where Nothing is Wasted

Above the alley at the home we share, Waffle Guy and I embarked on a grand experiment: a rooftop patio garden. 

For him, the garden appealed to his practical side. "It'll pay for itself in one basil plant," he mused as I tallied up the cost of the seeds I'd purchased. 

For me, the garden represented catharsis. To keep a plant alive represented proof that the struggles of the last several years of my life had given way to the sort of gentle day-to-day rhythm that allowed a person to remember things like sunshine and water. 

And so one day I tenderly planted seeds in tiny peat pots and waited eagerly for my efforts to bear fruit. 

It took awhile. And I made lots of mistakes along the way. For example, I left my little seedlings out on the porch while I went on vacation, subjecting them to the fierceness of May in Minnesota. Despite a hard frost, nobody died.

I left my extremely promising lettuce sprouts on the lawn in my backyard, where a newly adopted dog was altogether thrilled to poop on them. Grossed out, I returned the lettuces to the earth. It all worked out, though, as my tomato plants took up much more room than I'd alloted them, and the loss of the lettuces allowed four massive tomato varietals to take residence on my patio.

And then there's the Hanging Pepper Planter Saga. Turns out, those thriving plants I planted in it were not, in fact, the peppers I thought I was planting. The good news is that green and yellow beans grow extremely well from hanging planters. Who knew?

I've over-watered. I've under-watered. I've over-fertilized and forgotten plant food entirely. And somehow, my garden decides again and again to forgive me. 

I spend altogether too much time thinking about the fact that my patio is alive, now. When the Deepwater Horizon story broke, my stomach tied itself in knots every time I saw a picture of an oil-covered animal. One day, while sitting near my little urban garden, I realized that growing my own herbs and vegetables means that no one has to truck them to the store for me. It was comforting, somehow, that those plants reduce my use of fossil fuels. Even if the change was a small one, it was real. 

And that's the thing about planting anything, isn't it? You scatter the seeds of all of your new ideas, and somehow, against all odds, some of them grow. And they change things. And they're real. 

Just like that. 

I can't take credit for the metaphor, but I feel like using it puts me in good company. Jesus and Emerson and Thoreau and perhaps thousands of other great minds have noticed how tending a garden reflects tending to our own lives. 

The other day, upon locking ourselves out of the house, the kids and I lounged in the hammock in my little rooftop Eden and snacked on the beans that had grown where we'd expected peppers. I recalled a period of my life when being stuck in such a situation would have been a highly stressful thing. Instead, I was actually having fun. 

Today I picked cilantro, and looked forward to grinding its seeds to make homemade curry powder, and I was overwhelmed at the perfect efficiency of my garden. A few pots, some soil and some seeds have reminded me that I belong here, on this Earth, in this place, and that nothing that's led me here has been wasted. 

The Dao of Waffles

I met my Guy for lunch yesterday having no idea I was to spend the evening engrossed in wafflery, but a post-lunch jaunt to Williams-Sonoma made up my mind for me. There, on a shelf, was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen: an All-Clad Two-Square Begian Waffle Maker. 

"It's on sale. Should we buy it?" my Guy asked, eager to officially begin the waffle experiment. 

"Babe. It's $140. Let's just get the $20 cheap one from Target," I said. "We don't even know if this is going to work."

"But we'll get sick of the $20 waffle maker after we use it once, and then we'll buy another one anyway. Let's just get it," he said decisively. 

And that is how we came to own the best home waffle maker outside of Belgium.

I spent the afternoon carefully scrutinizing recipes on the internet. He shopped for ingredients. Just after dinner time, we were ready to roll. We used a recipe found on Chowhound, which I selected based on its delicious-looking ingredients and ridiculously complex process. The ingredients were as follows:

Batter 1:

1 1/4 ounces fresh cake yeast or 2 1/2 packages active dry yeast

1/4 cup warm water (about 100 degrees F)

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1 large egg, beaten

1/3 cup milk, warmed to 100 degrees F

Batter 2:

9 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

6tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (optional)

pinch of salt

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1/2 cup pearl sugar or 3/4 cup crushed sugar cubes

That's right: the recipe required two separate batters, which could theoretically be mixed to create the incredible dough required to achieve Waffle Nirvana. Such complexity, such intricacy must surely mean the author knew what they were doing, right?

Just for good measure, we thought we'd add a few equally challenging ingredients of our own:

2 overtired children who wanted to make a caterpillar cake

1 caterpillar cake pan

1 boxed cake mix

ingredients for homemade buttercream frosting, including food coloring gel (primary colors)

candy for decorating the damned thing

Good thinking.

We mixed up our cake and stuck it in the oven, and reverently began the sacred work of Finding the Waffle. Diligently, we dissolved the yeast into warm water and combined it with the sugar and a small amount of flour. It foamed and gurgled like into a thick, angry brew. My Guy triumphantly declared, "We've just made Belgian beer!" I should have known then that something was wrong, but I was determined that this could be The Waffle. I pressed on.

I added the remaining flour to batter one, set it aside to rise, and moved on to batter two--a scrumptiously aromatic paste of butter, flour, vanilla and sugar. The recipe directed me to mix the two batters with my hands and shape it into ten small balls of dough. The children argued fervently in the background about who whether the cake was cool enough to frost, but I didn't care. I was ecstatic. This was our moment!  

Plunging my hands into the batter, I proceeded to try to knead it into dough. It stuck to my hands like rubber cement. I tried harder. It stuck harder. Within moments, the majority of the bowl's contents were firmly adhered to my palms. I was really trying hard now. My Guy offered to scrape off my hands with a spatula. By now I certainly should have known something was wrong.

We gave up on balling the dough, and more or less flung it at the waffle maker. For the sake of experimentation, Waffle Guy added more flour to part of the sludge in a vain effort to make it less glue-like. The kids fought about markers.

He took on the role of Waffle Cook, tenderly glopping our hideous batter-stuff into the waffle iron. It smelled like skunky beer. But they came out of the waffle maker shaped like waffles, and so we maintained our optimism. We tasted them.

Failure.

He added more sugar to the second batch and baked them while I made homemade buttercream frosting for the caterpillar cake. The kids argued about who got to add the food coloring. This time, the waffles were a little bit better.

"We need more sugar, I think," my Guy said. "The ones in Bruges were way sweeter than this. Plus, they're not getting all caramelized like the ones in Belgium." He dumped in more sugar.

This time, they weren't so bad. We were getting somewhere. He added much more sugar. The kids bickered about who got to frost which segments of the caterpillar. The high-octane extra-sugared dough began to smell a little like fire. "Waffle emergency!" yelped the Guy, who was trying to scrape crumbly goo from the grid of the waffle iron. 

I was devastated.The tastiest waffle yet was being removed from the iron in a hundred tiny pieces. Just when we began to find the flavor, we lost the structure.

I frosted cake with my girls. He cleaned up his kitchen, which contained two batters' worth of messy dishes. As I remember it, we were mostly silent. 

Later on that night, as we sipped a beer on his deck and watched a storm roll by, I found myself contemplating my enjoyment at such a simple pleasure. It occurred to me that when it came to our waffles, we'd buried them beneath layers of kneading and leavening and sugaring and flouring and glopping. Perhaps The Waffle can't be forced--perhaps it must just happen. I made a note to myself to pick a much simpler recipe next time, and sat back to watch the lightning. 

At least the cake turned out...