Dear reader,
I’ve been waiting to write this ever since it happened. After four hours, countless toothpicks, and one very disappointed mother, I finally have “substance”. It started on Sunday, when I woke up at 3 p.m. The house was empty - the perfect opportunity to create chaos in the kitchen. By chaos, I mean waffles.
I poured the waffle mix into the bowl, cracked two eggs (perfectly), and added just the right amount of milk. I even threw in some vanilla aroma and pearl sugar. Everything was going smoothly.
I turned on the waffle maker, waited for the green light, sprayed some avocado oil and poured in the batter. Three minutes in, impatience got the best of me, so I opened it. I shouldn’t have.
That’s when it all went wrong. The batter hadn’t set and stuck to both sides. With the machine still on, the bottom started to burn. It took me 45 minutes to scrub it clean.
I tried everything: a knife (bad idea), a wooden spoon, then toothpicks to scrape the batter out of the grooves. I told a friend I would write this down, and she joked that I write about anything I manage to make that’s even remotely edible - which, to be fair, is true.
The third and final batch was the worst. It stuck again, but this time I left it in the machine. Since the waffle maker doesn’t turn off automatically, it burned so badly it practically fused to the metal.
My mother got home at 7 p.m. and immediately regretted she ever left the house. I was still there, performing what looked like dental surgery on the machine with a toothpick and a wooden spoon. I was scraping it again the next morning. My mother said those were probably the most expensive waffles I’d ever made, considering we probably need a whole new machine.
I hope this gave you a two minute break from everything going around us. If you’d like to bake something simple, and far less destructive, you can check Chef Amani’s Lebanese sfouf recipe or her Layali Lubnan, a Lebanese pudding that (hopefully) won’t turn your kitchen into chaos.
Melissa Manouchakian
Distribution editor
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