Tony couldn’t sleep. It was now six in the morning. He couldn’t plausibly start making their waffles yet, and he didn’t want to wake the kids anyway. He wanted them to like his new condo. He would need to wait at least a couple more hours before doing anything. Tina and Dante were sleeping in their new bedroom that was technically a den. The fire code specifically forbade calling it a bedroom, since it didn’t have a window, but obviously it was supposed to be one, potentially. That was exactly the sort of bullshit that Alice would hold against him now, if she knew about it, but never would have bothered her when they were married.
They seemed to like the IKEA bunk beds. Actually, they liked them surprisingly well, except for Tina’s sheets and comforter. She hated the princess theme. Maybe that was lucky, because she complained about them so much she didn’t even notice he had assumed Dante would get the top bunk. He had given it to him, even though Google warned him that being under six meant he shouldn’t have it yet.
He was close enough, as far as Tony was concerned. He couldn’t remember for sure, but he was reasonably confident that in kindergarten he would have preferred the top bunk, and being denied it would likely have had disastrous consequences for his budding ego. Boys definitely get top bunk priority, even if they are three years younger. That was another thing Alice wouldn’t have agreed with, but also another thing she probably wouldn’t have noticed before they got divorced either.
It was no problem. Next weekend he would have new sheets for Tina, and she would be so happy with them that she still wouldn’t notice Dante had been given the top bunk. He hadn’t been able to decide whether to get Dante the dinosaur or cowboy bedding at Walmart. By the third time, it would be too late for Tina to object. The rightful occupant of the top bunk would be well established. Tina could have the dinosaur ones. He should have known she would prefer dinosaur to princess sheets. What kid of his wouldn’t?
––
“OK, guys, pay attention. This is the most important thing I will ever teach you. The perfect-waffles-every-time recipe, passed down from generation to generation through my mom’s side. It’s a family secret. Every Italian family has a secret recipe that they keep to themselves. Ours is Belgian waffles, from Sicily or somewhere else presumably in Italy. I never even told your mom exactly how to make them. That’s the real reason why she divorced me —though she will never admit it. They are simultaneously extremely fluffy and crispy. Most people think they are impossible until they try them.”
They were watching, but not taking it in as deeply as they might. It didn’t matter. They would be suitably impressed later.
“You get two and a half, maybe three waffles per egg. We’re going to go with two eggs, therefore. That should be fine for the three of us.”
Tina’s apron was getting tangled. She was fighting with it. “It’s fine, Pumpkin. You guys just watch the first time, OK? You can make them next time.” She glared at him. She hated being called ‘Pumpkin,’ but she was still too young to realize that that reaction would only make him more likely to keep doing it.
“The first thing we do is separate the eggs. That way we can make sure that absolutely no shells go in. NO —I am wrong— the first thing we do is turn on the waffle maker. It’s the limiting factor, speed-wise. When you get good at this, you can make waffles so fast, you have to spend five minutes standing around twiddling your dick just waiting for the fucking thing to heat up, even if you do turn it on first.” Too bad Alice wasn’t here. She would have hated him telling them that.
“Mom said she was gonna wash Tina’s mouth out with soap for saying that.”
“Dante!” Tina was getting even more mad.
“For what, saying ‘twiddling your dick?’ That’s from Shakespeare, I think.”
“No, for saying the ‘F’ word. Now that you are divorced, she says we aren’t allowed to say it.”
“Oh, well, that is a good point, Dante. She is right. For some reason it doesn’t sound as good when kids say it. Let’s try not to use it as much, OK, Tina?” She glared at him again. Fucking Alice, that’s just the sort of bullshit she would think of to make him look bad.
He turned on the new Black and Decker Rotating Waffle Maker, model WMD200B. He got that from Amazon. He looked for one when he got the sheets, but they didn’t have any good ones. He should have gotten one of those anyway, but he cheaped out. Even the pieces of shit at Walmart had to be better than this travesty of an appliance. He much preferred the Cuisinart one that Alice kept. That was just plain spiteful of her, wanting to have the waffle iron. She was never going to use it.
“I got a double one. You see, you make two at a time, because it flips over. No more fighting over who goes first.” That’s why he had let his worst frugal instincts override his otherwise better judgment. He thought they would like that it flipped over. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to care.
“Dante can go first. I hate waffles.”
“No, you don’t, Pumpkin. Don’t you remember? They are your favorite breakfast.”
“I like pancakes with chocolate chips,” Dante interjected.
“Your mother is truly a terrible influence on you guys. I just hope it’s not too late. That is even worse than unnecessarily restricting all the best and most colorful words from your vocabulary. Also, it’s illegal to put chocolate chips in pancakes. They throw you in jail for that kind of thing. You can only have blueberries in pancakes. Little-known fact, but the only reason we have blueberries is thanks to pancakes, because otherwise raspberries are superior in every way.”
Dante was looking persuaded, but Tina clearly wasn’t. “Next time I will make blueberry pancakes, and you will see why Congress passed a law banning blueberries for all purposes other than pancakes. OK, next we add the sour cream —or you can use yogurt— but only if it’s a Greek-style, high-fat one. Mix it with the yolks. We mix it first, because we are going to add the milk next, and it takes longer if the yolks aren’t mixed already, and then you guess how much milk you need.”
He poured in a little less milk than he would need and stirred it quickly with a spatula. “It doesn’t really matter, because we care about the texture of the batter, not some arbitrary weight or volume. Flour is finicky. It depends on the mood of the baking Muse, the humidity of the air, the altitude, the phase of the moon, and a whole bunch of other things too. There’s no point measuring flour for waffles. Doing that kind of thing ruins them.”
He threw in a couple of pinches of salt too. He didn’t bother mentioning it. They were getting overwhelmed. “It’s pretty close to two cups per egg, so we have like four cups, give or take half a cup. Then mix in one heaping tablespoon of baking powder per egg. We add sour cream —or yogurt, as stated earlier— but we don’t actually use baking soda. If you use baking soda, your batter needs to be quite acidic. Even more than this. That’s why pancakes and waffles used to need buttermilk. But now baking soda is superfluous in waffles. Even if we did add it, it would hardly do anything other than make them a tiny bit bitter. Really, it’s not needed for anything anymore —now that baking powder is a thing. But we still want a little acidity from yogurt or sour cream anyway, and we want the fat from them too. We need lots of dairy fat. That’s why we use whole milk, too, by the way. Never use that skimmed shit your mother buys for you for some reason.”
He mixed the dry ingredients in. “If you add the flour to the liquids, rather than the other way around, you need to stir less, but you need to be gentle so you don’t send it flying everywhere. But that’s fine. We want to be gentle anyway. We don’t want to overwork our glutens. The point is to stir it as little as possible. Some people lie and say they are gluten intolerant —like half of your mom’s friends. But they’ve just overworked their glutens. If they knew how to make waffles properly, they would never pretend to be intolerant to it. Though keep in mind that, unfortunately, celiac disease may genuinely have a few documented cases, so it’s poor form to try and prove that they are lying by sneaking a little flour into their gluten-free pasta or whatever, like I did that one time to your mom while she was going through her astrology-and-other-horseshit phase a couple of years ago. That was probably a mistake, in hindsight.” He added just a touch more milk.
“OK, almost there, but first I need to set the land speed record for beating egg whites.” Tony ferociously beat the egg whites. “If your arm gets tired, switch to your left, like a pro, but you shouldn’t need to —if you only have two whites to do. If you were doing the cream too, then that’s allowed, but we’re going to use the stand mixer for that, because I am lazy. We only have the one mixer though, so we need to either beat the egg whites by hand or wash the mixer’s bowl and whisk attachment twice, and it’s way easier to beat the whites ourselves.”
Even Tina was impressed by how quickly he beat the egg whites. He made sure to really go for it. “Those are called soft peaks. You see how they flop over when I turn the whisk? That’s not good enough. We want them stiffer.” He beat them for another ten seconds or so.
“It’s all in the whisk selection. Your mom thinks she won the kitchen portion of our divorce settlement by calling dibs on the Rancilio espresso machine, but I got the best whisk. It takes years to find one this good. Some people spend their whole lives searching and yearning to acquire one but can’t. Like shooting a short-tailed rhinoceros or whatever those Republican assholes like your mom’s dad wants to do on his next holiday. Normally, the wires are too heavy, or the handle is just not quite right.”
“You need more cream than you think, at least half a quart.” He started the stand mixer on the whipping cream.
He grabbed the spatula that he used to mix the flour with the liquids. “This is how to fold egg whites. You spin the bowl a quarter of a turn as you do it, and gently pull the batter from the bottom, spreading it on top. Again, the less stirring, the better. That is the perfect texture. You see how much air there is in there. Just you wait, guys. The best ones are always the first ones. If you do six or more eggs, keep half of the whites back, and then beat and fold them in when you have used half the batter or so.”
He produced a medium-sized ladle from the drawer. “We don’t use our spatula to spoon the waffle batter into the waffle maker. That would stir it more than we need to. One deposit per waffle, if possible. Stirring is the enemy. Also, notice that there is no butter in the batter. That’s because we spread it on the iron with a silicone brush. Just drop a big slab on and coat both sides. Even though it’s brand new and nonstick, we want butter on it. It will stick even less, but more importantly, it tastes like browned butter this way, because it basically is. And the color after. Did I mention the color yet? Just wait until you see it. Also, and this is crucial —unsalted butter— always. Salt is hygroscopic, as I am sure you remember from your chemistry classes. Salted butter is just a con job big dairy perpetrated on the world to sell us water rather than fat —which is what butter is supposed to be made of, actually. In the old days —before fish had bones— there were no refrigerators, so it was arguably justifiable, but not more recently. Now there is no reason for salted butter, but you can still buy it due to lobbyists hornswaggling Congress, as usual.”
“Now we have to wait for this dumb waffle iron to get hot. We can set the table while that happens. We’re just going to use the bowl of the stand mixer as our whipped cream receptacle, once it’s ready. You don’t need a fancy dish or anything. It tastes the same. That’s true for the raspberries in their clamshells too. Remember, raspberries are the first choice. They are better than blueberries for everything, except pancakes, and especially so for jam and waffles. Finally, pure Canadian maple syrup. Those Quebecers have forgotten more about maple syrup than the idiots in Vermont will ever know. In Canada, it’s illegal to sell maple syrup unless it’s truly pure maple. I don’t know about you, but I like my maple syrup to be made out of maple syrup. None of this ‘maple flavored’ crap you see in the stores sometimes.”
“I like Pearl Milling syrup, like Mom buys now.”
“I am sure that’s fine too, Dante, whatever it is, but today we want only the best.”
“Mom says it used to be called Aunt Jemima, but that name is offensive,” Tina patiently explained.
“No, the whole disgusting mixture is offensive, regardless of what it’s called, and if either of you mention it again, it will be me washing your mouths out with soap. I will need to, just to help you get the taste of that stuff out. Honestly, guys, your mother is such a philistine. I am telling you, she’s a bad influence on you. I just wish I had known about that sooner. We could have used it as evidence to deny her custody of you during the week.”
He spooned the batter in for the first waffle. Then he went to turn it over but stopped himself. “I have just realized that the Black and Decker Rotating Waffle Maker, model WMD200B, may have an until now very much overlooked design flaw. You have to lock the bottom waffle in, so you can turn the fucking thing over.” Reluctantly, he locked it and turned it over. He had already bragged to them about doing two at a time.
This was just typical. What a cheap piece of shit. “Normally, you spread the batter on and then watch it gently push the lid up. Like a high school quarterback’s Levi 501s right before the prettiest cheerleader on the squad unbuttons them to give him his very first —ummm, something or other that I will let your mom explain… That being said —now that I think about it— she may have forgotten about those a few years ago.”
He spooned the next allotment of batter in and locked the second chamber in place with the cheap plastic clip as well. It didn’t feel right having one side locked but not the other, and maybe there was something to it. “Don’t worry, guys. I am sure the fine engineers at Black and Decker know exactly what they are doing. It probably makes them extra crispy this way.”
He stopped the mixer and put the bowl on the table. “OK, while we are waiting for those two beauties, let me explain correct waffle-topping procedure. First, you let it cool, just a touch, OK? You can’t go rushing in half-cocked like a Republican president —or Jimmy Carter— into the Middle East, like a giant idiot. That kind of thing tends to go terribly wrong and makes the rest of the world start to wonder about your bonds’ yields. If they are too hot, the cream melts. Which is why even after you let it cool a tinge, you put the raspberries on first. Use lots and spread them out. They help insulate the cream from the heat even further and only after that do you—”
BANG. The waffle iron exploded.
Its plastic clip landed on the table between them. “Did you see that? The fucking thing just blew up. I don’t believe it. Maybe somebody should explain to those assholes at Black and Decker that you buy a waffle maker to make your breakfast. Not to kill your whole family and the fucking neighbors while you are at it. That’s why they put ‘WMD’ in the name. Weapon of mass fucking disappointment. You know what? This is exactly why the fucking Chinese are kicking our asses. What do you want to bet Vevor’s God-damned waffle iron doesn’t try to take your head off? I mean, really, I know what you are wondering. If the perfect-waffles-every-time recipe causes the Black and Decker Rotating Waffle Maker, model WMD200B, to fail catastrophically, should we perhaps modify it to accommodate that particular appliance’s quaint quirks? Well, the answer is an absolute and definitive no. My art must come first. It’s fine. We will have pancakes after all. Waffle batter works just as well for pancakes too.”
“The city’s bylaws prevent us from having whipped cream and raspberries on them, but there’s plenty of butter and syrup, which is to code. We don’t have blueberries, unfortunately, but we can fry some bacon first in a separate pan. If you don’t have blueberries, then it’s permitted under the UN Charter of Human Rights to have bacon with pancakes. Make sure you get reasonably fatty bacon, though, so you can use a spoon of the bacon grease with each one as you cook them. Don’t worry, I will show you how. You mix it and fry them with butter too so they get beautiful brown speckled patterns. Bacon and maple syrup are a surprisingly good combination.”
“Sorry guys, just give me a second, and then I will get started…” He didn’t want them to see him cry, but he was suddenly fighting back tears again. He had been doing that a lot the last couple of weeks, since the divorce was finalized.
After the pancakes, he’d have just enough time to use the whipping cream and raspberries to make a pavlova to give to them take back to Alice. Maybe she would forgive him for his affair with Samantha if he did that.