Oplatka dát

This November cannot pass without the obligatory reflection on things for which we are thankful. And this year, among other things, like the Twilight saga and toilet paper, we are thankful for waffles.

A preface to the waffle discussion: RI Friends and Co. There was a large influx of “younger” couples that moved to Rhode Island this summer, all within a few months apart: Hawkers, Taylors, Nickim Edwards, Corcorans, Jesse/moi. 

Mike ("Strategic Service Consultant" at DealerSocket, Inc.) and Kaitie Hawker (sales associate at Anthropologie, this chic store where you can get $500 scarves!) have been in the ward F-O-R-E-V-E-R. Almost two years. According to Mike, the arrival of all us childless couples that recently converged upon the Warwick Ward are signs of irrefutable divine intervention; they've been dying for social interaction with cool Mormon people their own age.

Julie and Adam Taylor live in a cool house with Portugese landlords who brew moonshine in their basement (I think). Julie is an LCSW in the state of RI and spends a good deal of her time at work demonstrating that Mormons are neither members of cults nor polygamists. Adam is in culinary school at Johnson and Wales and gets to take labs with titles such as "Chocolates and Confections" and will be famous one day for founding Muscle Man Bakery, a bakeshop where chefs can do lateral raises and work the high incline bench press while they wait for their bread dough to rise.

Nick and Kim Edwards have baby Colette, but the baby doesn't mind hanging out with us. Nick is a neuroscience PhD student at Brown (you know that game Minesweeper, he's really good at it) and at one point worked in a lab at BYU supervising the growth of diarrhea cultures (I think). Kim does good accents. Chinese and Irish are her specialties.

Chris Corcoran (air traffic control operator/man/person at T.F. Green International Airport) and Cassie (elementary school teacher) have 54-pound baby Jak. Jak eats grapes and peanut butter and dog food.

Anyway, RI Friends and Co. invented a new holiday: Oplatka dát, which is my Czech translation for "Wafflegiving." It takes place sometime in November before Thanksgiving. It's kind of a rip off of National Waffle Day, which honors 8/24/1968, the date of the first U.S. waffle iron patent. Wafflegiving also commemorates the waffle’s illustrious history (take a deep breath and read really fast): waffles were first dreamed up in ancient Greece as obelios (flat cakes heated between two metal plates and cooked over the fire) OR in China where flour/eggs/milk were substituted for soy beans/rice/cottage cheese (allow me to say, “gross!”), THEN evolved into delicacies during the Middle Ages when waffle irons were carved with coats of arms/religious emblems, AFTER WHICH they migrated with the Pilgrims to Holland and later to America in 1620, WHEREUPON Thomas Jefferson instituted waffle parties in the White House with a waffle iron he brought back from France sometime in the 1800s, BUT it wasn’t until the 1964 World’s Fair that Belgian waffles (with yeast and egg whites) came to town, AND not until 1972 that those mass-produced cardboard patties riddled with Tartrazine (a.k.a. yellow no. 5) became famous from Kellogg’s coining of the phrase “Leggo My Eggo.”

Wafflegiving also celebrates other random ideas, including these: the word “waffle” comes from the Celtic “Wiff tille,” which may be translated as, “Alas! The mountain goat has my sandwich!” AND the fact/myth that part of L. Ron Hubbard’s theories of Scientology initially posited that mankind emerged when “a giant space waffle passed by the earth and sprinkled the ground with life-spores, from which human being sprang up."

Our first Wafflegiving was pretty casual: white chocolate waffles and vanilla-cinnamon waffles topped with apples, strawberries, bananas, whipped cream, homemade coconut syrup, and chocolate and caramel sauce and served with chicken-apple sausage and Galvanina Blood Orange soda.  

We are already gearing up for next year. By November 2012, chef Adam will have discovered how to make waffles out of gold leafed chocolate and then we’ll all be done for. 

This is the only picture we took at Wafflegiving. Jak thought my lap was comfy. See this for more details about this picture.