Waffles

For as long as I can remember, my mom has been making waffles. Saturday mornings, any time we had company, most holidays, and always, ALWAYS on Thanksgiving morning.

This is the second Thanksgiving I've spent away from my house. I don't remember many Thanksgivings until the first time my brother came home from college. I guess it was always too short of a holiday for my parents to load us all into a car or plane and drag us up to Chicago for a day. And we never went shopping on Black Friday. But we always had waffles during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

When I got married, my mom gave me all of her old recipes, and all of the supplies to make waffles...a whisk, a sifter, liquid measuring cups for the milk, and bowls (since it takes three separate ones to make the whole recipe).

It's often hard for me to feel connected to my family. They live 8 hours away, I don't know what goes on day to day, and I don't get to go through things with them. The majority of the family is made up of boys who, I learned long ago, express love and affection much more through wrestling, video games, and touch football, than through long heart-to-hearts on the phone. Besides, I really don't like talking on the phone.

But I feel connected with my family when I make waffles on Thanksgiving morning. My mom called me right as I was sitting down to eat yesterday, and asked how mine turned out. She had ruined her first batch by forgetting to add the egg whites. I didn't have a flour sifter at Dan's house, so I used his mom's loose leaf tea infuser to sift everything in very small batches.

I miss sharing waffles with my brothers, sitting at the kitchen counter, watching the parade on a 10 inch tv screen. Even though Dan's family oooohs and ahhhs about how I made "the best waffles ever" (and they are, by far, the best), they'll never quite understand exactly why. It's not the the perfectly sifted flour or the perfectly stiffly beaten egg whites. It's the way the egg whites whip up the same way they did when I first learned how to in 3rd grade, and the way sifting flour is completely tedious though absolutely necessary. The best part is the way the batter sizzles the same on my new waffle maker as it does on my mom's 20 year old one. It's the way the light that tells you when they're done seems to take forever to turn off, and the anticipation as you lift the lid...fairly certain they'll turn out, but not totally sure, and the fact that my mom and I both know that you throw out the first batch because somehow it never turns out quite right. It's all those moments, the ones that maybe only me and my mom will completely understand, that make Thanksgiving Day Parade Waffles the very best waffles in the world.