Daily Sketches. #6 Favorite Dish

This is it! I found them - I found the only one photo of the exact waffles from my childhood!

Unfortunately, you cannot see my favorite ones very well - they have a more interesting mixed pattern, and those were always my personal favorite. (Photo source)

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Write about your favorite dish as a child. Do you still remember the taste of it? The smell? The texture? Who was cooking it? What ingredients they used? Did they say anything while cooking? Where it was? How old were you?

Mama has never been an inspired cook. She cooked every day, of course, to feed her family, but it wasn’t something she wanted to do – rather something she thought she had to do. She has a fairly simple taste palette herself, as I understand it now, so she has always been content with simple things – cabbage soup, potatoes, bread and some sort of meat or chicken were staple foods in my family. But mom also has a sweet tooth, and from time to time she would make some sort of dessert. One of the most favorite things mom made for us as we were growing up were thick sweet waffles in the shape of hearts, with a few different designs on them. It was a waffle maker where you were supposed to pour batter in the middle, close it with an attached heavy lid, and when the waffles were ready, you just open the lid and magically get six heart shaped little waffles instead of one big one. We loved it when mom made those heart waffles! They were fun, pretty and so out of the ordinary – I did not see such a waffle maker in other families, so it was something of a specialty in our home.

As probably all children love to do, we would wait till mom finished making the waffles in order to lick the bowl with the rest of sweet batter, and we’d ask mom to leave extra batter for us, and from time to time mom would let us have a spoon or two of that sweet treat. Honestly, it’s hard to say what tasted better to me and my brother, the pretty heart shaped waffles or the sweet raw batter. Though one thing was out of the competition, it was a real heaven on earth if only we could think in such terms back then (we’ve never been a religious family). Can you guess what it was? Can you? It was those rare few waffles that did not bake through properly, and when you’d bite them, the warm but still raw liquid batter would run out of them. Those were my favorite ones! I wished all of the waffles had that unexpected little surprise in them. The sweet liquid heaven. Much later in life I learned about the desserts that would actually have a liquid texture inside of a spongy or crispy shell. It happened so much later when I tried chocolate lava cake, still one of my favorite desserts. Back then, growing up in a country with the lack of not just stuff, but experiences, understanding and sophistication, at least in my little corner of the world, those half-cooked waffles were my little liquid heaven on earth. I don’t know whether it was my most favorite dish, but I still remember the sweet taste of that batter and the sensation of biting into the hot soft waffle to discover my little unsophisticated treat. Always hoped for, and never expected.

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