We’ve started a new tradition: Sunday waffles.

It began last Sunday (it might appear to be kind of early to declare it a tradition, but you gotta trust me on this one—it’s a tradition fair and square, hallelujah and amen) when we swung by our friends’ house on the way from church to drop off their weekly egg order. The family—both parents and two of the nicest teenagers I know—was outside at the picnic table eating their Sunday lunch of waffles.

They hollered for us to join them, the father beckoning us over with huge sweeps of his arm, calling to us in his thick German accent, but we declined. We were eager to get home to our work-free afternoon, and besides, I’m cautious about unloading six hungry appetites into unsuspecting laps as it could do a person in. It does me in and I’m not unsuspecting.

Almost immediately, the entire family vacated the table and surrounded the van. They hung in the windows and opened the doors, the better to chat with all of us. When I next turned around, the Two Nicest Teenagers In The World were handing out napkins and wedges of Nutella-smeared waffle to my kids. When we finally drove away, the whole car smelled of melting chocolate and buttery waffles.

I spied an opportunity to teach a lesson on manners and promptly seized on it. “Kids,” I yelled, over their backseat ruckus, “Kids! Did you notice what they did back there?”

“Yeah! They gave us waffles,” they shouted back gleefully.

“It was so kind,” Miss Beccaboo added in a sugary-sweet voice. (These days, she’s big on the word “kind.”)

“Exactly,” I said, warming to my speech. “They not only offered us food, they came over to the car to give us food and talk to us. That’s what you do to make people feel welcome, you go out of your way. Now remember that.”

“Why don’t you make us waffles for lunch?” Yo-Yo asked as soon as I paused to draw breath.

The car rocked with shouts of Yes! Let’s! and Please, Mama, Pleeeease!

I hesitated. Sunday noon isn’t the best time to make a meal that takes any amount of time, and it’s usually when I rid the fridge of the week’s leftovers, but as our church lets out earlier in summer, the kids (and parents) weren’t quite at The Point of Melt Down, and the leftovers would still be there on Monday… But then there’s the issue of serving my kids a meal consisting of just starch and sugar, completely devoid of greens. I don’t usually do that. But hey, we had a freezer full of fruit (when are we going to use it up anyway?) and I could make the waffles whole grain—

“Alright,” I said, and the car rocked harder.

The meal was a roaring success (though I learned that a double batch of waffles is not enough) and everyone left the table supremely happy. We all agreed Sunday waffles would be our new family tradition.

This Sunday I mixed up the dry ingredients (a triple batch) before church. Once home, I bustled around the kitchen cooking waffles, whipping cream, thawing strawberries, and making a blueberry syrup. Sweetsie was so excited about the upcoming feast that she could barely contain herself. She was everywhere at once, being more helpful than was necessary, and when I tripped over her one time too many and banished her from the kitchen, she just giggled.

The kids take the adornment of their waffles very seriously. They can eat all the fruit they want, but they are only permitted one scoop of whipped cream (I’m exempt from that rule). Yo-Yo and Sweetsie eat theirs straight up, but Nickel makes heart-shaped waffle sandwiches stuffed with cream and strawberries and Miss Beccaboo uses hers as icing.

When lunch was over, there was only one waffle left. Sweetsie so stuffed herself that she collapsed on the floor in a heap, groaning.

Next Sunday I just might break out the jar of Nutella that they don’t know I have. They’ll go wild.

Whole Wheat Buttermilk Waffles
Adapted from the little recipe booklet that came with one of our waffle makers

The absence of sugar is not a typo.

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
½ cup white flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons butter, melted
2 eggs
1 ½ cups buttermilk

Mix together the dry ingredients. Whisk in the wet ingredients.

Preheat your waffle maker and cook according to the waffle maker’s instructions. (I oil the waffle maker lightly and only once in a while, and I probably wouldn’t even need to do that as it never seems to have any trouble sticking.)

For waffle variety: this is another great waffle recipe. It can be almost completely assembled the night before and is 100-percent whole grain and sensationally delicious.

This same time, years previous: Earthy ponderations, part two and Cold Curried Corn Soup

The morning after the refrigerator debacle, I was sitting at my desk clicking through my morning tour of favorite blogs when Julie’s post caught my eye. She was writing mostly about apple-red raspberry pie, but it wasn’t the pie that got me, it was the ball of red raspberry ice cream sitting alongside the pie.

As I pondered the recipe, I remembered the couple boxes of mushy, juicy red raspberries that I had hurriedly stuffed into one of the basement freezers in midst of the previous evening’s frenzy. That did it, I decided. Red raspberry ice cream was the way to go.

So I went.

I did not grow up with red raspberries. In fact, my mother was very outspoken in her distaste for the fruit. “They taste like Pepto-Bismol,” she’d say, screwing up her nose and smacking her lips, pretending to taste the foul medicine. “Now black raspberries,” a beatific smile relaxing her face, “they are something else. Black raspberries are far superior.”

Black raspberries are pretty incredible, I’ll admit, but over the years I’ve grown to love the red variety, so much so, in fact, that given a choice between red or black, I’m not sure which I’d chose. I kind of have a hunch I’d go with the red because they’re so … red. And because they’re tart and they go well with so many foods, adding an often much-needed color/flavor boost.

(I think my mother’s opinions regarding the red raspberry have softened somewhat. While she and my father still don’t have any of the bushes on their property, she did fall head over heels in love with the red raspberry-rhubarb pie. We spent phone conversations discussing that pie.)

I’ve made different red raspberry ice creams before and they always involved pureeing and then straining the fruit to remove the seeds. This ice cream doesn’t mess around with any such nonsense, and because I happen to like the seeds, this appears to be the only way to go.

If you add the fruit earlier in the mixing process, the ice cream will blush pink all over. I opted to go the swirl route, waiting till the ice cream was as stiff as I could get it before spooning in the crushed berries. (Actually, I didn’t wait for the ice cream; I was running around upstairs overseeing the kids’ room clean-up tasks, aware out of the corner of my mind that the machine was grinding away, probably for too long. It worked out in the end, though. The rooms got cleaned and I got my ice cream.) As soon as all the fruit had been scraped in, I shut off the machine and boxed up the ice cream.

I had some leftover peach cornmeal cobbler on hand (yes, I’ve made more and another one is on the kitchen line-up for today) and I kept fixing little bowls of warmed-up cobbler to eat with mini scoops of red raspberry ice cream. I think I did that a total of three times. It would’ve been four, but when I got home from my church council meeting the cobbler pan was shiny clean. I may have wailed. After pacing between cupboard and fridge for a good while, I finally settled on a plate of cheesy tortilla chips and salsa. The chips were good, but they weren’t cobbler and ice cream.

Red Raspberry Ice Cream
From Julie over at Dinner With Julie, not really even adapted

This is one of those ice creams that is best served up straight away, but it’s good after a rest in the freezer, too.

1 cup whipping cream
½ cup half-and-half
½ cup milk
½ cup sugar, plus 2 tablespoons
½ capful (½ teaspoon) of vanilla
1 cup red raspberries

Stir together the cream, half-and-half, milk, ½ cup of sugar, and the vanilla. Freeze in your ice cream maker.

While the ice cream is churning, mash together the red raspberries and 2 tablespoons of sugar with a fork.

Spoon the fruit into the machine in the last minute of churning, earlier if you want the ice cream to be pink all over.

Yield: 1 quart

This same time, years previous: Earthy ponderations, part one and Two morals and Oven-Roasted Roma Tomatoes

1. Go to the fair.
2. Arrive home from the fair at 9:58 with a carload of exhausted, dirty, ice cream-sticky kids.
3. Open the fridge door and notice that it’s (the inside of the fridge, not the door) warm.
4. Notice that it stinks, too.
5. Open the freezer door and notice that everything is soggy.
6. Panic.
7. Put the kids to bed while simultaneously panicking and yelling at your husband who is also panicking, but in a manly sort of way.
8. Call your brother at 10:15. You do not care if he is awake or asleep. This is an emergency. He says yes to your question of whether or not they have extra fridge space.
9. Thank your lucky stars that your brother’s family does not hoard food like you do.
10. Curse your unlucky stars that you hoard food.
11. Remember that your mother wanted to clean out your fridge when she last visited you.
12. Decide not to think about that.
13. Load a couple wash baskets with food to take to your brother’s house.
14. Load a couple boxes with food to take to the basement.
15. Cover the counter with a multitude of jars and tubs and bottles and bags of food that might no longer qualify for that title.
16. While your husband drives the soggy, stinky food to your brother’s house, dump all the unnecessary, ancient, not-worth-keeping food into one giant bowl: maraschino cherries (two bottles), a bit of salsa, moldy blackberries, rotten celery, a lime and a lemon, horseradish, old oil, ham broth (from Christmas, really?), honey mustard no one will ever eat, a half can of orange juice concentrate…and the list goes on. And on and on.
17. Refrain from gagging.
18. Feel nauseous anyway.
19. When your husband comes back, give him an opportunity to wash the dishes. (In other words, declare that you quit and walk away in search of some desperately-needed fresh air.)

20. Come back and help wash down the fridge.
21. Let your husband take a turn washing down the fridge and watch, completely depleted but pleased, nonetheless, as he disassembles the thing and then points out all the dirt you left behind.
22. Discuss what may have gone wrong with the fridge.
23. Fret about another huge expenditure whopping you upside the head so soon after the purchase of your lovely new cleaning machine. (Appliance polytheism does hold a certain appeal, you admit.)
24. At midnight, go to bed.
25. Wake up at 7:44 and go downstairs to a wildly gesticulating husband who points out, with much knob-turning and way too many words for your fuzzy brain to absorb, that the fridge setting wasn’t just turned down a little bit as previously thought, it was turned down one-and-a-holy-cow-half revolutions, as in OFF.
26. Recall that you have four children.
27. Interrogate them.
28. When the littlest one fesses up to the error of his Curious George ways, explain the importance of NEVER touching the refrigerator knob, and then forgive him.
29. Feel pleased on many fronts: the fridge is shiny-clean and empty, there is no need to buy a new fridge, and while the work was intense and disgustingly painful, it was blessedly short-lived; there was no time to dread the task—typically the most painful part of refrigerator cleaning.
30. Become an obsessive refrigerator knob checker because there is no way on earth that you want to repeat that cleaning method ever again.

More How-To Stories:
How To Get Your Kitchen Clean On A Leisurely Sunday Afternoon
How To Get Your Bedding/House/Kids Clean All In One Day