The Cleaning Waffle
Jan. 13th, 2019 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Much discussion this morning: farmsister got a Belgian waffle maker for Christmas. Instructions say to discard the first waffle. "I'm not throwing out a perfectly good waffle," she said, and made a flour and water paste to make that first waffle.
When it was done, she left it sitting on the kitchen counter, intending to take it out to feed to the chickens. (Cue "chickens and waffle" joke, snare snare cymbal.)
Anyway I'm running out of room for a mobile post but over breakfast we had a very entertaining discussion about marketing a "cleaning waffle", with suggestions ranging from the very practical to the wildly spiritual.
(now editing from computer with some of the examples)
So like, maybe you could physically use a waffle to clean things, like dusting knicknacks or scrubbing a toilet, but I immediately went more towards the metaphorical.
"You gotta put in, like, sugar crystals and sage-infused salt or whatever," I said. "Make this waffle and then set it on your kitchen counter to absorb all the bad energies."
"Then feed it to the chickens," someone else finished.
"I was gonna say burn it outside, but like." I shrugged.
"Maybe feed it to the songbirds," BIL suggested. "We don't want to limit our marketing to only people who have chickens."
For the record, though: the chickens wouldn't touch the waffle.
"I left it there for like five minutes," Farmsister said, "while I did all the rest of the chores, and nobody touched it. So I gave it to the pigs instead."
When it was done, she left it sitting on the kitchen counter, intending to take it out to feed to the chickens. (Cue "chickens and waffle" joke, snare snare cymbal.)
Anyway I'm running out of room for a mobile post but over breakfast we had a very entertaining discussion about marketing a "cleaning waffle", with suggestions ranging from the very practical to the wildly spiritual.
(now editing from computer with some of the examples)
So like, maybe you could physically use a waffle to clean things, like dusting knicknacks or scrubbing a toilet, but I immediately went more towards the metaphorical.
"You gotta put in, like, sugar crystals and sage-infused salt or whatever," I said. "Make this waffle and then set it on your kitchen counter to absorb all the bad energies."
"Then feed it to the chickens," someone else finished.
"I was gonna say burn it outside, but like." I shrugged.
"Maybe feed it to the songbirds," BIL suggested. "We don't want to limit our marketing to only people who have chickens."
For the record, though: the chickens wouldn't touch the waffle.
"I left it there for like five minutes," Farmsister said, "while I did all the rest of the chores, and nobody touched it. So I gave it to the pigs instead."
no subject
Date: 2019-01-13 03:16 pm (UTC)The cleaning waffle symbolizes that your first attempt will not be perfect and that’s okay!
The cleaning waffle is the waffle gods’ due!
So many possibilities.
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Date: 2019-01-13 09:34 pm (UTC)I think I was too economical in phrasing in the original post-- she made the cleaning waffle out of just flour and water, while she was mixing a beautiful yeast dough to make the proper waffles for the next morning. So it wasn't a perfectly good waffle, it was a terrible waffle, but did its job at absorbing whatever manufacturing gunk was still in the waffle maker.
But like. I was just rereading the Iliad, and they did the whole thing where their gods' sacrifices were of the bones with fat wrapped over them, and then the humans ate the meat themselves, so-- probably the same idea, where it's the paste waffle you're sacrificing, instead of a proper waffle with sugar and all.
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Date: 2019-01-13 04:05 pm (UTC)And I never knew that chickens were pickier than pigs - I thought they were just as indiscriminate.
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Date: 2019-01-13 09:30 pm (UTC)The pigs have a sharper sense of smell, I think.
Year-round, there are certain things they give the pigs and certain things the chickens usually get-- the main determining thing is that the pigs can break open things that the chickens can't. Like, whole apples and squash-- the chickens have trouble pecking them open if they're intact, so you have to crack or bite or squish them before you throw them in for the chickens, but the pigs, you can just dump a whole barrel in and they'll open up whatever needs to be opened up.
Neither of them likes potatoes, though.
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Date: 2019-01-13 04:22 pm (UTC)this immediately brought to mind the period when the bro had a waffle hanging on his bedroom wall for months: someone had forgotten the last one in the wafflemaker until it started smoking. the waffle was basically carbon - coal black and actually quite attractive. there was a little opening on one edge,and once removed from the wafflemaker and cooled, he hung it on a nail on the wall over his bed. it stayed there until he & a friend were acrobating around the room, and someones' flailing limbs smacked into it, smashing it to smithereens. I think it was quite the chore to vacuum up all the bits and dust
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Date: 2019-01-13 09:31 pm (UTC)I think the chickens just didn't understand it as food. They're usually excited to peck literally anything-- they tried to eat my boots, while I was in there today-- but the pigs have better sniffers and probably better ability to track a thrown object. That's my guess.
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Date: 2019-01-15 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-15 03:38 pm (UTC)or like. god really likes watching excited chickens run around with things they're eating/stealing from one another.
god loves it when you stand there with an apple and bite off big chunks and pitch it in the hen enclosure and watch them run around with it.
i kind of like this image.