You people. YOU PEOPLE.

I’m still blinking in disbelief at the kindness you’ve shared with me and Brandon and Tiny Person Under My Shirt. I hate secrets, and this secret, no matter how well intentioned, surprised me with how heavy it felt, how unwieldy it was to carry around. It’s been a relief to to share it with you, and an unexpected thrill to have it met with such encouragement and excitement. I should have gotten pregnant a long time ago, just for the morale boost! Thank you for that.

In return, I give you a waffle.

Initially, I planned to give you some orange buns, and then I planned to give you these seeded breadsticks that my mom used to make, and then I considered a rye cake with muscovado sugar and apples. But I’ve been having what I think you could safely call a month of totally mediocre cooking. Totally mediocre baking, I mean. (Totally mediocre ability to complete a thought, also.) Actually, I was starting to think that there must be some old wives’ tale about pregnant women baking with yeast, something akin to the one that says that menstruating women can’t make mayonnaise. (Note: despite the contents of the previous sentence, this is not going to turn into a blog about the female reproductive system. I don’t always know what this blog is about, but I feel confident ruling that out.) Then, this past Monday, I made a batch of yeasted buckwheat waffles, and boom, the streak was broken. Marion Cunningham is, now and forever, the solution to every problem.

Marion Cunningham’s yeasted waffle recipe is a tried-and-true for me, and I first wrote about it, in exuberant terms, close to two years ago. Her waffle is perfect. It’s crisp and crunchy on the outside, but inside, the crumb is tender, speckled with tiny air holes, and slightly, pleasingly damp (if I can use that word without causing you to think instantly of basements and mildew and the pair of jeans that you took out of the dryer and put on while they were still warm and only realized weren’t actually dry once you had your shoes on.) There’s a decent amount of butter in the batter, and between that and the yeast, you wind up with a lot of flavor – rich and lightly sweet, but also deep somehow, a little interesting. I knew all of that couple of years ago, but what I didn’t know until recently is how adaptable these waffles are, how readily they would welcome other flours and flavors.

I have a sweet tooth, and it’s only gotten larger in the past couple of months. I have alternately addressed this problem with Graeter’s ice cream – now available in Seattle! At Fred Meyer! And some QFCs, I hear! – Cadbury Mini Eggs, a few donuts, and, in moments of restraint and sanity, a teacup of plain yogurt with jam or honey stirred in. In the interest of exercising some degree of control over how much sugar and other ridiculous nonsense I ingest, I’ve been increasingly trying to make my sweets at home, and to make them with a variety of flours, not just the usual white. I’ve been doing my favorite banana bread (the one in my first book) with a third or half whole wheat flour, which gives a nice, nutty flavor, and I’ve been playing around with pancakes and waffles, too. None of it is rocket science or wheel-reinventing; it’s the kind of tinkering that I think we all do sometimes, to feel better about the way we eat. But when I made a buckwheat version of Marion Cunningham’s classic overnight yeasted waffle, I knew I had to tell you about it.

I have long believed that buckwheat plus maple syrup is a union that cannot be improved upon, but I am now prepared to go on record as saying that buckwheat plus maple syrup plus yeast plus a waffle iron is even better. The outside of a yeasted buckwheat waffle, where it crisps against the iron, gets toasty and almost caramelized. It’s a little savory, and when the maple syrup comes along, it feels especially welcome, especially right. You could put the maple syrup on top of the waffle, the usual way, but I like to put it in a puddle on the side of the plate instead, and then pick up the waffle with my hand – this is very important – and drag it and sort of smash it through the syrup, and then take a bite, and then drag it again, and take another bite, and so on. You probably will get syrup on your hand. You will not be sorry.