Popin' Cookin'
'Fun' Waffle
In a tiny strip mall tucked away inside a perfectly normal neighborhood, just outside of downtown Utica, N.Y., sits the magnificent Muju International Groceries. This may be one of our current favorite places.
Noodles. Ramen. Chili Momos (fried or steamed). Boba. Thumbs Up soda. So so many spicy chips. We stop every time we’re passing through, and the last time was last week for me during my fast trip to Buffalo.
This time, I brought Little Bean back some Popin’ Cookin’ Tanoshii Waffle mix. Tanoshii is Japanese for fun or pleasant, by the way. No actual cooking needed here, and I’m guessing no actual ingredients except for sugar. This is basically sugar dough that you mix to make the ‘dough’ or the ‘jelly’ then you let it sit for a bit to harden up and add the decorative elements and ta-da!
Fun Waffle!
Little Bean and I sat down in the kitchen the other day with some time on our hands and assembled - I mean cooked - our waffles.
You know how in the case of some activities with your children, the actual benefit of the final product has no value but it’s the doing the thing with your kid that makes it all worth it? Yeah, that!
We made two cream waffles and one cocoa waffle. Then we made a variety of jelly spreads - watermelon, cherry and blueberry - and did a little decorating. Then we sprinkled the candy packet over it and whoa boy, I’m here to tell you that stuff will get your heart racing.
We ate them, obviously, and I feel like the artificial scent of those fun waffles remains someplace up in my sinuses to this day. Maybe next time we’ll find something a little less Tanoshii and a little more healthy? Nah, probably not!
Get ready everyone! Tomorrow, we’ll carry on with our Wednesday Weekly schedule of publishing our hiking memoir Where There’s Smoke: On the Trail to New Hampshire’s Fire Towers. Chapter One, Warner Hill arrives around 10am exclusively to subscribers. Please let anyone you know who may have an interest! Until then, if you’d like to catch up, here’s a link to last week’s introduction. See you then!
Did you actually ingest those things??