Waffle Wednesdays and soft serve

Now that I’m back from my second R&R, it’s almost down to the wire. I still have another – looking at Iceland in August – but for now, it’s just the regular routine. And routine it is. With rare exception, such as today – Juneteenth – it’s the same old thing.

Nowhere is that more evident than the cafeteria. Bless those who work there; they bust their butts and I really do appreciate them, but the menu doesn’t exactly vary. Even though today’s a holiday, the snack bar closest to my office still has Reuben sandwiches. There’s no special snack bar menu for the holiday.

Sometimes, though, there is a special menu for holidays – Thanksgiving and Christmas are awesome. We also occasionally have a cake for one reason or another. This past week, there was an Army birthday cake as well as a Father’s Day cake. So while it changes it up a little bit, that’s mostly for the dessert. And the two snack bar menus are pretty much stagnant.

Tuesday nights for me are pretty brutal. We do the whole Taco Tuesday, which begins at my close snack bar with quesadillas and then the taco thing at the main cafeteria. The larger snack bar always has a chicken tortilla soup and then the non-soup option is a Buffalo drumstick. Not TexMex, but still not my favorite. (Wings would be different, but Wing Night is another time.) Essentially, I don’t look forward to Tuesday meals.

Except.

Alongside the drumsticks, there are raw carrot and celery sticks. While we have a salad bar with shaved options, this, at least so far as I know, is the only time to get straight-up carrot and celery sticks, and I love them. It’s really the only time I can get a veggie that’s not steamed to death. It probably doesn’t sound like much of a meal, but honestly, it works, especially when I also get a cornbread, which is something we always have.

And, since it’s healthy, I allow myself to get a soft-serve ice cream. Our larger snack bar has a machine, which is quite popular. On Tuesdays, since I do a light dinner, I allow myself soft serve. And, since I am trying to cut out sweet treats (of which there are so, so many always available), I look forward to it.

This week, tragedy struck when the machine broke. I have no idea what happened, but I’m clearly not the only one to miss it, because they’ve had to put a sign up outside the snack bar, announcing it’s out of service. It heads people off at the pass, because there are so many who only come in for their cold treat. It’s been dejecting. Hopefully it won’t be long, but man, I really wanted some soft serve after my carrot and celery sticks the other day.

The only redeeming factor after that dejecting Tuesday evening was the comfort of knowing Waffle Wednesday followed. This is an extracurricular day, when, outside of the cafeteria, one of the offices in my building makes waffles for whoever wants them. I have no idea when or how it started, but one day a week I can take the stairs down a floor and be overwhelmed with the smell of waffles at around 9 a.m.

At first, I thought this was an inter-office thing but eventually I realized that it’s open to anyone hungry who passes by. And these are not just plain waffles, or they don’t have to be. The waffle team prides itself on stuffed waffles, and they stuff those things with things it never occurred to me went with waffles. (Note: I don’t even think chicken goes with waffles, though that’s not an option since it’s breakfast. But, for the record, Chicken and Waffle Night is every other Saturday.) These guys – and they are all guys who serve them up – have all kinds of stuff available. It’s just too much and grosses me out. I can handle a chocolate chip, but oh man, they have everything from gummy bears to Twinkies and M&Ms. The guys take orders and make them up special.

It's really a morale boost for those who partake, I normally don’t, but the other day, one of the guys from church was the one cooking them in honor of his departure and I caved. I went light and only got a chocolate chip one but was absolutely astounded at the possibilities. Oreo-stuffed pancakes, really?   

Now, Oreos crushed up in soft serve, that I could handle.

I am nothing but a common thief. Or maybe a caloric one. Definitely a cinnamon one.

A couple months ago – time is flying! – Baghdad opened a Cinnabon store. At the time, I was temporarily working in a different office and, as a result that’s too complicated to explain, wound up at a little, private cinnamon roll party here in The Sandbox. They are as fabulous as I remember them, and now they come in different flavors, like caramel. We had some little ones, not the big giant ones, and it was a lovely treat.

For me, that’s pretty much the end of it, since it’s not like I can pop in a car and head to the mall and visit Cinnabon. Not, I guess, that I know it’s in a mall – it’s just somewhere in Baghdad. Our cafeteria does cinnamon rolls here and they’re incredibly tasty, though I try not to get them because … well, because they’re so tasty. And big. Huge. Like cinnabons.

However, last week or so, I noticed a Cinnabon bag crammed in the fridge on the office floor. Our building is configured to where there are multiple offices on a floor and there are 1-2 kitchens on each floor. Lots of people use the fridge, and, just like any other business on the face of the earth, people cram stuff randomly in office fridges. Some stuff just sits there, some gets eaten and some turn into science projects.

Ours has a bunch of milks and juice, like way too much considering there’s a little “grab and go” right downstairs if you really want something. Most stuff originated from there or the cafeteria, so I have, from time to time, helped myself to an OJ or chocolate milk and just brought one in a bit later. Once in a while, something sits there for months and months and you realize it’s likely homeless. I adopted a water bottle for myself and re-homed an unopened bottle of some kind of wine that had been sitting around for over a year.

When a bag from Cinnabon appeared, my heart leapt, but I figured it would be gone by the next afternoon. Really, unless I snooped, I couldn’t even be sure what was in the bag. Every morning it was there when I put my tea in the fridge, though. And every afternoon it was there, too, tucked behind a liter of Sprite.

After a solid week, I considered it abandoned calories. It’s bread, after all. How good could bread be after a week in the fridge? Was it even full of cinnabons at all, or was someone just camouflaging their lunch in a bag with convenient handles and a tantalizing logo? I decided to go for it, so I peeked in the bag and discovered a box built for four cinnabons and containing three of them – the big ones, too! Instead of going for broke, I liberated one. I figured I’d give the rightful owner another chance to reclaim the other two, hoping that if it happened, s/he wouldn’t remember if there had been two or three left.

When I got home, I discovered how good a week-old flavored bread could be – utterly fantastic, at least after being heated up in a microwave. So good that, when the box was still there over the weekend, I took home a second one. I ate that one super slowly, to savor it, assuming that there’d be no way the third roll would go unclaimed or, in the event that it was, still be edible.

And lo, no one removed it from the fridge or even left a nasty note. The box was still there the following work week. At this point, I figured time was running out and went for it. Yesterday, I had half a cinnabon for lunch and half for dinner. Although I could definitely tell they had been in the fridge too long, I have no regrets. And, as of the morning, there have been no “who stole my cinnabon?!” notes on the fridge. I hope whoever abandoned them comes to terms with the fact if you put

The bottle of Sprite is still sitting there, no longer providing cover for the tasty treats. Gosh, they were good.

I cannot recall the last time I ate a Cinnabon in America. My assumption is there’s still one in the Governor’s Square Mall, but I have no idea. We had one in Minsk, but I don’t recall ever splurging on one. In my travels, though, I ran across one in Yerevan and I do remember enjoying a giant gooey treat there. Maybe that’s why I liked Yerevan so much.