Brown Butter Waffles

A lazy morning favorite in my home. It always begins with the Joy of Cooking as a reference (even though I've just about memorized the recipe, it's reassuring to confirm my memory).

When in doubt, use an entire stick of butter. Let it melt slowly on low heat.

Let it cook until it begins to brown - a result of the Maillard Reaction! Once it's starts to brown, the Maillard reaction seems to accelerate as the butter darkens surprisingly quick. I usually turn off the heat as soon as I see it starting to brown, because it will continue to brown even as it cools slightly. Here it started to brown even before all the butter was melted, which turned out to be rather convenient because I could use the unmelted butter to help cool the quickly browning butter even faster than if I had just turned off the heat.

Fully melted brown butter:

A Buttery Digression: When you purchase a stick of butter, it's a smooth emulsion of fat, water, protein, and lactose (roughly 80% fat, 15% water). When you apply heat, it's incredibly easy to break this emulsion - meaning the fat and water separate and the protein and lactose clump together and fall out of solution. Clarified butter (a.k.a. ghee) is just butter that has been lightly heated such that the water evaporates and the proteins and lactose clump together so they can be easily strained out. Clarified butter is pure milk fat. Brown butter cooks a little bit longer than clarified butter until the lactose reacts with the proteins to form delicious little nutty brown flecks.

More on the Maillard Reaction: It's a redox reaction! Lactose is oxidized (gives up a proton) while an amino acid is reduced (accepts the proton) to form any of several aromatic, ring-shaped, compounds (i.e. pyrroles, pyridines, pyrazines, thiophenes, thiazoles, and oxazoles). These aromatic compounds stimulate our taste and smell receptors resulting in a delicious response!

And now, back to the waffles...

Combine the wet things:

1 1/2 cups whole milk

3 eggs

drizzle molasses

browned butter

Combine the dry things:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 Tbsp Sugar

1 Tbsp Baking Powder

Cinnamon

pinch salt

I generally use white flour, but you could easily substitute any flour of your wildest dreams! At some point during the preparation of the batter I plug in my trusty vintage 1940's cast iron waffle iron (it takes a while to warm up).

When the iron is hot, I whisk together the wet things and the dry things to make the waffle batter.

Butter the iron and apply the batter!

The set up:

Butter, waffle iron, batter, and of course - a cup of coffee

The perfect waffle.

...I love watching it cook!

Everything stays warm in the oven!

What happens from here is up to you. Waffles make great companions with any of theses toppings:

Maple Syrup

Honey

Molasses

Peanut Butter (or any nut butter)

Butter

Fresh Fruit

Jam

Fresh fruit cooked with butter and sugar (a la Bananas Foster)

Cinnamon & Sugar

...

Waffles also make an excellent substitute for bread - they can be toasted, used to make sandwiches (especially breakfast sandwiches!), or my new favorite - battered and pan-fried to make waffle-french-toast!

Waffle with chicken, fried egg, and cole slaw

Making waffle french toast

Waffle french toast mini sandwich with...

Mt. Townsend Creamery Trufflestack Cheese

Skagit River Valley Ranch Bacon

Heirloom Tomato

Green Onion

Reference: On Food & Cooking by Harold McGee

Orange Chicken

Last night I waltzed into the kitchen with the idea that I was just going to whip up a quick veggie stir fry, rice, and orange chicken. While the techniques are simple, it's not exactly what I'd call a "quick dinner" in the end...

First I put some brown rice on to cook while I did everything else (1 cup rice : 2 cups water/stock).

Then I started working on the chicken. I had two chicken breasts that were left over from roast chicken dinner the night before, so I just cut these into bite-sized chunks and then breaded them using a modified Standard Breading Procedure:

1. Coat with flour, shake off excess.

2. Coat with egg (3-4 eggs), allow excess to drain off.

3. Coat with corn starch.

I also add salt an pepper to the flour and cornstarch before using it to coat the chicken. While I breaded the chicken, I had a pot of canola oil warming up on the stove, so that as soon as my chicken bits were breaded, I could immediately fry them in the oil.

When the chicken was just barely beginning to brown, I pulled them out of the oil and placed them on a paper-towel-covered-plate to soak up any excess oil. The fried chicken sat in a warm oven while I made the sauce.

Orange Sauce

1 cup Water

1 Lemon, juiced

1 Orange, juiced and zested

1 cup Brown Sugar

1/3 cup Rice Vinegar

3 Tbsp Liquid Aminos (or soy sauce)

Sprinkle Cayenne

............

3 Tbsp Corn Starch + 3 Tbsp Water

Bring everything above the dotted line to a boil. Dissolve the corn starch in the 3 Tbsp water. When the water-juice-sugar-etc. is at a rolling boil, add the corn starch solution while stirring. Continue to stir over heat until thickened (this should happen fairly quickly). Garlic and/or ginger would also be awesome in this sauce.

When the sauce is thick, pour it over the fried chicken to coat them.

Then I put the chicken back in the warm oven while I whipped up a few sauteed veggies...

Reference: Chinese Orange Chicken

A post-vacation home-cooked dinner

After walking off a plane at 10pm, all I wanted was a good home-cooked meal. But both Alex and I were too exhausted to cook. Luckily, I remembered that before our two-week vacation, we had thrown a few things in the freezer to save them from going bad in our absence. We tried our best to eat everything that might go bad before we left, and for our final meal we sauteed all the veggies that were left in the fridge and combined them with some pasta and butter. Fortunately, we couldn't eat it all, so I put the leftovers in a baking dish, smothered it in all the cheese we had, and threw it in the freezer. Two weeks later, we stumbled through our front door, threw down our luggage, took out the now mystery leftovers from the freezer and let it heat up in the oven while we took a shower.

My original intention was to simply keep food from going bad, but little did I know that I made a much appreciated future dinner for Alex and I. Sometimes my past-self is pretty darn awesome.

Catching up...

Well, Autumn Quarter happened.  I took 16 credits worth of classes, did some of my own research, applied to graduate school, applied for an NSF grant, scored the Mary Gates Research Scholarship, and ate some tasty food.  Here's one big long post of all the pictures I've been snapping and doing absolutely nothing with until now:

1) Pesto.  I was gifted some basil starts in the spring after I killed the one basil plant I bought.  I babied these basils unlike any plant I've ever grown before. I kept them in black pots so that when it was warm enough to be outside, the sun would warm the soil around there roots.  I talked to them everyday and gently touched them so they would feel loved.  It was quite a labor of love and in the end, I was able to make a pretty significant amount of pesto! I froze the pesto into ice cubes, so we can save some for winter when we're pining for a taste of summer.

2) Tater-tots: BAD idea! Perhaps I did this all wrong, but making home-made tater-tots turned into an inferno of spontaneous hot-oil explosions.  That tater-tot on top of the stack is one of the culprits - they basically popped like popcorn in the oil.

3) Decibel Festival is a 5-day electronic music festival in Seattle that just so happened to fall precisely in line with the first week of school this year.  Alex and I discovered that Breakfast For Dinner was the fuel required to sustain five-days of non-stop dancing and school.  We had black tea, pancakes, Skagit River Valley Ranch breakfast sausage, and veggie omelets with fresh avocados that I smuggled back from California.  Nothing like an avacado fresh off the tree! mmmm!

Also, North Hill Bakery was right down the street from the Decibel in the Park show, so we could eat amazing ham-and-cheese croissants while groovin' to some delicious music.

4) Duck.  Every once in a while Stokesberry Farm sells duck, and we can't resist.  It's best to do as little as possible to it, it's perfect just the way it is! Here it is roasted on a bed of itty-bitty onions, which, if you've never had tiny onions roasted in duck juices, I highly recommend it!

5) Thanksgiving Leftovers: Turkey Curry.  It's brilliantly delicious and cranberries go surprisingly well in curry! I took Alex to Market Spice several weeks ago, and he was so inspired by all the spices there that he turned into a curry-making machine!

When Dinner Becomes Breakfast

Last Friday, Sarah taught everyone how to make tamales at our weekly Potluck. Alex made some awesome Mexican rice with black beans and veggies to go with, or in, the tamales. At the end of the night, Alex and I scored a bunch of the left overs, that I used for breakfast the next morning! I took Sarah's tamale dough and added some masa and bacon grease to make tortillas. I reheated Alex's rice and bean deliciousness and made some scrambled eggs to go with it. This might be my new favorite breakfast!

Refried Pizza and The Bay

In my exhaustion and starvation after returning home from 48hours in the Bay Area I created something incredible. I call it, Refried Pizza. What I was craving was grilled cheese and tomato soup, although we had no bread, just lots of old pizza that Alex swore was inedible at this point. How to make the inedible edible? Why fry it in bacon grease of course! That is precisely what I did. I even added some fresh Golden Glen sharp cheddar to the top of the old pizza and I let it get all melty and and delicious as it was frying. Perhaps anything would have tasted as good at that point in time, but wow that was delicious! The pizza was crispy with bacon-goodness on the bottom and smothered in melted yum on top, how can you go wrong?!

On a different note, while I was in Palo Alto I was on a mission to eat as much as possible. At La Bamba Taqueria I had a tamale with a texture similar to a souffle and a burrito with some of the best al pastor I've ever had. Although nothing compares to the burritos a few doors down at La Costena. I had my usual adobado chicken with black beans, rice, guacamole, cheese, cilantro, onions, pico de gallo, and salsa - it's all so good! My dad had some beautiful little tacos at La Costena. I also got my yearly fix of pumpkin and Swiss mocha ice cream at Rick's Rather Rich Ice Cream and spicy Mexican mocha's at Coupa Cafe that, "made our tonsils light up" according to my Dad. They did have quite the cayenne-pepper kick. I've saved the best for last though, a new discovery: Coconuts. It's a bright little Jamaican restaurant right next to city hall. The owner and chef, Robert Simpson, grew up in Jamaica and got trained in culinary arts at the CIA. I LOVE this restaurant, it is hands down the best Jamaican food I have had yet. All the meat was tender and juicy enough to eat with a spoon, the sauces and spice-mixes were spot on and packed a colorful punch. Not to mention each plate was visually a work of art.

...Thanksgiving update coming soon!

Left overs better than the meal they were left over from!

Berry Syrup(strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, pear) + Barbeque Sauce + Pork stir fry = incredible!

sweet, spicy, fruity, savory, mmmmm.