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

Comfort Christmas

For the past few years my husbands family has adopted a totally awesome unconventional Christmas tradition of no bought gifts (handmade things, stories, games, and other shared activities are all encouraged). Alex wanted to share his delicious brisket magic with everyone, and thus the food theme for Christmas dinner was born: comfort food!

Brisket BBQ sauce ingredients, fresh from World Spice.

Snacks by the light of the Christmas tree and Home Alone on TV

...crackers, cheeses, smoked salmon, hummus, grapes...

So there's a funny story I must include here that Alex's sister, Etalia told us about a phone conversation she had with her mom the day before Christmas. It went something like this:

Mom: Guess what I'm making?!
Etalia: What?
Mom: Crack!
Etalia: ....uuhhh, that's nice.....

Crack

Unbeknownst to us, crack is not just an illegal drug anymore, but rather a highly addictive chocolate confection!

Skagit River Valley Ranch Bacon is the best bacon in the world!

The grease was used for cooking, and we had bacon as both an appetizer and mixed into dinner.

Layered lemons, onions and shrimp...

A full kitchen!

 Etalia makes silly faces and gluten-free vegan pie dough

Jeremy's Alabama Shrimp Bake

Etalia & Sorin's Bacon Brussel Sprouts

Debbie's Salad

My Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Etalia's Gluten-Free Vegan Cornbread

Alex's Brisket

Sorin's Frosted Apple Pie (an old family recipe!)

An Edible Marriage

Well, since my last post I graduated college, got married, went on honeymoon, packed up my entire life, and moved to California where the new hubby and I have been in limbo for a few weeks between a storage unit and my dad's house. Needless to say, things have been a bit crazy...

Anyway, first things first - I must give props to the deliciousness that graced our wedding:

Edible Flower Bouquets - I wanted my bridesmaids and I to have completely edible bouquets, so I grew lots of edible flowers in my own yard, but ended up using flowers grown by the folks at Colinwood Farm.

Also, my friend Sarah figured out how to make roses out of bacon!! She put a dab of hot glue on a skewer, topped the glue with lettuce, and topped the lettuce with bacon baked in the shape of a rose bud. The glue gave the structure integrity while the lettuce acted as a barrier between bacon an glue. Brilliant!  While I was freaking out before the wedding, my bridesmaids assembled our bouquets with bacon roses, pea vines, bachelor buttons, squash blossoms, calendula, nasturtiums, and my favorite - columbine! Then immediately after the ceremony we chowed down.

Madres Catering - These ladies were an absolute pleasure to work with. They were totally chill and down for anything. They used local and/or organic produce and let us provide the meat and bread from our favorite folks at the farmers market (Skagit River Valley Ranch, Stokesberry Farms, and Tall Grass Bakery).  After our ceremony, we were greeted at our reception venue by Madres' lovely staff and a selection of appetizers. We chose to have a "heavy appetizer" style reception so our guests could be free to eat and drink as they please without having to conform to a set dinner plan. Here is our menu with pictures where I have them:

Salad Cups! 

Soup Shots 

Shots of zesty tomato soup that I found to be an important injection of calories between hugs and conversation!

Crostinis with:

Shredded chicken tinga

Roasted cumin mushrooms with parmesan

Dilled salmon

Polenta Triangles with Roast Tomato Chutney (so good!)

Bacon Wrapped Cesar Potatoes

Roast potatoes with Cesar dressing, wrapped in bacon (delicious!)

Sausage Bites with a Trio of Dips

Skagit Valley sweet and hot Italian sausages wrapped in pastry dough

Slider Bar:

Cuban pulled pork

Beef patties

Vegan roast veggies

Condiments

Tall Grass Bakery brioche or mutli-grain slider buns

NON-ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES:

Heather's Groovy Drink Mix

(Heather is one of the owners of Madres, she is a wizard with a blender and whatever happens to be in season!)

Dry Sodas

ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES:

Homebrew!

Made by me, Alex, and our friends!

(and supplemented with Elysian beer and Charles Shaw wine)

The only one not on the list is the beer we toasted with - a brew that Alex and I concocted together:

Lavender Ginger IPA

(Also Sarah designed this gorgeous drink menu!)

Trophy Cupcakes - Dessert was a couple hundred mini cupcakes of three different flavors: Snickerdoodle, Triple Chocolate, and Hummingbird (a more savory dessert cake made with banana, pineapple, and coconut).

In addition to Trophy cupcakes, Alex's sister made gluten-free vegan cupcakes ( you can see a few at the edges of the photo above, at the base of the tier).

T'was a delicious wedding indeed!

Baked Eggs

Ever since Alex convinced me five years ago that eggs are delicious, I've been very slowly exploring the myriad of ways to cook an egg.  We had breakfast with our upstairs neighbors one morning and Candice made a dish simpler than scrambled eggs. It blew my mind and I went through a bit of a crazy egg-baking phase. It's just an egg or two in a ramekin with a splash of milk, some chopped kale (or spinach or whatever is in the fridge), topped with cheese, and baked in the oven just until it sets. If the eggs are still a tad runny, toast makes a great companion. And no breakfast is complete without a piece of Skagit River Valley bacon!

Catching up on my neglected blog!

I've been neglecting this blog and there's two reasons:

1) Between the end of winter and the slow start of spring, it's pretty easy to get jaded about cooking.  The farmers market still only has potatoes, kale, turnips, and if your lucky - some onions and carrots.  And even the freezer stash of peppers, broccoli, ginger, peas, and corn is starting to become monotonous.  It feels a bit like I'm in hibernation, patiently waiting for summer vegetables.

2) Alex and I are getting married this summer!! So I've been totally preoccupied by wedding planning.

Alex and I have also been eating out more than usual - partially because our cooking inspiration is in a lull, and partially because we've had some sun here in Seattle and we chase it any chance we get!  Here's some quick restaurant reviews of where we've been hanging out lately:

Skillet - If Alex and I ever created our own restaurant, this would probably be it. Creative breakfast and breakfast-inspired foods all day long.  The bacon jam on their burgers is amazing, and we swear there's a secret ingredient in the french fries (coconut oil?!). Also, Skillet is conveniently located on the South-West corner of Union & 14th Ave. and they have floor-to-ceiling windows, which makes this an excellent spot to be on a sunny day!

Captain Blacks - It looks like an itty bitty little ramshackle pirate-themed bar, until you walk out on their gigantic West-facing deck... this is the spot to be on a sunny day!! Oh and also, they have a pretty decent beer selection and you can often find a Skillet truck right next door.

Kimchi Bistro - We went here for our friend, Kris's birthday and OMG this is some of the best Korean food I've ever had! We need to go here more often!

Pinky's Pig & Chips - It's a food truck located in the parking lot of the gas station next to the liquor store in Wallingford.  This place is run by two guys from Detroit who seem to have found they're calling in life and they're stoked about it. They will blow your mind with their sassy molassy sauces and their meats will undoubtedly induce a multidimensional flavorgasm.  Oh and their sandwiches are huge, especially for the cheap price!  I definitely recommend starting with a slider and working your way up to a full size sandwich.

Wedding planing has largely consisted of foody things so far, of course. I'm totally stoked to be working with Madres Catering, they're a smaller company run by three mothers who simply love to cook and live by the motto, "Find a job you love and you'll never work another day in your life".  They focus on local/in-season ingredients, they have strong influences from Latin American cuisine, and they're excited to accommodate all my ridiculous requests like using only Skagit River Valley Ranch meats and severing homebrew made by us and our friends!

For dessert, it's not official yet, but Trophy Cupcakes is the plan.

What else is edible at a wedding? Flowers, of course! I'm growing all the flowers for our wedding, so I know they're edible and organic. And since there's a lot of text in this post, I think it's high time I posted some pictures.  Here's what my edible flowers look like so far - from top to bottom: Marigolds, Red Calendula seedling, Yellow Calendula that came back from last year, Pink Daisy's and Sweet Cicily that also came back from last year.  In addition to these, I've also planted Dahlias, Day Lillies, Nasturtiums, Dianthus, Bachelor Buttons, Chives, and all sorts of Brassicas. ...this should be a delicious wedding indeed!

 

A Cast Iron Love Affair...

After destroying a high-end non-stick Scanpan, I started researching the original, indestructible, non-stick pan: cast iron. I started, as I often do, chatting with a salesperson at City Kitchens. He informed me that most, if not all of the modern non-stick surfaces are intended to be used with vegetable fats and repeated use with animal fat can actually degrade the non-stick surface. Considering that I cook daily with bacon grease, modern non-stick surfaces are clearly not for me.

So, cast iron. Something about the Lodge brand pans has never impressed me. They're bulky, pre-seasoned with who-knows-what, and their rough texture just doesn't seems very conducive to optimal non-stick. However Lodge is one of the few (American made) cast iron cookware companies that still exists... so I turned to eBay to find some quality old-fashioned cast iron from the early 1900's.

Griswold and Wagner were two American cast iron producers around the turn of the century. They were eventually bought in the 1950's and now you can apparently still find "Wagner" pans that are now made in China.  Both Wagner and Griswold pans gained a reputation of being high quality pans - they're light weight and forged in a way that maximizes non-stickness. Interestingly, Griswold pans are hot collectors items while Wagner pans go relatively unnoticed in the antique market.  This means it was relatively easy for me to find a prime-condition 10inch Wagner pan for about $30 (Whereas the exact same pan with a "Griswold" stamp might have cost at least $100... economics is silly).

As soon as I got my Wagner pan in the mail, I threw it in the oven to cook off the seasoning so that I could re-season it with bacon grease.  What is brilliant about this is that every morning when I cook bacon, I'm doing something good for my pan - whereas before I was just slowly killing my Scanpan with bacon.  It's funny how much better I feel about life knowing I'm being good to my cast iron pan and in return my cast iron pan is good to me.

The first thing I made was poutine. I fried french fries in my cast iron pan. Then poured off the excess grease, spread the french fries on the bottom of the pan, covered them with gravy and Golden Glen Farms cheese curds and then I put the whole thing in the oven until the cheese melted.

This pan made the best french fries I've ever had.  Needless to say, I'm totally head over heals in love with cast iron.

Biscuits & Duck Gravy

There's something about snow that inspires me to make biscuits. Conveniently, we also have a glut of duck stock at the moment.  So I made biscuits with duck gravy and a side of bacon for a glorious snowy Sunday breakfast!

There are two things that make the gravy absolutely magical; first, I used stock made from Stokesberry Farms duck, and their ducks are divine. Secondly, the stock was almost entirely duck and leeks, and then I started the gravy by sauteing leeks in butter.  Few things are better than the simple deliciousness of leeks, butter, and duck.  When the leeks began to turn translucent I added a bit of flour and then enough duck stock to get the perfect gravy consistency (with a bit of stirring and patience,of course). Here's breakfast in the snow!:

Blue Cheese Cheesecake Bacon Maple Donuts

For Alex's birthday I constructed something ridiculously delicious - blue cheese cheesecake bacon maple donuts. Essentially it was a yeast donut, filled with blue cheese cheesecake and topped with maple icing and bacon bits. Here's the process:

After letting the dough rise a few times, sit over night and rise some more I rolled it out to about a 1/8-1/4 inch thick and used a circle cookie cutter to cut out circles of dough.

Every circle got brushed with egg whites and half the circles got a dollup of the blue cheese cheesecake filling which was just equal parts Humbolt Fog, Cream Cheese, and Sour Cream, plus a dash of vanilla and a sprinkle of sugar.

Then I made a sandwich with two doughy circles and the filling in between. I thoroughly pinched the edges together and then placed them on a tray to rise one last time for about 30 min.

Once they were all puffy and risen, I heated up a pan of canola oil for vegetarian doughnuts, and a separate pan of bacon grease for meaty doughnuts.

I let them fry until they were golden brown all over and then let the oil drip off on some paper towels.

While the doughnuts cooled, I made a basic milk icing with added maple syrup and then iced the doughnuts when they were cool. Vegetarian doughnuts were topped with sprinkles and the meaty doughnuts were topped with the famous Skagit River Valley Ranch Bacon. I was worried they were going to be too intense, but they turned out to be a big crowd-pleaser and there were only two left at the end of the party - perfect for breakfast the next morning!