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My cooking Achilles heel has always been the seemingly simple procedures. It took me years to figure out how to make pancakes without ending up with a first batch that was burned on the outside and raw in the middle. I still occasionally fluff a batch of brown rice only to find a lagoon at the bottom of the pot, which leads to the dilemma: do I re-cover the pot and attempt to cook the rice further or do I eat the rice from the top of the pot and sacrifice the bottom ½ inch to the cooking gods?
Unfortunately for Rob, these are the very cooking mishaps that really make me boil. (I’m sorry… I couldn’t resist.) I’ve merrily thrown away entire meals because the recipes sounded like Nirvana but tasted like Courtney Love’s sweaty fishnets after one of her late-night making-a-fool-of-herself benders (or at least, how the fan sites say her fishnets taste). So I’m not a big Courtney Love fan but the point is that I can accept failure if the recipe is something totally new and bizarre, but rice for Julia Child’s sake?
I say unfortunately for Rob because inevitably, he is the one a growling stomach, merrily waiting for a meal that history suggests will be palatable if not scrumptious. I’m no gourmet chef but I can hold my own when it comes to everyday dining. So picture it, Rob’s had enjoyable meals for weeks. Maybe he’s reading a book on the couch, listening to me bang around the kitchen. (It’s always banging – my cabinets are so cramped that it’s not usual for me to remove a pan, close the door and then hear an avalanche of pans, lids and whatnot sliding off shelves because the precarious organizational balance has been disrupted in the name of sautéing.) And then, the most dreaded of kitchen noises: me cussing. Loudly. With no shame. Followed quickly by the dull plastic sound of pots banging against the side of the trashcan. It’s not pretty, people.
All of which brings us to this past weekend when we brought home a relic of Rob’s childhood: his mother’s waffle iron.
Gotta give it to his mom, the woman cooked three meals a day for nearly 50 years and she’s had enough. Other than the occasional scrambled egg and bacon, she’s given up her apron and I applaud her for it! I can barely cook two meals a day – and it’s only two if you consider putting English muffins in the toaster cooking.
Except on Sundays when I ditch the Thomas muffins for a big breakfast, usually eaten over our game du jour (lately cribbage though scrabble was the favorite for months). Rob, in one of his bursts of domestic enthusiasm, took a toothbrush to the waffle iron that hasn’t seen the light of day for a decade. Twenty minutes later, he clicked the plates back into their electric bed for a little reheating. Then Rob took cover.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever cooked waffles. I’ve watched my mom make them in her typically nonchalant way. She pours the batter, wanders off and magically reappears when they’re perfectly golden. Seems so simple...
This, however, is me. The confusion began as soon as I plugged the iron in. My mom’s waffle iron has two settings: on and off. This one had 11: settings 1 – 9, high and off. I decided to preheat on high while I made the batter.
Though I like for my Sunday breakfast to be on the decadent side, I do like to feel at least a little virtuous. For that reason, I lean toward oatmeal pancakes with walnuts, whole wheat French toast, mostly-egg-white omelets with sautéed veggies and lighter cheeses, like Goat Lady Dairy goat cheese, and sides of fruit and/or soy sausage. I found and printed a waffle recipe that included whole wheat flour and ground flaxseed… but lurking below it in my search results was a Cooking Light recipe for chocolate chip waffles.
After combining my dry ingredients, adding my wet ingredients and folding in a beaten egg white, I folded in a half cup of mini chocolate chips. I turned down the waffle iron to medium, poured on my first pools of batter, gently pressed down the lid and, nonchalantly, walked away.
I don’t know if you’ve ever cooked Gimmie Lean soy sausage but it’s sticky… in a way that makes you wonder if it really is better for you than pork sausage. Probably not but it’s the sausage compromise that Rob, a fan of the southern-style sausage patty, and I, the formerly-kosher-keeping Jew, have made. I formed my sausage patties from the grey soy goo and spent the next half hour (minute) scrubbing it from the palms of my hands. A faint charred smell was starting to develop from the waffle iron’s general vicinity. Giving myself the first-try, will-be-better-next-time pep talk, I peeled back the lid to the waffle maker to find two perfectly golden chocolate chip waffles waiting for me.
Rob came out of his hiding place to applaud my first go as I poured two more blobs of batter onto the iron. Then I got impatient… and peeked… way too soon… which tore the waffles in half. Believing in waffle-elf magic, I closed the lid and imagined elf glue adhering the two sides, making my second batch as successful as my first.
Ah, but no. A couple of minutes later, I again opened the iron to find 4 very thin waffles where two thicker waffles should have been.
This is normally the moment in cooking when I either dump the remaining batter in the trash and gloomily eat my one good waffle or dump everything in the trash and declare loudly that I guess we might as well eat out. But as the fact sinks in that at some point during this year I will be attending my 10 year high school reunion, I’ve realized my temper tantrums, which weren’t cute when I was a kid, are even less cute now.
Strapped with a fork and tongs, I pried all four crispy waffles from the recesses of the waffle grid. They weren’t burned, and they had chocolate chips in them, so they became a natural choice for a brunch appetizer (Rob coined the term “brappetizer”). I used them to lure Rob out of his hiding spot where he dove, duck-and-cover fashion, when the waffles ripped.
The third truly was the charm: after talking myself out of peeking several times, I gingerly opened the lid to find that where I had dumped the remainder of the batter, two perfect waffles had formed. I love a happy ending.
Rob loves them even more: after a neck-in-neck race to the end of the cribbage board, Rob stomped me soundly in the last hand.
**Rob categorically denies that he hides in the face of impending culinary disaster. Any disappearance, he says, is merely convenient coincidence.
We used to always give the first two waffles to the beagles, Bullet and Sherman. That's what their waffle destiny is.