Taking a Spin on the Traditional Favorite

Waffles as Dessert

While the new craze is savory waffles, let’s not forget the old and welcome back dessert waffles onto the menu. Chefs have learned to master the buttermilk flavor of waffles by combining it with sugary treats to turn this into one of America’s all time favorite signature sweets. Although an old time favorite, simple and traditional dessert waffles can take a spin to create something new and unique to any menu.

To keep it simple to begin with, let’s take one of America’s traditional desserts, where you only need a delicious waffle batter cooked to perfection, your favorite ice cream and maple syrup or rich melted chocolate.

If you love chocolate, try this spin on the traditional recipe by making fudge waffles with ice cream and chocolate sauce.

For those of you who like chocolate but feel as though the above is a little too much, mellow it out and try buttermilk waffles with a homemade chocolate hazelnut spread topped with some ice cream and some nuts.

Or maybe, chocolate just isn’t your thing at all – and this is where it starts to get creative – if you love cinnamon rolls, try cinnamon roll waffles. Take a plain buttermilk waffle; add some cinnamon sugar drizzle on top along with some cream cheese icing to really make this into one of the most delectable desserts.

To stick with the theme of incorporating sweets into waffles, why not try crème brulee waffles? Although this has yet to be popularized, as it has been with French toast, why not take the same recipe and instead of bread, use already made waffles?

Waffles can substitute in any dessert as well that has any type of bread involved, since waffles are a sweeter, heavier type of dough-based food. Keep this in mind when experimenting with new recipes at home.

A Cup For Battling Your Sneezes

I'm sick with a cold. Yes, I sure am.  Thanks for the sympathy or lack there of because colds are just blinking for life.

But what has a cold to do with tea besides the fact that everyone and their mom will tell you to drink some hot tea.  It's funny that every single person will give you a different answer when it comes to drinking tea to get over a cold or flu.  However, whether you were raised in America, Britain, Africa, or anywhere in the world where vegetation exists in some sort of edible way.

Yet, every culture has a different remedy.  Well this could be a good thing because in a place where multidimensional people exist with differing body types, we each need a unique way to ease a cold in our most awkward, pajama'd, and red nosed times of our lives.

I just had some sort of sinus tea that my significant other brewed up for me.  I don't know if it was the tea or the warmth of the liquid but something happens with that first sip.  It is as if the ambrosia of the gods has been sent through the ground and into the tea pot. I could not believe the ease, the smile it brought to my chapped lips which had previously been rather unfortunately and over-exaggeratingly puckered from moping about on the couch.  I admit it.  It's not manly but I did it.  I hate being sick, it's like being kicked in the stomach for days straight, and hoping that you might be able to catch your breath again.

But I can finally enjoy my time while my immune system reboots and wages a war through the art of herbal tea and following the ways of our unwavering ancestors.

Drink up and enjoy a cup.

The Origins of High Tea

I used to love having lunch at a tiny British tea shop in my town when I was a little girl. The shop was run by a British woman, so that was good enough for me to believe that I really had been transported to Mother England. Whether or not it’s completely authentic, high tea is a tradition that I really wish that we’d adopt here in the United States. It’s kind of like the siesta—Americans need some kind of break in the middle of the day that will let them calm down and relax for a minute. And this is coming from a die-hard coffee addict. Tea and its accouterments are a different kind of experience from going into Starbucks and rushing out with a venti latte—its ceremonies require you to slow down, to think, to interact with your experience. Let’s talk about some of the best things about a good English tea:

--There are three different types of afternoon tea. The first is called cream tea and includes tea, Devonshire or clotted cream and scones with jam. The second is light tea, which includes tea, scones and cakes or shortbreads. The final is a full tea, which includes teas, small sandwiches, appetizers, candies, scones and desserts.

--The Brits got hungry between breakfast and their massive dinners before tea time was invented in the 18th century. The creation of this middle-of-the-day meal came because of the shift of dinner from noontime to a later hour.

--That isn’t to say that the British weren’t big tea drinkers before this period. On the contrary, after Charles II and his bride, the Portuguese Catherine de Braganza, started drinking tea and importing it from Morocco, India and Asia, tea drinking became tres chic in the upper classes. In fact, Charles II set the course of the infamous British East India Company. Tea soon came to replace ale as the national drink of England.

--During the Industrial Revolution, families came home from work in the midday hungrier for more something more substantive than flaky tea sandwiches. They opted for bread, meats, butter, pickles and cheese to accompany their tea. This afternoon meal was eaten at high dining tables, rather than at the low, table-side chairs popular with rich society. Thus, this was dubbed “high tea.”

--Queen Victoria officially invented tea time the way that we know it. She invited friends over to her house around five o’clock and served them petite cakes, sandwiches and sweets.

 

 

Different Seasons Calls for...

Different Waffles!

 

There are many different ways to bring in the changing seasons, but why not start with something simple, such as breakfast? Get the waffle iron hot; these seasonal recipes are something you are not going to want to miss.

Fall

As the leaves start to change colors and fall and the weather becomes a little cooler, pumpkin becomes an obsession from invading coffee shops to grocery store shelves. Take advantage of this while you can because before you know it, the seasons will begin to change again. When you go to your local grocery store, pick up a can of pumpkin and some apple cider and try pumpkin waffles with apple cider syrup for a fall spin on this traditional favorite.

Winter

Winter is right around the corner when you start to see gingerbread-housing kits on display at the end of each aisle in the store. What warms the heart more than when the snow starts to melt than the somewhat spicy but ultimately sweet taste of gingerbread? While decorations cover your house setting the holiday spirit, fill the stomachs of your guests with gingerbread waffles and cranberry maple syrup.

Spring

When the snow starts to slowly melt and everything begins to turn green, mixed with vibrant colors of different flowers, it’s time for spring. Along with spring are a lot of fruits and other produce that couldn’t survive the extreme temperatures of the winter. Beautiful blue starts to fill grocery stores as blueberries are now in season. Try lemon poppy seed waffles with blueberry syrup.

Summer

As everyone begins to gear up bringing out his or her bathing suits, summer is on its way. Cherries come into season for a short time between June and August. While fruit is a healthy choice, it becomes absolutely irresistible with chocolate. Try chocolate waffles with poached cherries when you’re craving something sweet. Every now and then, it’s time to cheat on that diet, although this may not be an ice cream cone, one of summer’s favorites, it’s sure to come close.

 

A Real Recipe for Bachelor Chow

In the once-underrated, now-beloved show Futurama, a foodstuff of questionable content called Bachelor Chow is a fixture in the life of lazy everyman Philip J. Fry. It's a joke predicated on the comical loneliness and carelessness of the life of a single man, but it also comes from a deep seated and rarely acknowledged fantasy for such a substance to exist. The real world is full of food products marketed to men who would likely pick up a package of Bachelor Chow if it existed, but most of those things aren't terribly healthy or tasty. It's time to fix that. Herein you will find a recipe for an actual rendition of Bachelor Chow.

First, we need to define what Bachelor Chow ought to be. Primarily, it ought to be a sort of mush. It's meant to be consumed in a bowl or, better yet, straight from the package with little more than a spoon or spork. It also has to be palatable both warm or cold. Most importantly, the stuff has to be nutritious. Plenty of things can be made into a composite paste and shoveled into the mouth of a hungry bachelor, but the man needs his vitamins and protein just like everyone else.

So, let's establish a base element. This is going to be the medium by which everything else about the Bachelor Chow will be delivered. The knee-jerk idea is potatoes, as they mash easily and tend to play well with other flavors, but I'm going to reject that idea. It's too much starch and it's too heavy. Sweet potatoes or yams would be healthier and more flavorful, but those flavors would be a little too distinct and make the dish inflexible. No, my recipe opts for cornmeal mush. This stuff is pretty amazing on its own and is sorely under-utilized in the kitchen. Made by slowly heating a measure of cornmeal with water and salt, maybe a pinch of sugar and some butter, cornmeal mush is versatile and tasty. It's the basis for corn fritters, pudding and a wide variety of other dishes. It's not bland like potatoes or flour but it's also not strongly flavored on its own. As a bonus, it's easy to control how solid it sets up upon cooling by changing the cornmeal to water ratio.

Now that we have our base, it's time to up the nutrition. This is when we bring out our blender to make a vegetable puree. A collection of healthy, tasty veggies stir fried and blended to a smooth consistency will go great with the cornmeal mush and will still mix well with other, stronger flavors down the road. A mix of broccoli, carrots, onion, garlic, bell peppers and zucchini should work out nicely. Stirred to combine with the cornmeal mush, we're well on our way to functional Bachelor Chow.

Adding protein is a bit more tricky, but we have several options. There are simple approaches like a lazy chili of beans and 80/20 ground beef, but we can go for other flavors with unsweetened nut paste or vegan products like seitan or tempeh to give the chow a longer shelf life than meat will allow. Hitting the "plain" meal-and-vegetable chow with some Greek yogurt will also do the trick. We could go for whey, but that's boring and not terribly appetizing.

Lastly, there's the issue of flavor. On its own, Bachelor Chow won't have a whole lot of taste. There'll be some from the vegetable puree depending on the proportions of garlic and peppers, but maybe blandness is a good thing in this case. Bachelor Chow is meant to be a lazy, not at all exciting product designed to merely keep slobs alive. Also, it wouldn't be hard to hit a bowl of chow with one's sauce of choice or a dash of bottled spices.

It may not be the food of the future, but I think this recipe for Bachelor Chow is perfectly functional. It's natural, nutritious and flexible, which is about as much as we can ask for.

Kishr: A Tea Made From Coffee

This ancient beverage from Yemen is making its way over to the US

 

You might not consider a drink that comes from products of the coffee plant to be tea, exactly. You might be inclined to keep those two hot, caffeinated beverages in separate categories so as to mollify the organizational tics in the back of your mind. Maybe you're even the kind of person who gets ever so slightly miffed when someone considers herbal tea like chamomile to be included in the same category as darjeeling or earl grey. If you happen to be a beverage purist, kishr will probably unsettle your preconceptions a little. It's a drink that's arguably both tea and coffee at the same time--and also neither of those things.

Kishr is made from the parts of the coffee plant that are left over when you harvest the beans. The beans--the part that makes up the most popular caffeinated drink worldwide--are taken out of coffee cherries, or the fruit of the plant. The remaining husks--which are typically discarded in coffee production--are then sun-dried and ground into a fine powder along with cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger to make kishr. 

The naming confusion only really comes when you try to frame the drink in American terms. In its native Yemen, kishr is just kishr-- its very own category. It's drunk hot and has a strong, spicy flavor, a bit like chai or the more pungent of herbal teas. So far, it has not yet found an American market. One Chicago entrepreneur, though, is looking to change that.

Rowida Assalimy was born in Kansas, not Yemen, but grew up drinking kishr when her parents would bring the beverage back from their home country. Once she left her parents' house, she found herself unable to purchase the drink anywhere in the country. Upon beginning business school at the University of Chicago, Assalimy decided to go ahead and become the first person to sell kishr in the states. She buys her coffee cherry husks from farmers in Yemen's Haraz mountains. She's already begun to make a few changes to help increase sales of the ancient beverage. While kishr is traditionally brewed in powder form, Assalimy thinks American consumers will react better to the looks of a courser substance. She'll also tone down the spices in the drink in order to appeal to a more Western palate. And she'll market kishr as tea, not coffee--"coffee cherry," she thinks, will just make people think of a cherry-flavored espresso drink. 

Thanks to Assalimy, you can now buy kishr at the local grocery store Goddess and Grocer at 1646 North Damen Avenue. If the drink catches on in Chicago, we might just be seeing kishr marketed all over the country soon. 

"High" Tea or High Tea?

What are you thinking, cause I'm thinking peacefully

When I first saw the name High Tea, my mind never went to the proper form of drinking tea or having a bit of snacks during the day.  Of course, my fantastic mind went straight to a form of Weed tea.

But what a concept!  For all I know, it could have been a site for medical marijuana users who enjoy the tea rather than smoking which is a compelling argument filled with hope and much sadness.  The fight for medical marijuana use has been a long and tumultuous one which can be very difficult for those that use this plant for health reasons such as MS or cancer to bring their appetite back after chemo.

There is a message of hope there in an idea of high tea but not because it is weed tea but because the idea of having TEA is a very peaceful one.  You never really think about warring parties having tea with one another, unless having peace talks.

So maybe there is something very HIGH about tea, maybe in the sense that it unlocks a higher way of thinking. It could be English Breakfast tea for all we know or Earl Grey.  But when you sit down with someone else to enjoy a nice cup of tea, it brings peace and conversation.

This could be one legal way to get "high" without having to worry about being arrested.  And it is definitely healthy so drink up.

And while you are at it, think of those that are not as fortunate or that are in need of a medical tea that may help them through a difficult part of their lives.  This may seem unorthodox, but as they say "one good thought or action begets another."  So let's think not only highly of our friends but of those across the world, not just tea drinkers but all that breathe and smile just as we do.

Prepping Garlic: A Contentious Issue

Garlic, that delicious little bulb beloved by many, has often caused disputes in the kitchen. It has a papery outer skin which should be removed before cooking. You would think we could all agree on that, but even here there is dissent. Some people advocate not peeling the garlic before roasting it. Simply toss the cloves into your recipe whole, and peel them later as you eat your dish.
But for the most part, it comes down to getting that skin off. I had one particularly OCD and stubborn roommate who insisted on peeling each clove individually, by hand, without any other means used. He would just sit there and pick at it until it came off. Drove me nuts.
I learned the "smash and cut" method from a friend who is a genuine certified CIA graduate and former high-profile sous chef. You set the clove on the cutting board, lay the flat of the knife atop it, and give it a good pound with your free hand. Then cut it at the butt end and slip the clove out of the paper.
But other chefs insist that you must never do this, because it bruises the clove.
Then again, today a Metafilter user published a post highlighting an instructional video from Saveur Magazine's Executive Food Editor titled "How to peel a head of garlic in less than 10 seconds." To sum up the technique, you separate all the cloves (which Coleman does by the expedient of smashing the bulb from above with his fist) then put them in a stainless steel bowl. Invert a second bowl atop the first, then shake the whole thing up and down like mad. And when you are done, perfectly peeled cloves of garlic will result.
I haven't tried this (I don't have two bowls that fit together that well) but other users on the thread report using the technique with mixed success. It seems to work better for some types of garlic than others. Still, though, it's an impressive way to peel an entire bulb of garlic in one fell swoop!
And next? Many people insist that you mince the cloves by hand with a knife. Others (myself included) swear by the hand-held garlic press. I read a comparison test once which discovered that you do get better garlic taste if you mince by hand, because it releases less of the juice. But I don't care, if I have to mince more than two cloves, I definitely use the garlic press.
Regardless of what technique you use, I think we can all agree that those jars of pre-minced garlic are pitiful at best. Fresh garlic is where it's at!

What's for Dinner?

Let's Try Breakfast.

The waffle has been forever treasured as a breakfast treat since essentially it is a batter- or dough-based cake with common toppings such as whipped cream, strawberries, chocolate, sugar, honey, syrups and ice cream. However, the savory food revolution has taken place and the waffle no longer is just a delicious, sweet food for breakfast, but one that you can eat now for dinner. 

Sweet waffles, previously used as desserts were meant to cleanse the palette of the savory entree however, combining the two has proved to be quite delicious. Using a waffle as a bread base leads to a heartier meal since waffles are a lot thicker than usual bread. Many of the original waffle recipes have been altered to fit the needs of the entree but still remain relatively the same in consistency and in taste. Sometimes, the recipe is changed to actually mimic bread qualities, or for the instance of tacos, the recipe caters to a waffle that is thinner and crispier to resemble actual hard taco shells. 

Since waffles are batter- or dough-based, it makes sense that they seem to be replacing bread or dough bases/crusts. With this in mind, think pizza dough, taco shells, sandwich bread, rolls, breadsticks - all those are being replaced with waffles or waffle style starches. Cornmeal waffles with spicy chili, or cornmeal waffles with smoked salmon and a white cheddar cheese sauce, waffle grilled cheese, fried chicken and buttermilk waffles, or even tuna melts on waffle bread.

Although this may be the first time that you're hearing about savory waffles, they have dated a while back. Restaurants have had these on their menus for quite some time and new restaurants are continuing to open with appetizers, entrees and desserts as well that incorporate waffles as a main focus or ingredient in the dish. One taste of a savory waffle and there's no guarantee you'll go back to eating these for breakfast.

24 Eggs for Steve Harwell

In a supremely encouraging bit of Internet news, the online campaign to convince Smashmouth frontman Steve Harwell to eat 24 eggs in public is officially a success. The campaign started as an absurdist joke on the SomethingAwful forums and evolved into Harwell's bid to raise money for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. He set the bar at $10,000 and the fundraising effort reached $11,000 within one week. True to his word, Mr. Harwell will be visiting the new restaurant of his friend, renowned TV chef Guy Fieri, called Johnny Garlic's on October 10th. Seeing as 24 eggs in one sitting is a formidable meal, I've decided to put together a menu to help Harwell not only finish his challenge, but enjoy it. The key is to mix up the cooking methods and use a little culinary trickery to get around this heavy eating experience.

First Course: 6 Deviled Eggs

The benefit of splitting up the eggs into different dishes is to make the challenge more like a meal instead of an eating contest. It'll help Steve Harwell get into the right mindset. It's hard enough to consume 24 eggs that he shouldn't have to eat 24 of the same thing, counting as he goes. The first course should be something light, something cold and something fun. Deviled eggs are an excellent choice. They're finger food, they rely on non-egg flavors in the foreground and they're not all that filling. Most importantly, they have very little in them other than eggs themselves. As a bonus, the mixing process for the filling is bound to result in some waste, which combined with other mass-loss methods can really add up over the course of the entire meal.

 

Second Course: 4 Servings of Artichoke Florentine (8 Eggs)

The Eggs Benedict family is a collection of some of the best recipes for eggs in history. They're tasty without being too heavy and they're easy to modify. The classic recipe for Eggs Benedict is ill-suited for Harwell's challenge because it involves an English muffin. Steve's gonna want to steer clear of heavy stuff like bread in his meal. That's why I'm going for a double variation on the classic. Eggs Florentine substitutes the standard slice of ham of the Benedict (another too-heavy factor) with spinach and the Artichoke Benedict places the egg in a hollowed-out artichoke instead of on the muffin. These two variations will turn a filling dish into a refreshing second course, especially since Harwell isn't obligated to finish the artichokes or spinach.

 

Third Course: Portobello Quiche (6 Eggs)

At this point, Steve Harwell will start to get tired of egg flavors, however we've tried to augment them. This is why we're letting the eggs in the third course share the stage with a very different flavor. Quiche, when made properly, is fluffy and delightfully inconsequential. Unfortunately, a classic quiche lives in pie crust and we need to avoid bread to keep from weighing our challenger down. Baking the scrambled eggs in Portobello mushroom caps allows them to keep some form without being heavy and the mushrooms themselves will impart flavor and texture to the dish, especially if drizzled with white wine.

 

Fourth Course: Vanilla Amaretto Custard (4 Eggs)

Look no further than custard for the perfect egg-centric dessert. It's creamy, it's soft and it involves no solid components to trouble Mr. Harwell in the final stretch. Flavored with fresh vanilla bean and a spot of amaretto liqueur, this dessert will put a sweet, elegant finish on the 24 egg challenge.

 

I hope Steve Harwell enjoys his eggs, however he has them prepared, and I commend him for turning a silly Internet joke into an accomplishment of charity.

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