Celebrate Waffle Week!

The first week of September is National Waffle Week. Leggo your bland Eggos and break your fast every day this week with a better-than-the-average waffle. Try some of these ideas or come up with your own creative waffles.

Use your waffles for a sandwich. Try peanut butter and jelly or honey. Grill your waffles and use them for a steak or tuna sandwich, or stack them and add your favorite lunch items in between the layers.

Substitute your regular English muffin with waffles and add what you’d normally eat on top, or make a sandwich by placing a scrambled egg and your favorite breakfast meat in between two waffles.

Top your waffles with blueberries, raspberries, or your favorite fruit.

Serve a waffle on a stick to kids with plenty of yogurt or fruit dip.

Crumble waffles and use them in cobblers, pies and toppings. Substitute them as your salad croutons.

Top a waffle with ice cream and chocolate sauce for dessert.

Make homemade waffles with your own waffle maker. Add chocolate chips, nuts or your favorite toppings inside the actual batter for a twist.

Play a game where everyone takes a bit every time the word “waffle” is used!

Make chicken and waffles, a specialty in many restaurants.

Write a short message to a loved one on your waffles with chocolate syrup.

Make florentaffle, eggettes, toasted waffle pudding and these other cool, crazy waffle ideas.

Trick your guests into thinking you’ve topped a waffle with an egg—and instead make it vanilla yogurt with canned apricot in the center. (This is great for April Fool’s Day as well.)

Make buckwheat sour cream, potato, or other waffle recipes you can find here. Try some lime juice and brown sugar for topping.

Add in some bran or flaxseed when you make your waffles for extra nutritional content.

Make stuff out of your waffles. Remember Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates? Make a log cabin, a castle or your child’s favorite animal.

Substitute club soda for your water in the batter for fluffier waffles.

Copy the Denny’s alien pancake for your kids by using a waffle and topping it with whipped cream, cherries for eyes, and a bacon (or fakin’) strip for a mouth.

Mix and match your favorite syrups.

You could also try breakfast for dinner and use either waffles or waffle fries. Don’t forget waffle cones for dessert!

For over 100 ways to make waffles, visit Mr. Breakfast.

Mmm Mmm Frozen Yogurt

I used to spend a lot of money for a small amount of frozen yogurt from Red Mango.  What I loved about Red Mango was that they had so many yummy options for your yogurt toppings, including different kinds of cereal (cinnamon toast crunch, fruity pebbles, etc.), different fruits (banana, kiwi, strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, etc.), different candies (reeses pieces, kit kat, chocolate chips, yogurt chips, etc.), mochi balls, honey, nuts, pretty much everything you could think of.  What I hated about it was that it was so expensive and every topping was an additional cost.  They would also serve it up for you, so some employees might sprinkle a small amount of toppings, while others sprinkled quite a bit.  I would always walk away with a 4oz cup of frozen yogurt and two sides and pay no less than five dollars a pop.

Recently I discovered my new favorite ice cream shop popping up all over the US, maybe you have heard of it or tried it out, it is called Yogurtland and the founder is brilliant!  With Yogurtland you pay by the ounce and you can serve it up yourself, letting you choose if you want a lot or a little. You also have the option of about twelve to twenty five different flavors, depending on the franchised location.  Some flavors include: Peanut butter (my favorite), Arctic Vanilla, Fresh Strawberry, Dutch Chocolate, Pistachio (also delicious), Taro (amazing), Green Tea, Double Cookies and Cream, Orange Crème, Cherry Vanilla, Toasted Coconut and more (including holiday flavors: Gingerbread Cookies, Pumpkin Pie, Candy Cane).

When you walk into Yogurtland, the employees immediately offer you sample cups so that you can actually try all the flavors (if you so choose).  You have two choices of cup options, “small” which to me is more like a medium, and “large” which to me is more like an extra large, but then again, you do not have to fill them all the way up, just as much as you’d like.  Once you choose your flavors, you then walk over to the toppings counter, which has even more toppings than Red Mango.  They have fruits I have never even heard of, and candies that I would never thought to put on top of ice cream.  They have cookies (remember those cute little pink and white animal cookies, yep they have those, they even have vanilla wafers, which I do not remember them tasting so good), several different types of sprinkles and syrups giving it just an extra little special touch, a touch you cannot get from just any frozen yogurt stand.

After I fill up, and I mean FILL UP my “small” yogurt cup with ice cream (usually peanut butter, yummy) and tons of toppings, I put my cup on the scale and I have yet to pay over four dollars.  I get way more ice cream than Red Mango and a million different toppings of my choice AND I pay way less than Red Mango.  They also give you these cute green or pink spoons, I love it!  The only thing that Yogurtland is missing is a punch card, because since I have found a Yogurtland, I kid you not, I go there several times a week – it is that delicious!

Check out their website to find a Yogurtland near you, you will not regret it! http://www.yogurt-land.com/

Slow Food National Day of Action

Though it’s been around since 1986, the Slow Food Movement has only recently begun to spread across the United States, hitting Boston University as recently as 2007. Founded by Carlo Pertini, it was actually started to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Italy. Today, it is a grassroots movement that aims to preserve cultural foods and to move away from the world of fast food, active in 122 countries.  Some famous people in the U.S. who are involved in the movement include Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Eric Scholsser.

The point of the Slow Food Movement is sustainability, cultural identity, and health. Some of its specific objectives include maintaining small-scale local food processing, preserving cultural foods via seed banks, educating about fast food risks, food diversity, gardening, ethical buying, factory farms and taste, creating regional celebrations to highlight local foods, and lobbying against genetic engineering and pesticide use.

One result of the Slow Food Movement was the preservation of four different varieties of native American turkey. To maintain the species, members purchased 4,000 eggs and raised the turkeys to reproduce, as well as to be slaughtered and sold.

The movement is an important one, especially during times of rapid diabetes, obesity and heart disease in the Western world. If you’re interested in getting involved in the Slow Food Movement, here are a few things you can do.

Get involved in the Slow Food National Day of Action! It’s September 7 this year (Labor Day). Click here to sign the petition to get slow food into schools, contact your legislators, and organize your own event.

Become an official member. Join Slow Food USA and get involved.

Garden your own grub. Teach your kids, neighborhood children, and anyone willing to learn how to garden, too. If you’re a gardening professional, try sharing your skills with local businesses and schools to help spread the knowledge.

Host block party potlucks. Encourage people to skip ordering the pizza and wings and instead create dishes that they may be famous for, family recipes, and other delicious, local-food-based treats.

Eat slow food! It’s one of the most powerful things you can do. Skip the fast food whenever possible. If it’s hard to do, start with one slow food night a week with your family. Make a big deal about cooking together and make it a fun event. Gradually increase it to more than one night until it’s a habit.

How To Learn To Cook

I had always justified my crap food habit by promising myself that if I ever worked from home, I'd cook for myself.  A few years ago I finally transitioned to working from a home office.  I decided that it was time to put up or shut up.

I obviously can't speak for everyone.  But personally, the reason that I never properly cooked until that point was A) I was raised as a latchkey child by a single working mother who was attending night school to earn her MBA.  In other words, I was raised on Hot Pockets and Lean Cuisine.  And B) pre-packaged food is just so EASY.  It tells you what to do right there on the side of the box!  No one ever dithered over a box of Kraft Mac 'N Cheese wondering if they were doing it right.

Never having eaten proper food before, I not only didn't know how to prepare it - I wasn't sure what the end results were supposed to be.  I had a lot of "Is eggplant supposed to taste like this?" moments, believe me.

It's not easy to learn how to fix meals for yourself.  But I tell you what, I've lost weight - without making any other changes.  And when I eat pre-packaged food now, it doesn't seem like food to me.  It tastes strange, like chemicals, and the texture is all wrong.  And it's surprisingly un-filling, considering the calories.

The first time you make a new recipe, it's going to take a while.  And it may not turn out well.  That's just how it goes.  I have learned to have a back-up plan.  Start with something simple, and something that you're familiar with. 

In my case, I decided to make my own Egg McMuffins, because I love them so very much.  It seriously takes two minutes to make an Egg McMuffin, which is less than the amount of time you'd spend at the drive through.  And it has a lot less fat and sodium.

You will need eggs, cheese, and English muffins.  Put the muffins in the toaster.  Crack one or two eggs into a pan, and poke the yellows so that they will lie flat.  Cook the eggs until they're almost finished, then flip them and count to 10 (more or less).  Slide them onto the muffin, add a slice of cheese, and go to town on that bad boy!  I like to add a dash of steak sauce for flavor. 

My two favorite cooking resources are:

1.     A Veggie Venture's A-Z of Vegetables.  Look up any vegetable you might encounter at the store, and Alanna will provide a handful of easy recipes, plus extra info on how to prep it.  And her salad dressing "recipe" is the best!

2.    Allrecipes.com.  Here's what you do: search for a recipe, then click to sort the results by rating.  Pick the recipe which has the most stars AND the highest number of reviews.  (For example, a 4-star recipe with 5,000 reviews is better than a 5-star recipe with only 2 reviews.) 

Before you write your shopping list, read the comments!  Most recipes are made far better by the amendments suggested by the commenters.  Look for the phrase "I did X like everyone suggested.."

Would You Eat Road Kill?

It sounds like something you’d joke about your in-laws, doesn’t it? “Oh, Mike’s mom is having us all over for dinner on Sunday… she said if we see any armadillo or possum on the side of the road to bring it on over, she didn’t have time to make appetizers.”

Sure, we get a laugh out of it. But as often as we joke about Uncle Bob eating raccoon he’s scraped off a highway, do we make as many cracks about him hunting animals in the fall for the same reason? Some of us might—but essentially hunting is more socially acceptable than eating animal carcasses left on the side of the road.

And how many people are actually eating road kill because they’re actually hungry? A lot of people honestly cannot afford food these days. Even some of those who can are advocating eating roadside meat—including vegans!—because they believe that this fresh, organic and free food source is a waste if not eaten. (Though, of course, you could argue that other animals often get a meal out of it, too.)

There may be as many as one hundred million or more animals killed in traffic every year. That’s 250,000 a day—enough meals for quite a few families. One vegan couple who has even used deceased bear as a food source explains their first time eating such an animal—a gray fox—in their zine, The Feral Forager. Hardcore vegans, they had no qualms eating an already-deceased animal—as well as making clothing from it. Along with the rest of the people in their collective, they now eat road kill every day.

My main concern would be the sanitation involved; meat is meat. If you’re going to eat pork, why not possum? But the risk of maggots and rot alone make me turn away from the idea. (If you’ve seen Into the Wild, a certain scene might make you feel the same way!)

Is it so different from eating a hamburger? If you’ve read Fast Food Nation or other similar works, you know that meat’s not the most sanitary food to begin with. And honestly, is a deer hit by a motor vehicle any different than the one your uncle shot between the eyes last season? If you would eat the latter, wouldn’t not eating the former be considered wasteful? What do you think—would you, could you, eat dead meat? Its head, its tail, its face, its feet?

Have you ever eaten road kill? Why or why not?

Ice cream: Pacific Northwest style

Hey now, Pacific Northwest summertime! Ready for dessert? Who wants to make some ice cream so grungy that Cobain himself would have applauded its unmistakable nonchalantness- that certain something of a Seattle je ne sais quoi? Like Fennel ice cream. Like a sundae made with kirsch caramel sauce and bing cherries and hazelnuts resting upon mounds of oh-oh-so-so vanilla ice cream. Ice cream made of milk, whole and raw from the breast of a cow or goat and soy milk made from soy plants that sing Hendrix at night to the stars. This is Ice cream made with fresh Pacificnorthwestern grown mint and huckleberries with quietly humming northern souls. When you eat this ice cream- you will become filled with the soul of music inspired by gray days and gritty nights and a few short weeks of sun in the summer. Let's get Pacific northwest with this ice cream recipe.

First let's start with equipment:

1- ice cream maker

2- bowls of all sizes, stainless steel or glass

3- whisk

4- decorative ice cream bowls and and stemmed sherbert glasses with tiny silver or gold spoons

5- linen and silk blended, hand-embrodiered napkins because you are very, very fond of your guest. you can order a pair of napkins for every occasion, made by a seamstress in Portland for less than $20. why not? life is short. live, artfully. (old plaid shirts ripped into squares may be a good alternative for casual nights)

6- cocktail glasses

 

Ingredients

1- milk (raw, whole)

2- heavy cream

3- fennel seeds

4- vanilla beans

5- sugar, granulated

6- salt (a pinch of)

7- egg yolks

8- bing cherries

9- huckleberries

10- blueberries

11- white chocolate chips

12- a lime

13- hazlenuts, pinenuts, walnuts (toast for toppings)

14- Kirsch (3 bottles of) - a cherry liqueur beloved by women and Germans

15- Absinthe (2 bottles)

 

Mix and serve chilled. Invite friends, listen to The Decemberists, blast KEXP on the radio, stay out of the sun. Stay cool, always stay cool. Cherry? Champagne cocktails would also go well with the Fennel ice cream and your solid black outfit. Chocolate covered espresso beans to go on that Triple Northwest Berry Oh-Oh-So-so Vanilla Bing Cherry Nut Sundaes. Don't forget a glass of chilled Absinthe stirred with mountain fresh mineral water and take a walk on the wild side! Like Oscar Wilde style so keep the Kirsch Caramel sauce handy if you have company over!

Garnish with mint, of course!

The Natural Ingenuity of Food

I love cultural anthropology. Analyzing the way widespread behaviors form is fascinating and it's not surprising that much of what we know today as "culture" initially formed as a response to needs and desires related to food. Thinking about the things we eat and, more importantly, how we prepare them leads to a baffling sense of surface-level absurdity. We go to such great lengths to make our food that it seems almost random. Of course, no innovation is meaningless. In the end, even the most elaborate food preparations stem from the same thought process: Problem and Solution.

Take sausage, for instance. Sausage is nothing if not a series of problems that need to be solved. Problem #1: I have all of these leftover bits of meat that, on their own, just aren't palatable. They're tough, coarse or just don't taste very good. I don't just want to throw them away, so what do I do? Well, let's grind them all together to alleviate the toughness and coarseness, then hit them with a bunch of herbs and spices to make them taste good. Problem #2: Now that I've ground everything up, it's loose and difficult to cook. So, I'll throw everything in an edible casing so it'll cook evenly. Voila! Sausage.

I know that it had to take a lot of trial and error to come up with the proper procedure for sausage-making, but you get the point. Still, not all innovative foods are the result of inconveniences. My favorite ingenious food is, by far, bread.

Thinking about the bread-making process, it's seems pretty silly to go through all of that messing around for something so simple. But when I think of bread, I think of stubborn early humans who came to the concept of bread in stages.

Grain has been a staple of the human diet for a very long time now, but the fact is that grain on its own barely even qualifies as food. Take wheat, for example. A kernel of wheat isn't exactly a casual snack. It's hard, it's bland, it may even have some bitter compounds lurking in its shell. If I were a prehistoric man who really wanted to eat grain, the first problem I'd solve would be the hardness. I'm tired of breaking my teeth on grain, so why not grind it up before I eat it? Simple enough. Grain + Rock = Dinner.

Yeah, still pretty tough stuff. Even if I grind it down into a powder, grain's still dry and not very tasty. Water's wet, so let's slop on some water and make my grain meal into a paste. Yeah, okay, still not very good, but we're making progress.

Now, for a time, prehistoric humans left grain meal as it was, but they didn't usually mix it with water. As they began to domesticate cattle, they found that they could stretch their bovine food supply by holding off the slaughter and relying on blood instead. It sounds gross now, but blood was a significant part of the human diet for a long time. Early cattle herders would mix cow's blood with grain meal for a high-carb, high-protein dish that would have sustained them through some of the rougher parts of the year.

But my prehistoric man isn't satisfied with moistened grain meal. He and the rest of his tribe have stumbled across the benefits imparted to food by fire. Whether by accident or just sheer curiosity, people started heating their foods to favorable results. As Paleolithic Foodie has discovered, wet grain meal slop isn't exactly conducive to impaling upon a twig and roasting over a fire. What he can do with it is plop it down on a hot rock for a spell. After some experimentation (and a few burned flatbreads), Paleolithic Foodie has created a tasty treat that will end up changing the way people eat and live forever.

I don't know if it went exactly like that, but I couldn't be too far off. Modern scientists have been observing non-human primates for a century now as a window into the earliest stages of human culture. Some of the most fascinating studies have come out of Japan, like when Dr. Syunzo Kawamaru observed a troop of macaques start washing the sand off their food when one of their own "invented" the innovation in 1954. Only this one troop demonstrated the food-washing behavior, indicating that it wasn't an instinct, but a behavioral development stemming from the ingenuity of an individual.

Food is fascinating like that. It's a subject at the heart (or stomach) of cultural evolution. Studying the way we and our closest genetic relatives approach food-centered problems is not only relevant to culinary practices, but to the history of thought itself.

Mallard Ice Cream, Bellingham, WA

Ice cream is not only one of the best possible summer desserts; it's one of the foods suited to eating-while-blogging, if you have a dish instead of a cone. I note that blogging while eating a cone is not recommended. Mallard Ice Cream and Cafe, on 1323 Railroad Avenue in Bellingham, Washington is a Bellingham institution

beloved by locals and exceedingly well-respected as a supplier of ice cream to local restaurants. They make all their own ice cream, right on the premises, and offer an astonishing variety of flavors. Sure, they have the standard vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and even the slightly less common varieties; you can find lemon cheesecake, coconut chocolate chunk with almonds, butter pecan, mocha, or green tea.

Where Mallard's really stands out is in the wide variety of slightly unusual flavors, like cinnamon, Earl Grey, basil, ginger, lavender, cayenne-chocolate, raspberry-mint, or vanilla with black pepper. And all the ice cream is made with fresh ingredients. You can get several sizes of sugar cone or dishes, or even pints. There's a case near of pre-packed pints near the counter, but they'll gladly pack one just for you. It's worthwhile taking a few minutes to look at what's being offered on any given day—it changes very frequently, and there's often just a brief window of time for a variety that's made with seasonal fruit, like fresh Washington Cherries or Blackberries. You can request samples if you want to try a flavor, or be adventurous and combine two different flavors in a single cone or scoop.

They also have tables inside and out, and off to the side are board games to play with your kids while you enjoy your ice cream. Do bring cash or a checkbook though; they don't take credit cards.

The Seattle Luxury Chocolate Salon

On Sunday, July 12th at the Bell Harbor Conference Center, The 2nd Annual Seattle Luxury Chocolate Salon presented by TasteTV introduced cacao fanatics of the Pacific Northwest t

o some of the nation's finest artisan products. The vendors were a mix of traditional confectioners and ambitious fusion craftspeople, some local and others from some of the nation's up-and-coming culture centers.

There were a number of surprises at the Chocolate Salon, such as the unexpectedly strong showing from Montana's burgeoning artisan chocolate scene. Three vendors- Posh Chocolat from Missoula and the Bozeman-based La Chatelaine and Crave operations all had delightful contributions. Posh Chocolat concentrates on spice-flavored truffles, La Chatelaine offers updated French-style treats while Crave hits the chocolate game out of the park with a wide assortment of modern but not overly ambitious candies.

Seattle itself has a growing artisan business community, with chocolatiers among the most promising. The name of the 21st century chocolate game is innovation, though sometimes the idea is better than the execution. Among the successes at the Salon was German-born Dennis Haupt's Suess Chocolates and Pastries based out of Madison Park. Many of his chocolates were balanced two-note confections like a Green Tea Ganache and a truly stunning Citrus Truffle. The real stand-out of the day goes to Oh! Chocolate, originally out of Peachtree City, Georgia but with several locations in Seattle. Their Habanero Mango Truffle is one of the most delightful, unique chocolates I've ever tasted.

One of the more unusual offerings of the day was Choffy, a 100% cacao beverage that is like a more mild, caffeine-free alternative to coffee. Choffy certainly has a lot of potential, but the current product lacks definition. With some tweaking to make it sharper, stronger and more flavorful, Choffy could be an exciting trend.

Not all of the concepts were a success. There is a disconcerting trend these days to try to turn treats into shills for snake-oil health and fitness products. Case in point: Xocai "healthy chocolates" by the not-at-all artisan MXI Corporation. These so-called snacks barely qualify as chocolate in any sense. They are chalky, artificial and generally offensive to the palate. Worst of all, the nutritional claims are dubious at best. Though the vendors touted Xocai chocolates as being diabetic-friendly, only two of their products, the Protein Bar and the tiny Nuggets, have a low enough sugar content to be safely consumed by people with the condition. When it comes to chocolate, it's best to stick with the stuff that promises an indulgent treat.

The most inspiring story from the Salon was that of Divine Chocolate, a high-quality bar company that uses the fair-trade beans of Kuapa Kokoo in Ghana exclusively. Kuapa Kokoo is one of the most successful applications of the community-ownership farming model in Africa. The cacao farmers co-own Divine Chocolate and the profit sharing model has allowed them to bring clean, fresh water to their towns and send their children to school. But it's not just a heartwarming story. Divine Chocolate is as tasty as anything you'll find on the artisan market.

The 2nd Annual Seattle Luxury Chocolate Salon was a wonderful experience. Whether you're a budding chocolatier, a foodie or just a fan of the sweet stuff, it was a fine showcase of America's creative, increasingly international confections industry.

The Beautiful Pickle

Let's talk about pickles, one of the most ingenious culinary inventions in human history. People have been crafting a wide variety of pickled products for centuries. Just about every culture has some form of pickle, from the extensive collection of chutney varieties in India to the Eastern European pickled cucumbers that have long been favorites in the cultural mish-mash of America.

The word "pickle" is a bit mysterious. The farthest back etymologists have been able to trace it is to a medieval Dutch word "pekel", which itself is just a word meaning "pickle". Whatever the case, the concept behind pickling has remained the same for well over 1000 years. A pickle, in the broadest sense, is an edible item preserved in a brine, meaning a solution of water and salt. That's not to say that a cucumber left to sit in a saltwater bath will come out palatable. In order to produce a tasty pickle, some other elements will have to come to the primordial soup of preservation that is brine.

In the United States the most commonly pickled food is the humble cucumber. Immigrants from all over the world have brought their particular take on this treat to our shores for hundreds of years. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there were pickles on the Mayflower, though they probably would have been of the Polish-influenced ogorek variety that eschews the use of vinegar and depends solely on salt brine and yeast fermentation to pickle the cucumber. Ogoreki are extremely versatile, able to take on just about any herb or spice with which they share the brine.

One of the most popular types of pickled cucumber in the States is the Kosher pickle brought to America by Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the 19th century. These simple but tasty pickles get most of their flavor from a generous addition of garlic to the brine. The variation that also includes dill has been a particular favorite, especially as a hamburger condiment.

Though the term "pickle" often refers to the pickled cucumber in the United States and Canada, there are so many other pickled foods from all over the world. Sauerkraut is cabbage that is shredded and lacto-fermented just like traditional pickled cucumbers. It has been a staple of German cuisine for a very long time, enhancing everything from sausage to slaw with its characteristic bite.

Fans of sushi know that the meal isn't complete without gari, the thin shreds of sweet pickled ginger served as a palate cleanser in between different kinds of nigiri. Pickles are indeed an elegant way to prepare the tongue for new flavors without corrupting them with the last dish, especially using vinegar-treated pickles.

Pickles also have a number of health benefits. They contain a decent amount of Vitamin K, which helps the body in a wide range of ways from maintaining bone mass, aiding in healthy clotting and acting as a powerful antioxidant in the liver.

Of all the unusual but amazing inventions in culinary history, none have the allure of the pickle. At once humble and sophisticated, the products of this unique process are a common bond between cultures (and meals).

Pages