And in the mornin'....I'm makin' WAFFLES!

We have an extra kid tonight....the neighbor boy is spending the night.  My boys are SO excited.  They had originally asked if he could stay from Sunday til Thursday, lol!

I asked them to discuss what they wanted for breakfast and after about three seconds, my oldest came flying back upstairs and said, "WAFFLES!"

I love waffles.  I love the crispy-ness, I love the fun shape, I love that you can cut on the lines (yes, I know that's weird), and I really love the maple syrup that goes on them.  REAL maple syrup, not corn syrup with maple flavoring.  Ick.

I digress.

My very favorite thing is that I can make the batter the night before, stumble down to the kitchen, pull it out of the fridge, and make a delicious breakfast before the coffee kicks in.  Here's the recipe I used.  I put together a couple of recipes that we sort of liked and made a recipe we just love.

You'll notice it's a huge amount of ingredients.  Well, of course it is.  I have four kids and they love breakfast at breakfast.  I prefer to make breakfast for dinner as I'm NOT a morning person.  The way I get around this is to make this amount of waffle batter (it's a quadruple batch, fyi), make it all up, and freeze what we don't eat.  Although you'd probably be surprised at how many waffles we can put away.  I freeze them in zip-top bags and the kids can all get their dang breakfast for the next week or so.  It's a win-win situation.

Big batch of waffles - make 12-24 hours in advance

7 cups milk
1 pound butter
4 cups whole wheat flour
4 cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons salt
1/4 cup sugar
2 Tablespoons yeast (that's approximately 3 pouches - but be sure to measure!)
4 teaspoons vanilla
8 eggs

Melt the butter slowly in a saucepan with about a cup of the milk.  When the butter's all melted, take the pot off the heat and add the rest of the milk.  You want to cool down that mixture so it doesn't kill the yeast when you add it to the mix.  You could wait for an hour for it to cool down by itself, but I'm guessing you don't really want to do that.  :-)

While the butter is melting, mix the flours, salt, sugar, and yeast in a big bowl.  Mix the eggs and the vanilla in another bowl and set aside.  When the butter/milk mixture has cooled to just warm, add it to the flour mixture and beat until smooth.  Then add the egg/vanilla mixture.  Stir until smooth.

Cover (not tightly) and set in the fridge overnight.  The next morning get up, start the coffee, heat up your waffle irons (you have two, right?  that you found at a yard sale for $3 because they didn't know you had to flip the grids OVER to make waffles?  I thought so), and start a-cookin'.

If you'd like everyone to eat at the same time (or have a late riser), put them on cooling racks in a low oven (250F or lower) to keep warm.  Crack the oven door so they don't get soggy.

Pour the coffee, put a couple of waffles on your plate, butter if you feel you must, cut them, then add the syrup.  And yes, I cut them first.  I don't like them to get too soft.  Yes, I KNOW, I'm weird.

Enjoy!

Experimentation

I was gone this past weekend to the Home Educators Association of Virginia's annual conference.  It was great.  One of the greatest things was not having to cook or clean up after myself.  However, that also meant that I was at the mercy of the cook at whatever restaurant I visited.

The first night, I ate in the hotel restaurant.  Meh.  It was edible.  I wouldn't eat there again.  The next day I had Thai food.  I loved it.  I'm not sure how authentic it was, but it was delicious.  I had crab wontons and lettuce wraps.  I want to try making them at home.  How hard could it really be?  I have wonderful lettuce in the garden, and the basic ingredients for the filling can't be that hard to find, right?  Stop laughing at me...I really want to try it!!

The next evening I had a yummy burger for dinner.  However, even though it was tasty, it did leave much to be desired.  Of the two slices of bacon, only one was really cooked all the way.  The cheese had fallen off.  The bun was much to big for the burger.  Now I'm thinking of all the different burgers I could make at home.  Burgers with onion rings (skinny) and barbecue sauce and pepper jack cheese.  Or a mushroom, onion, and provolone burger.  My mind is racing!

Part of my experimentation train of thought comes indirectly from a speaker at the convention.  She was talking about decreasing your grocery bill.  Her first suggestion was to make a budget.  <sigh>  I don't do them.  BUT, what I did do was take the amount I spent per month (yay, Quicken!) and divided it by six (the number of people in our family) and then by 90 (the number of meals we eat in a month.  I discovered I spend approximately $1.48/person/meal.  I think that's awfully good.  And we eat WELL.

All that to say I think I'm entitled to a bit of experimentation.  Especially if it saves me $15 a meal for ONE person for Thai food and $10 for ONE burger.

Do you experiment?  Have you had any really good ones?  How about bad ones?  Let us learn from your mistakes!