Thursday, May 25, 2006
Waffling from home
You know what passes as excitement for me? Getting a new waffle iron. I’ve never had one and have been wanting one for a few months now. I don’t like to get a hankering for a nice thick Belgian waffle and have to go searching for a restaurant that actually serves them. Disappointment is, well, disappointing. And no fun. So yesterday we went to a department store and used a gift card we had. They had the regular wimpy waffle irons, but after a bit of searching we found one that did the deep-pocketed Belgian waffles we like. And it was on sale! I heart sales. 40% off is a beautiful thing. Here’s what we brought home:
Look how beautful and shiny it is! You can even see how clean the underside of our kitchen cabinet is! Never having used this type of waffle iron before, I read the instructions. I’m a geek, I do that. Instructions are my friends. Now, it says not to overfill the thing when pouring in the batter, and there’s even a diagram showing how it should be done.
See? Little puddles in the center. So that’s what I did. I ladled my waffle batter carefully into the middle of each section without filling it completely. I figure it’ll spread out and become a nice full waffle. Well, it didn’t. The puddle of batter pretty much stayed where it was and became beautiful partial waffles. When I opened the iron my first reaction was, “They look like bugs!”
See? They have legs, a head and even a stinger. Viscious waffle bugs! I was immediately enamored by them and started playing with them. La dee dah waffle bugs crawling off the plate and across the table. Weee aren’t they cute?? Of course my sweety takes one look and asks, “What did you do?”
“I followed the instructions!” I whined and pointed helplessly at the diagram. “See? They don’t fill ‘em!”
My next batch I made sure to carefully fill the sections with batter so they would look more like normal waffle squares. They turned out much better.
Unfortunately the batter I used wasn’t that great. It was a whole wheat pancake mix that was great for pancakes. I added the oil it asked for in order to turn it into waffle mix, but bleah it came out really dry. I ended up slathering tons of butter and syrup onto mine in order to make it palatable. We’re trying to eat healthy, yet how ironic what we had to do to it in order to make it taste good. The whole wheat pancakes were tasty, but we need to experiment a little more to find a good waffle recipe because this one did NOT work well. But I’m still happy for my new waffle iron!