Deborah Madison's Multigrain Waffles

As I try to catch up on my posts, I'm realizing that I haven't been snapping as many photos as I'd like.  So I'm skipping ahead to this one - Deborah Madison's Basic Waffles recipe, for which I took the Multigrain variation.  I never would have turned to Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for a waffle recipe, as I usually take it off the shelf looking for something to do with my CSA share, but it's a good basic recipe and I like the suggestions she makes in the Multigrain variation.

Deborah Madison lists in the ingredients: milk or buttermilk.  Well, since they interact a little differently with leaveners, I opted to use buttermilk and so swapped the measures for baking powder/baking soda so that there would be more of the soda and less of the powders.  For my "multigrains" I used a total of 2 cups of various flours: 1 cup spelt flour, 1/4 cup + 2 Tbsp cornmeal, 1/4 cup oat flour, 3 Tbsp wheat bran, 2 Tbsp teff flour, 1 Tbsp 7-grain hot cereal (dry).  As long as a reliable flour is used for the bulk of it (1 cup or 1/2 the flour), you can pretty much throw anything in there, which I like because I have so many less common flours that I don't have much to do with.  I'd like to try teff grains next time, as they are super tiny and add a nice crunch.  Millet or amaranth would be good too, as long as the amount of (literally) whole grains is kept small so as not to disrupt the balance of flour. 

There is no sugar in the recipe, so it can be used for a sweet or savory application - we opted for sweet, using some of the peach rum sauce I canned last year, which fully made up for the lack of sugar.  I froze the extra in a gallon bag with parchment paper between the layers.

Oat Soda Bread

Heidi's Oat Soda Bread is a spinoff of her Rye Soda Bread from Super Natural Every Day.  I loved the rye version and I was actually a bit skeptical about the oat version since I liked the rye so much.  Fortunately, this is some of the best bread I have ever had and probably the best bread I have ever made myself.  I love the whole soda bread technique because it's so much quicker and easier than making a yeasted bread.  This bread makes a great sandwich bread as long as you like it by itself.  I tried it with some tomato, arugula, and whole grain mustard (also homemade, recipe from Super Natural Every Day).  I topped this bread with oat bran, since I have a whole bunch of it hanging around.  I'm really looking forward to experimenting a little more.  This bread has a lot of all-purpose flour in it, which I'm sure really helps the texture, but I would like to find a way to make it more whole-grain.  I'm looking forward to trying a spelt version too, now that I've got the basic technique down.  For someone who never makes bread because of the time commitment, this is a great option.

Rye Soda Bread with Dill Butter

This is a fantastic pair of recipes from Super Natural Every Day.  I've been meaning to make the Rye Soda Bread - it's one of the ones I had my eye on early on when I got the book.  The Dill Butter was never on my short list.  But when we got two bunches of dill from the CSA, I figured, why not both?  I used up some of the chives from my little container garden as well.

I don't know what I was thinking not wanting to make the Dill Butter to go with the bread.  It's ridiculously good!  I'm not one to butter my bread, which is why I wasn't interested in it at first - but it's really worth it.  I have been snacking on it for the past few days, and I even ate it for breakfast yesterday (and probably will tomorrow).  Despite the somewhat assertive flavors it actually makes a very nice breakfast.  (In Heidi's book it's in the Lunch section, but I like to warm it up and we don't have a toaster oven at work, so breakfast it is!)  Farmer cheese is added to the butter, almost as much as there is butter, so it's not entirely butter that I'm eating for breakfast!

I'm officially out of rye flour, though, so now it's time to try a variation with some other types of flour.  I'm trying to use up as much of my flour as possible, but it's rough with all this produce coming at me left and right!

Which reminds me... I'll try to get my CSA post up tomorrow!