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.

Banana Cereal Muffins

This morning I made the Banana Cereal Muffins from Good to the Grain, my new favorite book. Written by Kim Boyce, a pastry chef turned stay at home mom, these recipes are designed for optimal performance rather than nutrition - something that always bothers me until I get to the delicious finished product. I plan to try the recipes as-is first, then begin to tinker a little to cut down on some of the all-purpose flour she uses. I'm not a pastry chef, so a flatter muffin top won't really bother me.

Some of the ingredients this recipe calls for: cracked multigrain hot cereal, whole-grain rye flour, bananas, molasses. Yum. The multigrain cereal, which I really bought with this recipe in mind, is actually delicious as a cereal if you like cream of wheat, oatmeal, etc. (which I do). I made it for breakfast (plain, with water only) and reserved the 1/2 cup needed for the muffins for when I had more time to make them. I made much more cereal than I could eat so I had it for breakfast for the next two days as well. I reheated it in the microwave with a generous splash of soymilk, which made it sweet enough for me. I hate ingredients that have only one purpose because they fill up my cabinets and refrigerator and then I spend hours looking for recipes to use them up.

I have never used rye flour before, which made it more interesting when I opened the bag and saw what it looked like - kind of like gravel. Yuck. But no, it was good in the muffins. I can understand why the recipe was written with 1 cup rye flour and 1 cup all-purpose flour as I don't know if I could stand the taste of rye alone.

I did forget an ingredient - a teaspoon of cinnamon. I had it sitting out on the counter after making oatmeal cookies the other day, and I thought to myself, "oh good, it's already out," and then I forgot to put it in. Fortunately the muffins are still delicious - I was very concerned when I realized what I'd left out halfway through the baking time. Molasses is a unique flavor of its own, which I think helped to save it, and so did the bananas. But next time I will include it and I do think it will be better that way.