Waffling

My Beloved and I love waffles. We have eaten them at restaurants as varied as the Brown Sugar Kitchen in Oakland and the Fremont Diner in Sonoma. We have made our own at home on long, lazy Sunday mornings, complete with real maple syrup, lashings of butter and the Sunday funnies. Occasionally, we even have them for dinner.

I wanted to replicate the crisp, light, cornmeal waffles they serve at the BSK so when I found a recipe online for cornmeal waffles with bacon bits, I knew we had dinner waffles in our future.

I hauled out my fastest waffle baker, an ancient appliance that can keep up with a boatload of hungry waffle lovers. I got it from The Fixer's Offerings and have loved it ever since. The electrical plug is a scary little relic and the metal switches get searingly hot during baking, but it makes a mean waffle really fast and it never sticks.

We had leftover already-crisped bacon (I know, I know - leftover bacon??? Who ever heard of such a thing?) in the fridge, so the batter went together in a snap. Ladled into the waffle iron, it emitted a fragrant steam of promise. Sadly, the resulting waffles were not light and not crisp and not anything like the ones at BSK. I didn't quite have enough bacon and the kind I had wasn't salty enough or smoky enough to give the result my mind had imagined. The corn flavor was evident, as was the rich buttermilk, so we really did enjoy the waffles but, as a copy of the BSK ones, they were a flop.

If you like buttery waffles with lots of corn and buttermilk flavor, however, we can recommend these. And, continuing to research cornmeal waffle recipes isn't exactly a hardship, is it? The journey begins here.