whole grains and happy houseguests

We are back from our road trip! It was fantastic. More later — specifically after I have sorted through over 1200 photos, deleted most of them, and selected a small handful to share.

In other (hopefully) exciting news, I decided (yesterday) to participate again in National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). That means I will be posting every day in the month of November. If I had actually planned ahead it would mean that I would have some content ready to go, but November sort of sneaked up on me and so I don’t. This should be fun.

Anyway!

Photo by Amanda

This is my friend Amanda! She worked on my last show with me and is lovely and wonderful and I enjoy her greatly. After the show opened she took her own road trip through California, including a visit (seen in the above photo) to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. Her photos helped inspire our own road trip of late.

Because of the complexities of travel and contracts and schedules and things, Amanda ended up staying with us before and after her road trip adventuring. It also meant that she was our last house guest at our previous apartment and the first at our new place.

Most importantly, her visit gave me an excuse to make fancy breakfast.

Since neither my nor my husband’s usual schedules –working or not– usually involve early morning departures, I offer up fancy breakfast from time to time. This is almost always brushed off in favor of cold cereal for him and a brief period of sulking for me.

Enter Amanda the house guest. Fancy breakfast excuse! Since we’d both been working on the show, most of our recent meals had been eaten hurriedly off plastic or Pyrex. The prospect of actual dishes, cloth napkins, a dining room table, and polite company was thrilling.

Also exciting was the prospect of waffles.

As mentioned previously, I am a breakfast fan, but try to avoid starch-bomb meals that leave me cranky and starving soon after. To prevent this, I wanted to add some whole grains and fiber to the waffles. I found a recipe in Moosewood Restaurant New Classics that was intriguing and decided to start with that. I changed it up a bit but it was a good base.

These are not crisp-on-the-outside-fluffy-on-the-inside type waffles. They’re a touch heartier and have some tooth to them. I enjoyed their more complex flavor, however, and wasn’t starving and cranky when I had to go to work later.

We served them with butter and maple syrup, but they would also be lovely with a fruit sauce and are sturdy enough to hold up to peanut butter. Coffee, tea, or mimosas would make a nice accompaniment, too.

What do you serve guests for breakfast?

I also made fancy breakfast when she came back! Granted, I also tend to make everyone breakfast when I am a house guest, but I think we can all share in the knowledge that I am not normal.

Whole Grain Waffles

Adapted from Moosewood Restaurant New Classics
Serves 4

Ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup flax seeds, ground in a spice or coffee grinder
• 1/4 cup cornmeal
• 1 tablespoon chia or poppy seeds
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil

Directions:

1. Whisk together dry ingredients in a medium bowl.
2. Stir together wet ingredients until combined.
3. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir just until incorporated. Let batter stand for 10 minutes.
4. Cook batter in waffle iron. Serve warm topped with syrup or fruit.

Tagged as: breakfast, nablopomo, sweet, waffles, whole grain