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Tag Archives: breakfast

I make! Banana nut waffle edition

The other day I had some gross bananas.  All bananas are gross to me once they get any sort of brown on them.  Bananas should be eaten when they are still green tipped.

Anyway, I had some gross bananas.  I normally make banana nut bread with my gross bananas but I’ve been trying to branch out.  Banana nut bread is all well and good, but I don’t always want to eat a whole loaf.  I’ve also been curious just how well different types of batters would do in a waffle iron.  So…I made a batch of banana nut bread batter and then dumped it into the waffle iron.

Results?  Delicious.

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But the thing is, because the recipe is for a quick bread and not for a waffle, the results are not quite waffle-like.  I mean, it’s a waffle in shape but not in texture.  The texture is still like that of bread.  Like I said, it’s delicious but not quite right.

So now it’s time to experiment with leavening and also with temperature and length of cooking.  This time I heated the waffle iron to 350degF and left it in for…a cycle.  I forgot to look at the time, but I left it until the iron reached temperature again.  I think maybe I’ll try raising the temperature next time with the same recipe and see what happens.  And then maybe I’ll change the leavening to see what happens.

As it is, it’s pretty good the next day after you’ve toasted it in a toaster (darkest setting on mine).  It crisps up a little and banana bread (or waffle in this case) is always better the next day.

It looks like I’ll have to buy a lot of bananas.

 

I make! Turkey congee edition

You know how I roasted an entire turkey basically for myself a few weeks back, right?  And I’ve basically been subsisting off of turkey sandwiches since (not really)?  Well, I did make turkey stock which I then used to make turkey congee earlier this week.

Congee is a type of rice porridge eaten in Asia.  The type I made is more typical of the Hong Kong style, but I really like the Taiwanese style congee too.  I rather like having congee for breakfast in the winter (because otherwise it’s too hot) because it’s filling but not heavy.  And because I get to eat spicy pickled radish and preserved egg with it.  Also, because you can make it in a slow cooker and not have to worry about scraping the bottom of the pot so the rice doesn’t congeal and burn.  You set everything up at night before bed and in the morning, you have a warm pot of congee.  Yay!

Congee is pretty simple to make.  If you don’t have leftover rice (as is typically my case), you can start from uncooked rice.  You just need more liquid is all.  I prefer long grain rice for congee because of the resultant texture after cooking.  In this case, I used 1.5c (real cups and not those stupid rice cups) of raw, long grain rice, 2qt turkey stock, 1qt water, whatever turkey meat that I salvaged when making turkey stock, some ginger and green onions.  Everything goes into the slow cooker on low for about 8hr.  The next morning, dump in a few more pieces of ginger and more green onion and set it on high for 30min.  Done.

You can always switch up the stock to water ratio depending on what you have.  Or you can use all water.  I typically make this with chicken or fish, but I had all that turkey, you see.  And there are any number of add ins you could dump into the pot at the end.  It’s one of those pantry/fridge clearing things again.