Day 159 (For Real This Time): Waffling

First, let me say whoopsie! I noticed I had a discrepancy between the number of blog posts I've posted and the number of days this project has been going on. And guess what? I skipped day eighty-three. Ay carumba! But I've fixed my count now, and as disappointing as it is to be one day farther behind than I thought I was, at least I'm back on track.

So: as for today's post (Day 159, for real this time).

I often find myself perusing a cookbook only to find that the recipe I want to use requires huge cooking times or refrigeration overnight. I tell myself I'll remember next time, that I'll be prepared and start prep work in the early morning or the night before. I rarely remember to do this. My husband, however, does.

He got it in his head yesterday that he wanted to make waffles for breakfast, so last night before bed we whipped up the batter for Overnight Waffles, a recipe we found in our good old Better Homes & Gardens cookbook.

It seemed like these should be the waffles to end all waffle making, especially for those of us who are used to making waffles from a mix (Ian often makes oatmeal cinnamon waffles, but those are what we consider "healthy" and therefore don't count). They had yeast in them. Yeast! And vanilla and sugar and all those good things. We expected fluffy waffle nirvana.

Boy, were we wrong.

Ian says this isn't the first time the old Better Homes & Gardens has let us down, though I reminded him that it has provided a few of his favorite dinners (he LOVES the Greek-style turkey burgers). But I couldn't deny, these waffles were flavorless. I reread the recipe. We'd done everything right. We'd refrigerated long enough. We'd taken all the steps we were asked to take, and what we got was not worth the effort. It makes one long for Krusteaz.

Part of our problem could lie with our waffle maker, which we realized this morning is a piece of junk. Ian used to blame the "healthy" waffle recipe for the waffle maker's uneven cooking, and sometimes he blamed himself, but we were recently at my parents' house where my dad made us several batches of delicious waffles (thank you, Dad and Krusteaz) in their professional waffle maker, and so of course ours suffers by comparison. But I've never heard of an uneven cooking sapping all the flavor out of a food. So the middle was browner than the edges. So what?

I did learn one lesson from this: just because something takes longer to make, that doesn't mean it's better.