Crafting your own Cuisine-Waffles!

• By Eileen Perkins –

Many people’s experience of waffles is limited to those available in the grocery’s frozen food section. For individuals avoiding gluten and dairy, the offering is pretty bleak, as well as expensive for what you get. Homemade waffles are a versatile baked good that serve not only as breakfast fare but as quick, on-the-run meals when pulled from the freezer, heated and paired with a smear of nut butter and jam or ND cheese. My husband jokingly refers to them as “cookies”, and there have been hectic days when they seemed to be just that (especially heated and tossed in cinnamon sugar)! For this recipe, I urge you to experiment with different flour blends, both premixed and your own creations, but only AFTER trying the brand recommended here. This formula was developed utilizing it. GF flour blends are a varied bunch, and although all baking is, in a sense, chemistry, baking for special dietary needs is much more obviously so, as one who’s had a fair share of unpalatable outcomes will attest.

Monthly Cookbook Review—Everyday Vegan Eats-Family Favorites from My Kitchen to Yours, by Zsu Dever

This is an excellent vegan cooking primer for both new and seasoned cooks. Its unassuming format and simple, straight forward style might lead a reader to incorrectly expect less than professionally informed tutorage. Zsu Dever is a restaurant veteran, from a long line of restaurateurs, with many years of vegan cooking experience. (Years ago, her family went vegan cold turkey…so to speak!)  Clearly, the book’s presentation was intentionally chosen, complete with photos that illustrate, realistically, how the food is likely to look when you cook it, not photoshopped to illustrate a discouraging, unnatural standard. 

  Especially helpful is the “Recipe Basics” chapter, which includes formulas for “Savory Broth Mix”, “Hearty Umami Flavoring”, and a mainstay familiar to many a vegetarian cook, “Vegetable Broth”.  These are followed by a section on “Dairy free basics”, with a very good suggestion for how to break the “dairy cheese habit.” Also included is a collection of plant-strong protein recipes among which details crafting simple Seitan (“wheat meat”) from scratch. This book can save a person money!

I found Everyday Vegan Eats-Family Favorites from My Kitchen to Yours refreshing. If you are embarking on a more plant-based diet, I think you might too. The process does not need to be scary or difficult. This book might help you smoothly transition, which is the author’s expressed goal.  To learn more, check out her website, www.zsusveganpantry.com.