I’m getting married later this year, and my fiancée and I have already registered in at least one place. Can you guess what first item I picked was? That’s right…a waffle iron. It turned out to be a premature choice though, because to my surprise, I got my first waffle iron for Christmas. My fiancée put in a good word for me with rest of family saying, “Paul really wants a waffle iron.” I love it; I’ve already used it quite a lot since Christmas.

I followed recipe printed in manual on inaugural run. The more times I used it, bolder I got. I made substitutions and even added other ingredients like swapping milk for buttermilk or oil for butter. I altered amount of flour and even tried using pasteurized egg white; I’ll never do that again. Pasteurized egg whites just don’t fluff up way non-pasteurized egg whites do.

I hit pay dirt recently with my family. My latest experimental batter came out really well. So here it is, “Pauly’s Long Awaited Waffle Iron Waffle Batter!”

Waffle Batter

Ingredients:

2 cups of all-purpose flour 4 egg yolks 4 egg whites 1 pinch of cream of tartar 1 cup of butter milk 1 cup of sugar 2 tsp. of vanilla extract 2 tsp. of baking powder 1 pinch of salt 2 Tblsp. of melted unsalted butter

The talk around town in November was mostly politics, but after election, people started talking turkey.

The thought of using a self basting or kosher turkey did not appeal to me, I’ve never liked taking too many short cuts, I find it ruins fun. But I had heard a lot of talk about brining and how it cut cooking time down and made turkey universally moist.

I did a bit of research, reading magazines and online articles and finally I got basic formula: one cup of salt per one gallon of water. Salt and water seemed pretty boring so I researched further. Recipes for brine were a dime a dozen, some made sense while others were downright bizarre. Finally, I decided I wanted my brine to give my turkey a little more than a salt bath and came up with my own recipe based on that one cup – one gallon ratio

I started out with a half gallon of water in a large pot. I added two cups of salt and one cup of brown sugar. I brought it to a boil and kept it on just long enough to dissolve salt and sugar. Next, I dropped in some peppercorns, a couple of bay leaves, and some thyme.

Finding a container big enough to hold a fourteen pound turkey and enough brine to cover it wasn’t much of a task. I just so happened to have a five-gallon bucket that I used for home brewing.