Yesterday I made muffins for Tuesday morning breakfast and a Monday night snack. I used the sour cream muffin recipe, added a tablespoon of lemon juice and a small package of blueberries.

I finally got around to it. This morning I woke up at 10am, went the store to buy some milk because I didn't have enough and then got on with the recipe.

3 cups warm milk (105 to 115 degrees)
1 envelope active dry yeast
1 1/2 sticks of butter, melted then cooled to lukewarm
1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs, yolks and whites separated
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4 cups all-purpose flour

Add the yeast to the warm milk and let stand for 5 minutes. I am pretty sure if the milk is too warm it will hamper the yeast's activity. So I used a small thermometer to make sure I was at least near the right range. Unlike a yeast dough recipe you're not going to see the yeast foam after 5 minutes but that is ok. Whisk the milk until smooth. When your melted butter is lukewarm, add that to your milk and whisk.

Add the sugar. When you add the sugar you should be able to hear the yeast crackle in celebration. The sugar is food for them. If that doesn't happen, you might be in big trouble. Add the egg yolks, whisk, then add the salt and vanilla and whisk until smooth.

Then you need to add your 4 cups of flour in three installments. Beat until smooth between each addition. Your final batter should be thicker than waffle batter but still pourable. You'll be able to scrape it away clean from the sides, as it will stick to your beating spoon like a runny dough.

Cover with plastic wrap and set aside at room temperature for 1- 1 1/2 hours, until the batter has doubled in size. Beat your 3 egg whites with an electric mixer until soft peaks form (aka really foamy). Remove the plastic wrap from your batter and fold in the egg whites with a large spoon.

Fire up the waffle iron and enjoy. This makes 12 delicious, but pretty heavy waffles. I think you can store the batter, provided you let it come to room temperature before you use it again. The waffles taste similar to a waffle cone. At least that is what Lauren says. I topped mine with strawberry syrup and whipped cream.

Well, I had hoped to be posting about Belgian Waffles right now but my weekend didn't really work out like that. Lauren had to go into work Saturday morning and I had soccer at 12:30 so there was no opportunity for an elaborate breakfast.

Sunday brunch was the next plan, so I made sure to pick up eggs, flour, syrup and toppings from Meijer. But when I opened my cook book I realized I had already made a terrible error. Belgian waffles, true Belgian waffles, use yeast. Which means the batter needs time to proof. The recipe is something like this:

1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm milk (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
3 egg yolks
2 3/4 cups warm milk (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
3/4 cup butter, melted and cooled to lukewarm
1/2 cup white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 cups all-purpose flour
3 egg whites
Activate the yeast in the warm milk, set aside for 5 minutes. Then combine only the wet ingredients, followed by only the dry ingredients, then add the ingredients together and let sit for an 60-90 minutes until doubled in size.

But we were hungry now, so we scrapped the Belgian waffle idea and just made regular waffles from scratch:

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon fine salt
• 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 1/2 cups milk, at room temperature
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature, separated
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted, plus more for brushing the iron
• 1 large egg white, at room temperature
• 1/4 cup sugar

We mixed a mashed banana and chocolate chips into our batter. The result was great. It was also cool to be able to use a waffle iron in the comfort of my own kitchen and not the breakfast area of a hotel lobby with a hundred kids in soccer gear wreaking havoc in every direction.

I am going to try to talk Lauren into Belgian Waffles for dinner later this week, but I suspect I'll have to wait for Saturday morning. What I really want is to try chicken and waffles.

Borne primarily out of laziness and the hatred of single digit temperatures I have begun a weekend tradition I'm calling The MacGyver Breakfast. It consists of me waking up, wandering aimlessly around the kitchen opening and closing the refrigerator door several times, taking note of what I do and do not have to work with.

When I've keyed in on at least one bountiful ingredient I open up my Joy of Cooking cookbook and check the back pages for recipes utilizing that ingredient. When I opened the fridge last Saturday I couldn't get my mind off the bottle of lemon juice I had purchased the week before when I made chicken salad. I wanted pancakes, I wanted them to have flavor but all I had was lemon. That is when I discovered


Lemon Pancakes:

Dry Ingredients
1 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

Wet Ingredients
3/4 cup sour cream
1/3 cup milk
lemon zest
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 tablespoons butter (melted)
1 egg 1
1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Mix the dry ingredients with a wisk, in a separate bowl mix all the wet ingredients until it becomes a milk-like consistency. By hand quickly mix the wet ingredients with the dry for 15-20 seconds. The batter will be light and airy. Do not overmix the batter or the pancakes will be dense and not nearly as good. Heat a skillet and make pancakes.

These pancakes are awesome on their own, but the next time I plan on making them I'm going to throw in some blueberries. I didn't bother with the lemon zest since I was using bottled lemon juice.

This post isn't done yet. A couple weeks ago I had a similar, but far less spectacular, experience with sour cream. The night before Lauren and I had made some white chicken chili and as a result had most of a 16 oz container of sour cream left in the fridge. So when I went rummaging through it the next morning looking for potential breakfast items I couldn't get my mind off of the sour cream. It might be weeks before we do anything else with sour cream and I just don't trust expiration dates, especially when the container in question costs about $1.50.

So once again I opened up The Joy of Cooking and discovered an excellent use for the ingredients I had on hand.

Sour Cream Muffins:

Dry Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Wet Ingredients
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream
2/3 cup brown sugar (packed)
1/2 stick butter (melted)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Bake at 350 or 375 for 10-12 minutes, or until you can stick a fork in the middle and have it come out clean.

This is an excellent base muffin recipe. The sour cream and brown sugar keep the middle and muffin top nice and moist. They are pretty good on their own but a bit less sweet than you might expect. My suggestion here would be to add either lemon and blueberries or banana and walnuts to the muffin batter to round out the taste.

Other sour cream muffin addition possibilities include Snickerdoodle (pictured), cherry & peach, apple cinnamon and chocolate.

Sour cream is pretty awesome.

So this morning we tried our hand at Chocolate Chip Scones, or at least she did. I mostly watched while I washed dishes. The recipe was as follows:



1 3/4 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup cold butter
2 eggs
1/3 c heavy cream

Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt together into a large bowl. Cut butter into small pea sized cubes. Mix into dry ingredients with pastry blender. Beat eggs in a separate bowl. Reserve 2 Tbsp of egg. Beat cream into the remaining egg. Make a well in the dry ingredients. Pour in the liquid and combine with a few rapid strokes. Handle the dough as little as possible. Place it on a lightly floured board. Flour hands, and pat dough to 3/4 inch thick. Cut into diamonds, squares, or whatever shapes you want. Brush with reserved egg and sprinkle with salt or sugar. Bake 15 minutes at 450.

We added chocolate chips, or rather shavings of bittersweet chocolate from a baker's block because we didn't have chocolate chips.

Warm scones are delicious.