Mamarati

So, the buckwheat waffles were completely and totally stuck to my waffle iron like nothing I’ve ever seen. The batter was like snot. It was so odd. I’ve never seen quite this consistency before. I had to scrape the bits out with a bamboo skewer. And this is a nonstick waffle iron that was lubed up.

I thought I’d try pancakes instead. The book suggested using a well-seasoned cast iron skillet. I own several of these. The small one is my favorite (I think it’s 6 inches, which is perfectly average. Ha.) I’ve had this thing forever. It couldn’t be more seasoned unless I spent a week deep frying butter in lard.

And still, the pancakes stuck to the skillet so much that I couldn’t even get a spatula underneath them to even get them out of the pan. So I let the pan cool and filled it with water. Half an hour later, I go to wash the pan and I turn it to dump the water out. The pancakes are still stuck to the pan, wholly intact and hardly even phased by the water.

So I still have some of the pancake batter left and I decide to try it in a teflon pan and they don’t stick this time. But they weighed about 80 pounds a piece. And these were tiny little silver dollar pancakes. I haven’t gotten the verdict from Jacob yet on how they ended up tasting.

So far, Jacob has been great at giving me feedback on foods. Cooking is kind of one of those things for me… I really like to do it, but food is expensive so I don’t like to screw it up. I have some guilt in that area. And then I hate serving things to my family that don’t taste good. And I never get a “this tastes like crap” response on any of my cooking, so I wonder if everyone is just being nice or if I’m really an OK cook or what.

Anyway, I told Jacob that I need to make sure that I get absolutely honest feedback with suggestions for improvement… examples of why something didn’t taste good or whatever. It helps that he spent a lot of the summer in the kitchen with me cooking like crazy. He learned a lot of things about food and how it all works together, consistency and texture, color, flavors that go and those that don’t go so much… So hopefully that will make these dishes work at some point.

I’m about to say screw buckwheat, though. That stuff is weird.

I’m also having a hard time finding buckwheat noodles that are all buckwheat and no standard wheat. It seems that Korean noodles don’t have any wheat, so I’m going to have to ask David where to find some of those since he’s my go-to guy on all things in that sphere. (Hint, Hint)