Breakfast for dinner

 

Everything is better when lemon icing is involved, even a Saturday morning school make up day.

Nina’s love for the written word is at that stage where she’ll read anything within reach. Comic books, chapter books, the back of a cereal box, whatever I’ve downloaded on my Kindle.

It wasn’t long before she started reaching for my cookbooks, especially anything with ‘vegan’ in the title . A few weeks ago she shouted “Tonight, blueberry waffles!” from the living room, and just like that, she also took over menu planning.

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Ni reads recipes with intent, quizzing me about ingredients (always fun when she mispronounces them), memorizing the steps, and preemptively chastising me if anything I’ve ever done in the history of our time in the kitchen together these past seven years contradicts a recipe’s Notes. This intensity means she has the energy to read through exactly one recipe most nights, usually from the first chapter of a book.

We had a lot of breakfast for dinner before I rearranged the cookbooks.

 

Blueberry teff sourdough waffles with lemon icing

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Any sourdough starter will work in this recipe, but teff is especially suited, flavor-wise, to blueberries. (Rye would be my second choice.) Also! My teff sourdough starter smells like apples, and this makes me want to put it in everything. I started it several months ago while testing recipes for Kittee’s Ethiopian cookbook, and it’s now the only sourdough starter in my refrigerator. Oh yeah, and it’s gluten free to boot. In case you don’t recognize the book Nina’s holding, she plucked this gem from Lauren Ulm’s Vegan Yum Yum.  As with most recipes in my cookbooks, I made it once as written, modified the heck out of it (which usually means making it from memory alone and letting instinct take over), and then scribbled all over the recipe page when I got it just so. The lemon icing is very sweet, the waffles not so much. Definitely use muscovado sugar if you have it;  turbinado is also quite good. To make these gluten free, substitute an all purpose gluten free flour blend for the white spelt and add 1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum.

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For the waffles:
1 1/2 cups white spelt flour
2 tablespoons muscovado sugar
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
6 ounces unsweetened plain coconut or soy yogurt
1 cup almond milk
1/4 cup teff sourdough starter
3 tablespoons coconut or sunflower oil
1 heaping cup fresh or frozen blueberries

For the icing:
3/4 cup confectioner’s sugar
juice and zest of 1/2 lemon
2 tablespoons almond milk, more if needed to thin

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Make a well in the center and add the yogurt, almond milk, starter and oil. Whisk together until just incorporated, and then fold in the blueberries. Let the batter rest while you prepare the icing.

Preheat a waffle iron and brush or spray it with oil. Cook according to the manufacturer’s instructions – a heaping 1/2 cup batter in my iron makes a 7-inch waffle. Serve immediately, or keep warm in a 200 F / 93 C oven.

Prep time: 10 minutes | Cook time: 5-7 minutes per waffle | Yield: 5 7-inch waffles