Sourdough waffles

 At the end of last week, the sky was an unusual color, as shown in the picture. As is common in winter, the clear sky that allowed us to see some sunlight meant wicked cold nighttime temperatures. We had the first below zero reading Friday morning, but only -1°F. The trees can take that.

A sunny but cold day

Some of my readers wanted to know what an egg looked like covered with muddy chick
en footprints. Here you go:

Muddy chicken footprints

My sourdough starter was finally ready. It smelled both yeasty and not unpleasantly sour. The true test is that it doubled in volume after feeding in a couple of hours. The photos were taken at noon and at 4:30 p.m.

Sourdough starter at noon

The same starter at 4:30

When my brother sent me the link to his favorite sourdough bread recipe on the King Arthur Flour website, I found a number of other recipes to try. Brilliant marketing, actually. If you have ever experimented with sourdough, you know that you have to feed the starter weekly, and if you have no immediate starter needs, you have to throw away a good portion of the previous starter so the waste products don’t poison the whole thing. What does King Arthur do? The starter instructions say, “Hate discarding so much starter? See ‘Tips’ below.” The tips have a link to a whole lot of recipes that use sourdough starter, including chocolate cake! I printed up 8.  That will keep me busy for awhile. First up: sourdough waffles for Saturday breakfast. I mixed up most of it Friday night, as instructed. In the morning, I added the rest of the ingredients, included a teaspoon of baking soda. The recipe said it would bubble, but it was far more than I anticipated from so little soda. The result was an incredibly light waffle, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. It was like changing air into something that could hold maple syrup and pecans.

Sourdough waffle with maple syrup and pecans

I am continuing with my winter reading of vintage cookbooks. Right now, I’m about halfway through Clementine Paddleford’s classic, How America Eats (1960). First of all, how great is that name? Ms. Paddleford traveled the country beginning in 1948 for her column in This Week Magazine. The book includes her favorites. It’s a blast from the past, including several savory gelatins such as tomato aspic and shrimp ring. Sounds awful? Trust me, it was. I remember tomato aspic with horror. I digress. As I was reading through a huge number of not-very-different biscuit recipes from the south and feeling nostalgic, I thought of Chicken à la King, something I haven’t made in close to 40 years.

Chicken à la King requires a sauce, and I am sauce-challenged. I have often thought about making the effort to master the Mother Sauces, but have never followed through. Chicken à la King was popular long before we knew the words Béchamel or Velouté—it was a white sauce. Anyway, I hesitated to wing it. I knew where to look for a recipe. If it’s white food, Betty Crocker never lets me down. There it was among the poultry dishes, Chicken à la King, which actually is a combination of Béchamel and Velouté, half milk and half stock. And here’s another reason I have never mastered the Mother Sauces: holy smoke, what a lot of butter!  I took a deep breath and put in an entire stick. Following the instructions thereafter (except putting in 8 ounces of mushrooms instead of 3), I made a lovely sauce. I was quietly proud. I also made Betty’s buttermilk biscuits. Full disclosure, as a child I liked the biscuits more than the Chicken à la King. Hilda loved it. “You got such good mushroom flavor in the sauce.” I wonder why.

Chicken a la King

Lots of hype about a snowstorm coming tonight. We’ll see if it amounts to anything.