Years ago, when I first went out on my own, my parents bought me a Belgian waffle iron. A pretty odd thing for them to do when they never owned one themselves, but my father used to cook up a stack of pancakes for the family every weekend, and they probably figured that a waffle iron was just the thing that a modern lady about town needed these days. In all fairness, they also got me started with almost all of my other kitchen essentials too, but that poor waffle iron has spent most of its sorry existence stashed beneath other little-used appliances in remote corners of kitchen cupboards, probably crying to itself if appliances have feelings.
But to the waffle iron I now say, I'm sorry! Or at least, I'm sorry the second time around, since this is the second time I've tried making spiced pumpkin waffles since coming across a
vegan recipe a couple of weeks ago. Pumpkin and spices! But with apologies to my vegan friends, soy milk and soy yogurt just don't do it for me, and in my simple pancake-chef naiveté I imagined I could just substitute ordinary milk and yogurt. After laboriously picking crusty little pieces of unbelievably dense pumpkin waffle off of the iron, I came to the realization that there must be some chemistry that made that recipe work for soy products but not dairy. Still, I enjoyed popping the little pieces of waffle relic in my mouth, and the heavenly aroma of pumpkin and spices baking was almost worth the effort alone. But there was no way I was going to put up a recipe for waffle bits tortuously pulled from a reluctant waffle iron!
