Saturday Morning Gameday Breakfast

More from the goofy guy again. When he lives with you 24/7, it stops being so funny. 






In school we talk a lot about family traditions. Many families have embraced rituals from parents whose backgrounds seem so exotic and mysterious. Grand meals shared with scores of neighbors and families around some special holiday. Days and days spent preparing for this feast.

In our house, it's college football on Saturday morning; more specifically, it's ESPN's College Football Gameday. It's got something for everyone: Dad gets the breakdown of the Xs and Os; Mom gets to ogle at Kirk Herbstreit, and the most important part of the ritual is that we all get to pick which mascot head Lee Corso is going to  pull on at 8:58 a.m. PDT. Just like they say in Fiddler on the Roof...Tradition!

And yeah, there's food involved too. There's bacon. Always the bacon. Everything else is just a sideshow to the bacon. Once in a great while we let the star share some of the glory with the sidekick. One example is our waffles with bacon bits. As the old jingle goes, Two great tastes that taste great together.

Bacon...the essence of all that is beautiful

  

The (almost) finished product

Gameday waffles (adapted from our good friends at Cooks illustrated)
Makes 8-10  4" waffles

3 or 4 strips bacon, cooked until crisp and crumbled
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup dried buttermilk powder *
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup plain or vanilla lowfat yogurt
2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup canola oil
1-1/3 cups plain seltzer water or club soda (not sparkling mineral water)

Cook the bacon until crisp, and crumble it into small pieces. Set aside.
Preheat the waffle iron, and turn the oven to 200° to keep waffles warm

Whisk flour, sugar, salt, buttermilk powder and baking soda in a large bowl.

In a medium bowl, beat together yogurt, eggs, vanilla and oil. Gently stir seltzer into wet ingredients, then fold the wet stuff into the dry stuff, being careful not to overmix. Batter should still be slightly lumpy. Stir in the bacon, using caution that you don't stuff it all in your mouth. Pour batter into the waffle iron and cook until golden brown. Keep warm in oven until ready to eat. It works best if you put waffles directly on the oven rack, but don't keep them in there too long or they'll begin to dry out.

Serve with syrup, bacon and football.

* Find dried buttermilk powder in the baking section of your local grocery store.