Daring Cooks’ Challenge: Cornmeal!

Tags

breakfast, brunch, cheese, eggs, hatch chiles, recipe, savory, vegetarian, waffles

Rachael of pizzarossa was our August 2012 Daring Cook hostess and she challenged us to broaden our knowledge of cornmeal! Rachael provided us with some amazing recipes and encouraged us to hunt down other cornmeal recipes that we’d never tried before – opening our eyes to literally 100s of cuisines and 1000s of new-to-us recipes!

My friends Julie and Andrew just traveled to New Zealand a few days ago and I am incredibly envious. In fact, they’re spending the next nine months Down Underer while renting out their Texas home, so I offered to borrow various items from their kitchen in the meantime. Always thinking of my friends.

Having never shared a roof with a waffle iron, I obviously had to put some cornmeal in it in order to kill two birds: my desire to make some waffles (of course) and this challenge. Do you know how many cornbread waffles on the internet are covered in chili? This is so freaking brilliant that it’s disappointing to have never heard of it, but even more so that it wasn’t my idea. While tempting, August is just not the time for chili in Texas.

I knew I wanted something savory featuring cheese and chiles since that’s my favorite kind of cornbread. Then I remembered a post by Joy the Baker in which she made savory cornmeal waffles and served them with a fried egg. Excellent! (pun avoided)

This time of year, there are Hatch chiles everywhere, so I bought one and roasted it over the gas stove flame. (YES. I’ve always wanted to do this!) While doing so, you want the skin of the pepper to char and it will make popping sounds in the process. Once finished, I just scraped the skin off and diced the pepper.

These don’t actually have very much cornmeal so I almost upped it and decreased the flour, but then didn’t. Maybe I should have tried this for my own purposes, but they are most definitely delicious as is!

The recipe resulted in six waffles for this particular iron, so I froze the leftover ones and reheated them in the oven as needed. They’re all gone now…

Roasted Hatch and Cheddar Cornmeal Waffles
adapted from Joy the Baker

1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper
1/3 cup melted unsalted butter
2 large eggs
1 1/4 cup buttermilk
1 Hatch chile roasted, skinned, and diced (or 2-3 tablespoons diced green chiles, drained)
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese (you might want to increase to 3/4 cup!)
sliced tomato and eggs for topping

Follow Joy’s recipe for how to, just adding in the chile and cheddar in place of the chives and parsley.

I didn’t think ahead while shopping, but topping everything off with cilantro and/or chives would be super. Not to mention more aesthetically pleasing… (now you see part of why I chose to use the plate with the green on it.)

Thanks to Rachael for picking such a versatile challenge! She has tons of recipe ideas in her challenge write-up.