First-time visitor?

Waffleizer was the blog that got it all started. Now, the waffling continues in the form of "Will It Waffle?" a book with more than 50 fantastic non-waffle recipes for your waffle iron. (Think waffled bacon and eggs, waffled pizza, waffled falafel, waffled s'mores aka s'moreffles, and waffled oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.)

Pick up a copy of "Will It Waffle?" at your local bookstore, or find it on ...

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Indiebound

If you like this waffling stuff and think others might like it too, find the book and the blog on Facebook. You can also follow this all on Twitter.

Have a question? There's a FAQ page for that.

Waffled macaroni and cheese

Hey, don't miss out! For more waffling, get the "Will It Waffle?" cookbook on Amazon, or find it at your local bookstore.

Follow @will_it_waffle on Instagram!

Really, this isn't so much a post about how to make macaroni and cheese as it is a post about what to do with leftover macaroni and cheese. So I will let you find your own path to macaroni and cheese. If you make the macaroni and cheese specifically for this purpose, that's fine too, of course. But you're going to have to let it cool in the refrigerator for a while. It needs to be easy to handle. Because you're going to abuse it. 

There were a lot of false starts on waffling macaroni and cheese. At first I tried just waffling the cooked and cooled chunks, but after a few minutes in the waffle iron, the cheese had melted away and the macaroni stubbornly refused to conform to the grid of the waffle iron. It had all of the easily imaginable drawbacks of waffled macaroni and cheese — cheese melts easily, after all — and none of the advantages (i.e., no discernible waffle form). 

Then I decided to get clever which, as you may suspect before you even move beyond this clause, didn't lead to anything good. If the noodles were refusing to bend to the will and the weight of the waffle iron, maybe I could cut them down to size. 

So I dumped a batch of cold macaroni and cheese into the food processor and gave it a whirl. I envisioned the resulting pellet-sized bits of macaroni and cheese conforming easily to the grids of the waffle iron, fusing together into one magnificent macaroni and cheese waffle. 

Not so much.   

And I made a loaf of macaroni and cheese, which had a slightly different texture to it — one that didn't charm me but which I thought would at least hold up in the waffle iron. I let it cool, cut off a slice, and waffled it.

No.

This was all months ago. Since then, I avoided the topic by waffling abut 20 other things. And that worked well for a while. Until it didn't.

Macaroni and cheese popped up again.

I appealed to Ask.Metafilter for ideas.

Bread it, they said.

That's what worked.

First, I spread the prepared macaroni and cheese into a thin layer on a sheet pan and put it in the refrigerator. (If I had wanted to be more careful about it, I could have rendered it flat on both sides by pressing it between two sheet pans.)

The next day, I took it out and cut a block about the size of a small waffle. 

In three shallow dishes, I set out the following ingredients:

• flour
• an egg, beaten with a bit of salt and pepper
• bread crumbs (I used Japanese-style panko) and grated cheese (I used pecorino romano)

I coated the block of macaroni and cheese first in the flour, then dunked it in the egg, and then coated it with the bread crumbs. It held together, though it certainly benefited from a delicate touch.

Into the greased (Belgian) waffle iron it went for about three minutes.

The extraction process was a bit tricky, but with a silicone spatula and some patience it was possible to get the waffled mac-and-cheese out in one piece — OK, two pieces.

The bread-crumb coating and the heat from the waffle iron may tend to make it a bit dry. Melting a little cheese on top of it, drizzling some cheese sauce over it, or sprinkling some olive oil on it can help with this.

Really, if you can nail it, the presentation is pretty much unbeatable, even if it does come out in pieces.

* * * 

This is answer No. 29 to the question "Will it waffle?".

I picked macaroni and cheese from a short list of ideas with the help of a poll — a poll that really went off the rails when some people frantically and comically stuffed the ballot box. (Who knew the stakes were so high?) 

As in a lot of editing, in the process of winnowing the blog to 30 entries, some good ideas got swept aside, chief among them perhaps bacon (though Alton Brown certainly has that covered), gnocchi (which, fortunately, we do not have to wonder about; it can be done) and pierogi (which have been done at least a couple of times — with enough people it's even a party). 

I'm certain there are more that I'm missing, some that were part of the poll but didn't finish first and some that didn't make that short list to begin with. If an idea that you were pulling for didn't make it onto the blog, I'm sorry. I try not to disappoint people but sometimes it happens anyway.

I can only say that there is one more post after this one. Maybe it will be the one you were hoping to see on this blog.

Though I rather doubt it.

* * * 

With the blog heading off into the sunset, I answered a few questions for Michael Gebert over on Grub Street.

Recipe: Waffled cornbread

Buy "Will It Waffle?" at your local bookstore, or...

Follow @will_it_waffle on Instagram!

A photo posted by Will It Waffle? (@will_it_waffle) on Jul 14, 2016 at 4:14pm PDT

Recipe: Waffled squid salad

Will this leave your waffle iron a mess? Probably. Probably an unholy mess. When I finished, the grids were coated in a thin film of squid — my waffle iron's very own marine layer. I did what I always do: patiently scraped up the biggest offending chunks with a silicone spatula, and then made a batch of waffles (out of waffle batter — and you have to love that I need to specify that) to lift out the rest of the nasty bits. The waffles were nothing you'd want to eat, but by the time they were done cooking they had absorbed every bit of squid that was clinging to my waffle iron.

And that is a hell of an introduction to this recipe.

The recipe comes from David Thompson's tremendous cookbook, Thai Food. The inspiration comes from a reader who wrote in after the waffled quesadillas. (Thanks, Elena.) "Why not try cephalopods — maybe squid?" she asked.

Why not? Because it's utterly impractical even by the standards of a blog dedicated to the ridiculous. Because my idea for the blog — most aspects of which are overthought to an almost paralyzing degree — was to offer people a mix of dishes that would be practical to make in their kitchens and dishes that would be impractical to make in their kitchens but fun to see made, and I wasn't sure if squid was either of those things. 

No question it was a good idea. And I would like it, yes. But it didn't seem like the kind of thing that people would go for.

Then I thought about it for a couple of weeks. I realized I really had no grasp of what people go for, despite being 90% of the way through this blog.

And I realized that if I was going to worry about playing to the Internet, I could just post pictures of kittens and call it a day.

Which is how I found myself in Chicago's main library, thumbing through the Thai cookbooks to find a squid recipe suitable for waffling.

When I lived in Argentina, people would sometimes ask me what I missed most about the States. Some of them were probably a little taken aback when I answered Thai food. Thai cuisine does one thing better than any that I've ever come across, and that is striking a balance among sweet, sour, spicy and salty notes. This recipe — with its lime juice, sugar, fish sauce and hot peppers — is an excellent example of that.

Squid don't take long to cook, and the high heat of the waffle iron is pretty much perfect for the task. Squid are ranked as a "good alternative" in the Monterey Bay Aquarium's sustainable seafood listings. They're also relatively inexpensive, especially when sold frozen. (The squid that's not sold frozen is usually previously frozen, so if you're able to plan ahead, you can save money by buying from the freezer case.)

The barest and yet still delicious version of this recipe makes use of ingredients you're likely to have on hand — with the possible exception of fish sauce — or at the very least can find substitutes for.

It comes together quickly, looks impressive on the plate and, in a mark of a great recipe, tastes much better than even the sum of its delicious parts. Thompson's version of the recipe does not make note of optional ingredients or include substitutions, but I've written a few notes below. 

Waffled squid salad

Serves 2

Ingredients:

Salad:

• 6 oz. squid [200 grams]
• 3 shallots, finely sliced
• optional: Thai lime leaves, shredded
• optional: lemongrass, finely sliced
• optional: handful of mint or cilantro leaves
• optional: roasted peanuts, crushed

Dressing:

• 2 bird's eye chilies, sliced thin (substitution: red pepper flakes to taste)
• pinch of salt
• 2 tablespoons lime juice
• 2 tablespoons fish sauce
• large pinch sugar

Directions:

1. Combine dressing ingredients and set aside.

2. Waffle the squid until opaque. This should only take about two minutes. When finished, cut into strips. 

3. Allow squid to cool slightly, dress and serve immediately.

Waffled cinnamon buns

It's been hot. I'm sure a lot of you will nod your heads — languidly — in agreement. Specifically, my apartment has been hotter than the surface of the sun. (I'm not exaggerating. Just rounding up.)

It's not the sort of thing that draws me into the kitchen.

And yet I've been working on these waffled cinnamon buns for weeks.

There have been a lot of missteps. And they could still stand to be improved upon. My ideal waffled cinnamon bun — the one I had in my head before I started in on this — showcases the distinctive swirl of cinnamon and sugar. That seems to get lost when you waffle them.

But I have at least come up with a workable version.

Along the way, I made a few different cinnamon buns, including those from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and The New Best Recipe (from the Cook's Illustrated people).

When it came to waffling, I'm not sure it was the recipe that mattered so much as the preparation and serving method.

The problem, in general, was that when the bun met the waffle grid, the swirl tended to be swallowed up by the dough. Even in a cross-section of the finished product, it wasn't readily apparent that these were waffled cinnamon buns. Yes, the aroma and the flavor were there. But we eat first with our eyes, and I was never able to capture that distinctive swirl in waffled form. Your ideas on that topic are welcome.

Meanwhile, there was the problem of texture. Pressed between two grids, the waffled cinnamon buns don't rise as much as they do when they're unencumbered. This makes them unpleasantly dense and chewy.

Unwaffled cinnamon buns typically call for the dough to be cut into thicknesses of about an inch to an inch-and-a-half. Maybe, I thought, there was just too much dough. Maybe a half-inch-thick cinnamon bun would waffle more effectively.

No such luck. It was less dense, but still clearly did not rise enough between the waffle grids.

So what then?

I continued experimenting, baking off part of each batch as conventional cinnamon buns so that the experiments wouldn't be a total loss.

(Along the way, I came to appreciate my silicone pastry brush — not just because it didn't leave weird hairs on the dough as I brushed it with milk or butter, but also because I accidentally dropped it onto the burner when I was melting the butter, and rather than bursting into flames, it emerged unscathed.)

In a set of parallel considerations, I was debating how to dress the waffled cinnamon buns. Icing was my first inclination, but it's a little one-note and dull. Essentially just powdered sugar with a bit of vanilla and a few drops of milk to thin it out, it doesn't introduce anything to the cinnamon bun that's not already there. It's sugar on top of sugar.

My thoughts turned to cream cheese frosting — and then just to cream cheese. I spread some onto one of the waffled cinnamon buns and took a bite. Tasty.

From there, I addressed the density issue by slicing the waffled bun in half down its equator. This let the cream cheese provide a bit of breathing room between the two pieces of waffled bun. 

They're not great. But they are pretty good.

Because of what I started out with in my head, I can't consider these a complete success. But they're certainly one of my better failures.