Recently my food impulse has turned to buckwheat. I found a package of buckwheat flour, brought it home, and since then have used it in every single thing I've baked. Well, ok, I didn't use it in the pan of brownies currently living on top of the refrigerator, but everything else.

1. Buckwheat cranberry bread.

For this one, I swapped out 1/4 of the plain flour in the Veganomicon cranberry orange bread recipe for buckwheat flour. For the other 3/4, I used whole wheat, so I suppose I technically switched out all the flour. I also replaced the orange zest with grapefruit zest and the orange juice with grapefruit juice, largely because I had half a grapefruit threatening to die in my refrigerator. I threw a bunch of poppyseeds over the top of the loaf, just for the heck of it.

Result: while this produced a lovely-looking result, it became obvious that grapefruit is not exactly the greatest match with buckwheat flour. It wasn't awful--I certainly ate the whole loaf--but it wasn't superb either.

2. Buckwheat cranberry almond scones.

I had much better luck in working from an actual buckwheat-based recipe I found at Lovely Morning. That's not to say I made zero changes, of course. I had dried cranberries, so I used those instead of the cherries. I also didn't have quite enough wheat flour to serve as my unbleached white substitute, so I ended up using about 3/4c of wheat and 1/2c of buckwheat flour. Finally, I had milk but no cream, so I switched that up. The resulting dough was sticky enough that I didn't bother trying to pat and cut it; instead, I made drop scones with teaspoons. My batch made ten.

Results: these were great, and have continued great throughout the week. They looked very much like chocolate scones when I first pulled them out of the oven, but they certainly don't taste like it. That's a little surprising, but in an exciting way.

3. Buckwheat waffles. Hey, it's going to be Valentine's Day soon, if you do that kind of thing; what could be a better holiday breakfast than a plate of lovely waffles? (Coffee mandatory.)

I actually made mine for lunch, but that's obviously fine.

I followed this recipe from Dinner with Kirsten just about as closely as all the other recipes, although in this case it wasn't quite as intentional. I mostly just simplified; instead of buying buttermilk, I used the time-honored milk with a teaspoon of vinegar substitute, and instead of separating the egg for extra volume, I just beat everything together.

My batter turned out so thick it wouldn't pour. I ended up scraping down the measuring cups for my three resulting waffles. They cooked beautifully. I ate mine with labneh and sauteed red cabbage with bacon and onion on the side.

Then I looked back at the waffle recipe to discover that I'd never added the water. HA HA. It still worked; it was just a bit more arduous, and produced less waffle overall. Next time, though, I'll be eager to see the actual recipe results.



Now my other two waffles are in the freezer, and I don't really feel like cooking dinner....hmm hmm hmm hmm.