Trail Waffles: How I Found Myself Again
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(you can click that if you want, I won't be offended, though I will say a small prayer for you to Glizabert, Goddess of Travel, Privilege and Whatever-the-Opposite-of-White-Guilt-is)
I wasn't always a person who made waffles on a donkey.
I know. I know. You came here for a recipe, and instead you are getting Filmeena's Feelings, and I promise we will get there, we will get to the part with the flour and the fire, but first you have to understand about my grandmother's grandmother, a woman I never met, who according to family legend once fought off a bugbear using nothing but a cast-iron pan and sheer force of personality, and I think about her every single morning as I stand over my own cast-iron pan wondering if today is the day the bugbear comes back seeking revenge.
It was autumn - or whatever passes for autumn in a world where the seasons are decided by which god is currently "on one" - and I had just left my third adventuring party in as many months, not because I don't love a good dungeon (I do, dungeons are fine, dungeons are a journey), but because I had realised, somewhere around goblin encounter number forty-one, that nobody in my party had eaten a warm breakfast in six weeks and everyone was, frankly, being insufferable about it. You cannot reason with a paladin who has not had breakfast. I have tried. It ends in a lecture about "Nome guilt" and "we must confess about the sin of taste". All this from a man who, and I cannot stress this enough, eats hardtack dry.
So I quit the party. I kept the donkey. The donkey's name is Big Clop and he has never once complained about waffles, which already makes him a better travel companion than most of the two-legged adventurers I've adventured with.
I want to be honest with you: I did not invent trail waffles in a moment of culinary genius. I invented them at 5 AM in the freezing rain, sobbing slightly, holding two pans, having what I can only describe as a Breakfast Emergency. But that's the thing about the road, isn't it? It strips everything back to the essentials. Who are you, really, when you're cold, and hungry, and someone in your party (still not naming names, Flibbert) keeps asking "are we there yet?" like we are not all equally lost, annoyed and extremely overwhelmed. Are you the kind of person who gives up? Or are you the kind of person who straps two iron pans to a mule and refuses, on principle, to eat another cold biscuit stew flavoured with sock?
I chose waffles. I choose waffles every morning, honestly, it's less a decision at this point and more a compulsion, but we don't have to unpack that today.
I made these for a hag once. Not "for" in the sense of "willingly." She'd threatened to turn my party into assorted woodland creatures unless someone impressed her by sundown, and everyone looked at me, and I don't know what that says about my reputation, or the uselessness of my former party, but I made her trail waffles with a little wild honey on top and she let me go AND gave me a discount on a curse removal later that year, so. Draw your own conclusions about the transformative power of a good breakfast. I certainly have.
Trail Waffles {#recipe}
(serves 4 adventurers, or 1 adventurer and their emotional support donkey)
You will need:
1 cup of oat flour
1/2 cup of regular flour
1 egg
2 tbsp dried milk-curd (fresh if you can get it)
1 cup of water (thin ale will work in a pinch)
Pinch of salt
1 tbsp fat or oil, plus extra for the pans
2 flat iron pans of roughly the same size
A fire that has calmed down and stopped being dramatic about it (coals, not flame)
Optional, but I heavily suggest these are not Optional
1/2 cup of nuts
1 tablespoon dried fruit or preserves
1 tablespoon of wild honey or syrup
Pinch of travelling spices
A fire that has calmed down and stopped being dramatic about it (coals, not flame)
- Scrawled on the wall on the privy of The Wandering Spoon, signed Filmeena Oatbarrow, lvl 10 Cook/Bard
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