This savory vegan waffle recipe combines the best of both worlds: warm comfort and guilt-free noshing.

Don’t you just love it when you can take a beloved comfort dish and turn it “healthy” or, rather, less of a burden on your health? This savory spaghetti squash and quinoa waffle recipe is vegan, gluten-free, and sugar-free. And, how about the taste, you ask? On. Point.

These waffle fritters are bursting with flavor but aren’t compromising their content because of it. The savory twist makes these waffles fit for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Preparation

Easy to put together, yes, but the recipe does require a bit of foresight. The spaghetti squash needs to be roasted for one hour prior to preparation and you’ll also need pre-cooked quinoa, so make sure to keep these in mind. It helps to roast the squash in the evening the day before you plan to make the recipe. Meanwhile, you can either use store-bought nut milk or make your own almond milk for this recipe.

Other necessary items are a waffle iron. If you have no waffle iron, you can easily cook the fritters in a patty-like shape in a saucepan on the stove top.

Vegan Spaghetti Squash And Quinoa Waffle Recipe

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1 large spaghetti squash
• 1/4 cup cooked quinoa
• 1/4 cup coconut milk (the thickest part)
• 1/4 cup vegan milk (almond milk, rice milk, etc.)
• 1 tablespoon coconut oil
• Juice of one lime
• 1/4 cup gluten-free flour
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Chopped fresh chives for garnish

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Cut the squash in half, lengthwise. Place cut side down on a parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet. Roast until squash is tender when pierced with a knife, about one hour.

In a medium bowl, add the squash, quinoa, coconut milk, nut milk, coconut oil, and lime juice. Mix until evenly combined before folding in the flour and spices.

Heat up the waffle iron and grease it lightly with coconut oil. Once hot, add in the batter in batches and press the iron, letting the waffle fritters cook for about one to two minutes before opening the iron and serving the waffles. Continue this cooking process until the batter is finished.

Serve the waffles alone with a garnish of chopped fresh chives,or pair them with this vegan white cheese party dip.

Related on EcoSalon
Can Quinoa Be a Local Food
There’s Quinoa in Your Cocktail: Foodie Underground
Four-Cheese Garlic Spaghetti Squash

The post This Savory Vegan Spaghetti Squash And Quinoa Waffle is an Autumn Delight appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnBreakfast is in.

Any foodie-wise restaurant knows to wrap hors d’oeuvres, entrees and even the table rolls in bacon, but lately, eggs have been showing up to the dinner table at every opportunity. On pizzas, astride mashed potatoes, in ramen: This is much more than the classic Caesar salad preparation of soft-boiled egg beside dressed hearts of romaine. But it’s not just eggs and bacon. For better or for worse, breakfast is in.

In a stagnant economy and dismal state of global affairs, we’re in dire need of comfort food.

A waffle sandwich for lunch? Yes. A food truck that only serves up buttermilk creations? Certainly. Breakfast food isn’t the sexiest, but it’s cozy and warm, reminding us of a lazy Sunday brunch spent with friends or alone with the Times and the French press.

Are we really having a brinner love affair? If it’s an officially defined word on Urban Dictionary, the answer is “yes.”

(brin-ner) adj. breakfast eaten at the time in which you eat dinner.

But why? When it comes to food, most of us are obsessed with instant gratification, and fried eggs solve that problem far more quickly than a plate of artisanal cheese with fruit compote, let alone a a fennel emulsion. As Shawn LaPean, executive director of Cal Dining at the University of California- Berkeley says, “eating weird is the new normal.” Which means breakfast for dinner is just as marketable even in the upscale food world as foie gras bread pudding. (Some days, I think being a foodie is no more than a glorified version of our meat-and-potatoes humanity – fancified with pancetta and foccacia, or pork belly and polenta.)

Feel the need to get on the breakfast train? Here are five ways to bring home the bacon.

Waffles

Make them with sweet potatoes. Then make a sandwich. Or add chicken friend steak. Whatever you do, don’t serve them with maple syrup.

French Toast

Completely acceptable for dinner these days, as long as you use fancy bread. (But god forbid, no matter how tempting, please don’t prep it in a slow cooker.)

Pizza

Just put an egg on it. Or two.

Crepes

They’re French! And classy! As long as they’re made with buckwheat and not smeared in Nutella.

Pancakes

Like crepes, but not. If they’re fluffy and include a fancy dairy product (think: Ricotta) you can feel fine about eating them for dinner.

No matter how much you love breakfast – and if the restaurants of Brooklyn, San Francisco and Portland that are jam packed at 10 a.m. on a weekday morning are any indicator, most of us really do – proceed with caution. Replacing real meals with mashups of whatever-we-feel-like foods might have us running towards the brink of self-destruction. Breakfast for dinner (or lunch) is almost as bad as gourmet junk food, and if those trendy food carts and waffle windows don’t watch it, their culinary prowess just might risk the reputation of a Maple Bacon Sundae.

At least there’s always gourmet granola, with hemp milk, of course. Can someone just get me some real dinner, like a taco?

Oh, you want to serve them on a waffle? Even that is too underground for this columnist.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Images: Anna Brones, manray3, jamieanne, rick, avlxyz, d.loop

The post Foodie Underground: Put an Egg On It appeared first on EcoSalon.