Cheese-Stuffed Mushrooms

To the apparent surprise of Americans who believe conservative podcasters, Canada is a sovereign nation.

Cheddar-Stuffed Mushrooms 6 large portobello mushrooms, or 1 to 1½ pounds baby mushrooms ¼ cup (60 mL) butter, divided ¼ cup (60 mL) chopped roasted salted cashews (or nuts of your choice) 5 or 6 green onions 1 clove garlic (or more if desired), minced 2 tbsp (30 mL) flour 1 cup (250 mL) milk 1 cup shredded cheddar, or cheese of your choice 2 tbsp (30 mL) soy sauce 2 tbsp (30 mL) cooking oil Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C. Line a baking sheet with foil.* Remove the stems from the mushroom caps and chop. Set aside. Melt half the butter, mix with the chopped nuts. Set aside. Thinly slice the green onions, keeping the white and green parts separated. Set aside the green parts. Melt the remaining butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the whites of the green onions and cook for 4 minutes, or until wilted. Stir in the garlic and chopped mushroom stems. Add salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking 8-10 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and most of their juice has dried. Sprinkle the flour over the pan (if you have one of those miniature sifters, it's perfect for this), stirring rapidly to prevent lumps. While still quickly stirring, add the milk one splash at a time. You can add it more freely as the mixture thins out. After all the milk is added, cook until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Then remove from heat, and immediately stir in the cheese and the green parts of the green onions. Mix the oil and soy sauce. Brush them all over the mushroom caps. Then lay the caps concave side up on the baking sheet. Fill them with the cheese sauce, adding enough to almost come to their rims. Put some of the chopped nuts and butter on top of each. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and the cheese is golden at the edges. Serve warm. *You don't need to line the pan with foil. But come cleanup time, you'll be glad you did. Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Right after election night, I said that I hoped Trump's dumber policies would inconvenience enough people who have sufficient money to influence him, thus bringing at least a little sanity back into national politics. And already, we are seeing little ripples of dismay in various top-floor offices. I would be bitterly amused if I had a lot of money to throw away on rising prices.

Liquor store employees in Canada have been removing American alcohol from the shelves as shoppers carefully avoid it. It turns out that people get irked when threatened with annexation and whapped with tariffs. Canadians may not be able to vote in US elections, but they can definitely vote with their money.

A friend sent me this picture from a store in Montreal.

 

Sinking sales over the border haven't bred executive desperation yet, but there are already signs of consternation. After all, stores never let freshly-cleared shelf space stay vacant. The president of the Kentucky Distillers' Association took to Twitter and begged Canadians to keep buying bourbon. The distillers' plea came on the same day that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario yanked American alcohol from every single store in the province. Other Canadian provinces have followed suit. 

The Globe and Mail

All of this to say, today we are getting out that magazine I took home from Ottawa's airport, and making a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Or at least, we are trying to make a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. As we have learned, a lot of the recipes from their beautifully-photographed magazine seem like they were only tested in commercial kitchens. I suspect the LCBO's recipe developers didn't always think about the realities of cooking in a house that does not have a full complement of restaurant equipment.

On a minor cross-cultural cooking note, I'm surprised the recipe writers used volume instead of weight* when writing the metric measurements of ingredients like shredded cheese and flour. I thought that people in Canada (and everywhere else that isn't the US) had kitchen scales.

We begin the recipe by making puffed wild rice. It was surprisingly hard to find plain wild rice at the store. There were plenty of rice mixes that contained it, but only one store in town could sell us a bag of standalone wild rice.

My puffed wild rice tasted burnt. I threw it out and tried again, watching the pan a lot more carefully. But I got more burnt (yet puffy) wild rice. After two failures, I figured that I needed a better tutorial than a few recipe sentences. But when I looked online, everyone's Instagram-worthy pictures showed rice that was just as burnt as mine was. Maybe everyone has been burning their wild rice and trying to convince themselves that it has a "deliciously nutty flavor" as the recipe headnote claims.

Since my burnt rice looked just like everyone else's, I gamely put it into the spice grinder. After it was as pulverized as it would get, it had a lot of unnerving translucent crystals that looked like Plexiglas sawdust.

With a skeptical yet open mind, I tried some of our allegedly completed "wild rice crunch." It was like eating gravelly dirt. This stuff threatened to sand off my teeth. At this point, I went off-recipe and tried putting it in hot water to soften it-- you know, what people normally do with rice. I thought I could put a dab of the resulting paste into the bottom of each mushroom for that, um, earthy flavor. But the rice was just as gritty as ever. Since I don't like ending every meal with a visit to the dentist, I threw it out. 

Setting aside the failed wild rice, it was time to go nuts.

We're supposed to use pecans, but this isn't the most economical time of the year to purchase them. Instead, I helped myself to a quarter-cup of cashews from the household snack stash. I could have chopped them with a knife, but we already had the spice grinder out from our recent wild rice misadventures.

I mixed the nuts with the melted butter as directed. If the wild rice hadn't been so terrible after getting burnt and pulverized, it would have been here also. But even though the paste looks terrible, but it tasted really good. I could already tell it would be an amazing topping for what was to come.

The next part of the recipe involved the white parts of our green onions and a lot of butter. I don't usually cook green onions, so this felt a bit odd. But it smelled really good. We should have been using a leek, but those were very expensive and only sold in large bunches. I didn't want to commit to two pounds of leeks for the sake of one mushroom recipe.

We are next directed to add the chopped mushroom stems. I like that the recipe uses the whole mushroom instead of telling us to snap off the stems and then discard them.

I usually don't cook mushrooms until dry, but I followed the directions and kept stirring the frying pan until all of the juices had bubbled away. The mushroom reduction in the pan was fantastically good, but I don't know if it was worth it.

The next part of the recipe is easy if you can make a competent white sauce (which, admittedly, is tricky to get right on the first five attempts). After we have made gravy of the pan, it was time to add the cheese. The ingredients list calls for "old cheddar," but I chose to use up the various scraps of cheese lurking in the refrigerator. Besides, "five-cheese sauce" sounds so much better than "cheddar sauce."

 

One taste of the cheese sauce and I forgave the recipe writers for the burnt wild rice.

And so, it was finally time to assemble everything! The recipe calls for large portobello mushrooms, but full-sized ones were extremely costly compared to the little ones. I know nothing about fungiculture, but the price difference suggests that mushrooms are difficult to grow to a large size. So, I figured we would have dainty little stuffed mushrooms instead of big ones. And they looked so cute before we baked them.

I know that this magazine is meant for autumn recipes, but realistically we can only serve these on Halloween. They look like we should call them "zombie pustules."

Things didn't look any better after coming out of the oven.

Before I get too disappointed about their appearance, I should note that the magazine's army of photoshoot professionals couldn't make their mushrooms look any less oozy. Their picture is a lot prettier than what happened in our kitchen, but I think this is an inherently untidy recipe.

Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario

Even though our mushrooms looked like I had dropped them onto the floor before serving, I figured there was no way mushrooms and cheese could possibly taste bad. On a related note, I wonder if there's a visual equivalent of an "acquired taste." You know, how you think something looks ugly until spend several years forcefully convincing yourself that you like it.

These were as delicious as they weren't pretty. I know the recipe calls for pecans on top, but I thought the cashews were a lot better. That salty hit on top of the cheese made the mushrooms taste like really good bar food, without having to pay $20 for a beer in some place where the music is as loud as a high school dance. 

And so, once again, a recipe from this magazine didn't go where the directions told us to, but took us somewhere delicious. These mushrooms don't make up for the horror show that currently passes for national politics. But on the (very small) bright side, our northern neighbors who gave us the recipe aren't pretending any of this is normal.

*In the purest, most pedantic sense, it is true that the kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. However, unless someone has decided to whip up some stuffed mushrooms while in a vomit comet or somewhere far away from Earth's surface, mass and weight are functionally interchangeable in the kitchen. Anyone wishing to waggle their irate index finger at me is advised to direct their corrective urges at the manufacturers of kitchen scales that switch between pounds (a unit of weight) and kilograms (a unit of mass) at the press of a button.↪

Egg-Free Cake: or, The time is right

Who would have thought that eggs would disappear from grocery stores? 

Eggless Cake ½ c shortening* 1½ c sugar 1 tsp soda ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg 3 c flour 1 c sour milk or buttermilk 1 c firmly packed raisins Heat oven to 350°. Grease and flour two 8" round cake pans. Chop the raisins, or put them in a cup and have at them with scissors, stirring them as you go so they all get snipped. Cream shortening and sugar. Stir in the cinnamon, nutmeg, and baking soda, mix well. Add the flour one cup at a time, alternating with the milk ½ cup at a time. Mix thoroughly after every addition. Stir in the raisins, being sure to break up any clumps. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until it springs back in the center when lightly pressed. *A lot of recipes from this time use the word shortening to refer to any solid fat. So if you prefer to use margarine or butter, go right ahead. Good Things to Eat, Rufus Estes, 1911

Only a few weeks ago, the very idea of an egg shortage seemed as preposterous as running out of toilet paper did before the pandemic. Eggs were always there, just like the flour and the canned corn. But these days, a movie scene like this hits a little different.

The Stepford Wives, 2004

As eggs get scarcer, we at A Book of Cookrye would like to share a cake recipe that doesn't use any. Of course, we can offer the War Cake, which also contains no dairy. We also have a one-egg cake, for those who want to make a single egg work for an entire birthday-sized layer cake. But today, we are making the eggless cake from Good Things To Eat As Suggested By Rufus. 

Because we already had sour cream in the refrigerator, we used it instead of buttermilk. It made the cake batter almost like cookie dough.  

Of course, having been here before, we know that this recipe will make a perfectly good cake if you put it in a cake pan and then bake it like a normal person would. If you look past the low-quality picture from when last we wrote about it, you can see that baking it as directed results in a very lovely cake.

But today, in order to give the oven a bit of rest, I'm putting the cake batter onto this Soviet waffle iron that landed in the kitchen.

Reminder: The cake batter is egg-free. There's nothing timely about this cookware at all.

I knew the cake would be good because it was the last time I made it. And it looks really cute coming out of a waffle iron. 

I'll admit it makes a better cake than waffles, but that's why the cookbook writer told us to bake it in the oven and not on a waffle iron. 

In closing, this is a great cake for saving eggs. It's old-fashioned and a lot firmer than what we're used to today. But it doesn't taste like you tried to bake with ingredients you didn't have. It is very good on its own.

Cabbage Cooked In Milk: or, Just like Great-Grandma used to make

Today, we are going back to my great-grandmother's binder of recipes and making cabbage.

Cabbage Cooked in Milk 2 cups milk 3 tbsp butter 3 tbsp flour 5 to 6 cups shredded cabbage (about half a cabbage-head) 1 cup cream or half-and-half Salt and pepper to taste Nutmeg to taste (if desired)* Heat the milk in a large saucepan. While you're waiting on the milk, melt the butter in a small frying pan. Add the flour and mix thoroughly. Reduce the burner to just enough heat to keep it warm. When the milk comes to a boil, add the cabbage to it. Cook for 2 minutes after it comes back to a simmer. You may have to press the cabbage into the milk until it softens, just like you usually have to gradually push spaghetti into boiling water as it starts to bend. After the cabbage has cooked for 2 minutes, stir in the half-and-half. Before the mixture has time to reheat, quickly mix in the butter and flour. Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a brisk boil and cook for 4 minutes, frequently stirring and scraping the bottom of the pot. *Nutmeg isn't in the original ingredients, but it's very good. Source: handwritten manuscript

Apparently she was a teacher. I think her cursive is just as incisive as the corrections she probably put under subpar homework.

Before proceeding, I should note that I only decided to make this recipe after seeing the relatively short cooking time. After all, very few vegetables are at their best after boiling for an hour. 

More so than the graham cracker cake or the brown sugar squares, this seemed like something my great-grandmother would have made. From what I've heard about her, and from seeing her perpetually stern face and rigorously serviceable clothes in photographs, she seems a lot more likely to serve cabbage than cake. 

I've never shredded a cabbage before, and honestly had no idea how. But Martha Stewart showed me how in exactly one minute. It's so rare to find cooking technique videos that aren't bloated out with theme songs or entreaties to "like and subscribe," so I was pleasantly surprised. Of course, I didn't manage to cut my cabbage as finely as the disembodied hands in the video, but I think I did pretty well for a first attempt. 

I didn't see how we could ever submerge this surfeit of cabbage in a pint of milk. But I figured it must have worked at some point, otherwise it wouldn't be written down. I thought that perhaps the cabbage would shrink a lot as it cooked, just like spinach does.

The cabbage barely fit into the pot, which took away a lot of my vegetable optimism. But as I often do when things look amiss on the stove, I followed the recipe exactly as written so I could blame someone else.

There's milk under there somewhere.

After two minutes, our recipe directs us to add the butter, flour, and second allotment of milk. Anyone who made it through the first six weeks of a home economics class would know that milk, butter, and flour are the starting ingredients of a standard-issue white sauce. With that in mind, I initially thought we're supposed to make a gravy which would in turn thicken the milky cabbage. But our recipe directs us, in formidably legible cursive, to "Combine the butter and flour and add with the top milk and seasoning to the cooking cabbage mixture." 

I was afraid that the butter and flour would harden into dumpling-clods as soon as it landed in the hot milk. But I can't argue with someone who (based on the recipe we're looking at) could competently use a fountain pen. And so, I dumped in the half-and-half (which today is filling in for the top milk). Before the pot of cabbage had a chance to reheat, I quickly added the butter and flour and stirred really hard to make them quickly mix into everything else. I didn't think it would work, but was happily surprised.

At this point, we had only one sentence left in the recipe: "Continue cooking the entire mixture rapidly for 4 minutes." When I turned off the burner, the cabbage was blessedly still green instead of a colorless overcooked slime. Unfortunately, it hung off the ladle like limp green tentacles.

Boy does this ever look like someone saying "Eat your vegetables."

The cabbage looked a lot better at the table than when I fished it out of the pot. Just for a bit of extra flair (and because we had the partial remains of a loaf on the countertop), I popped a slice of French bread into the toaster and then propped it up in the bowl.

 To my surprise, I liked this a lot. I had initially suspected that I was making a perfunctory recipe for joyless vegetables, but it was oddly satisfying on a cold night. It also was unexpectedly filling, which I imagine was ideal when my great-grandmother was feeding the kids. The short cooking time meant that the cabbage was still ever-so-slightly crisp. The cabbage became slightly sweet as it cooked, which I liked.

In full disclosure, I should note that some of the milk hardened onto the bottom of the pot (as often happens when putting milk on the stove). I had to soak it overnight in bleach-water before the cooked-on milk would lift away. Soaking a dirty pot overnight isn't laborious, but I do think it's worth keeping in mind. 

In closing, this was unexpectedly good and also really quick to make. If you are actually organized in the kitchen, you can have it ready in about half an hour. So, and I didn't think I would say this, I have already made this again.

Note: "Top milk" refers the cream that used to separate out of milk and rise to the top of the bottle. Because milk is now homogenized, that no longer happens. Back then, you had to shake the milk bottle to mix it before pouring, like you often do with salad dressings today. Many people would instead pour out the cream, then pour themselves a glass of milk, and then return the cream to the bottle afterward.↪

Onion Soup Gratinee: or, Every bit as good as I hoped

"Oh, go eat a boiled onion!"

Onion Soup Gratinee 3 white or yellow onions 3 tbsp butter or margarine (or cooking oil if desired) 6 cups beef stock 1 clove garlic, chopped (if desired) 2 tbsp chopped parsley (fresh or dried) Salt and pepper to taste 3 tbsp grated cheese (we recommend provolone) ¼ loaf French bread, sliced to desired thickness Have a large casserole dish ready. Quarter the onions lengthwise and slice thinly. Melt the butter in a soup pot. Add the onions and cook until slightly golden. This will take a while, so have patience. If using butter, be sure to stir it often or else it will burn onto the bottom of the pot. Add beef stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. While the pot is simmering, put the bread slices onto the bare oven racks. Then heat oven to 400°. Remove the bread from the oven when it is dried. After the soup has simmered 10 minutes, remove from heat and add the garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper. Pour into the casserole dish, and lay the bread slices on top. Sprinkle with the cheese. Bake until the cheese is browned on top, about 10 minutes. Note: If you have single-serving baking dishes, that is even nicer than baking the soup in one large pan. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933 via The Internet Archive

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book, 1933

As the temperature dips in and out of freezing, heating up the oven for the express purpose of baking soup seems more justified than it did a week ago. And so, when no one was around to whine about the smell, I dared to bring forth an onion.

You can tell that this book comes from an era when we were economizing on time as much as money. Instead of chopping the entire onion into tiny pieces, we just had to cut it up like this. The onion didn't even have time to make me cry.

Less than two minutes after I got the onion out of the refrigerator, we were ready to heat up the saucepan. Now, because this cookbook came out in the middle of the Depression, our recipe calls for "butter or butter substitute." And so, with the recipe's blessing, I defied a century of cooking purism and put a big spoonful of cheap spreadable margarine into the pot.

 

This is period-correct economization.

And so, it was time to get our star ingredient off the cutting board and onto the stove!

I was kind of surprised that this soup contains onions and nothing else. I know it's called onion soup, but most soup recipes tell you to throw in a few other things besides the title ingredient. Truly, economizing was no joke in 1933.

We have learned that caramelizing onions takes a very long time. But you can also expect to spend quite a while at the frying pan if your recipe merely calls for "softened and lightly browned." For those who aren't using cooking oil like it's the 21st century, you should know that you need to keep stirring this the whole time because the butter (or butter substitute) will otherwise want to burn onto the bottom of the pan.

 

I had the audacity to leave the pot unattended and clean off the countertop. (After learning that onions require patience, I soon let myself get used to this sort of stovetop neglect.) Only a minute or so later, I returned to find that we had a few blackened spots on the onions. Because we are economizing, I didn't throw them out and start over.

You wouldn't have thrown this away if Old Man Depression was knocking on your door.

I've seen a lot of people say that recipes from this era are underseasoned, and I agree that a lot of them are. But I think the tiny seasoning amounts in most ingredient lists were meant to be starting points that you, the home cook, would expand on. With that said, I have to credit the recipe writers for using a truly huge amount of parsley in this recipe. This is exactly as much as the ingredients list calls for, and not a speck more. Perhaps fresh parsley would have been better, but we are economizing.

At this point, it was time to put our bread on top and get this into the oven. Our recipe calls for "one-fourth loaf of French bread," which I was only too happy to purchase. Even today, French bread is just one dollar per loaf at the grocery store near me. But then I started wondering: was French bread already a thing in grocery stores in the 1930s? I know that no grocery store today is complete without a rack of baguettes, but was that already the case in 1933? (Of course, supermarkets didn't really exist then, but that's another matter.) Or did most bakeries sell cheap French bread in those days?

Anyway, today's recipe taught me that bread shrinks when you toast it. I cut enough slices to cover this pan exactly. But after getting them out of the oven, I had to add two more to cover the empty space. 

In case you forgot that the Depression was on, this recipe calls for only three tablespoons of cheese to sprinkle over enough soup to serve a medium-sized family. Obviously, I let myself be a bit more extravagant than that. Provolone seemed like a great match, but I couldn't find any in brick form. I was mildly irked at having to pay the deli-counter markup for sliced cheese. But a good onion is worth it.

You can see the non-toasted last-minute bread already getting soggy, while the oven-dried bread is still perfectly fine.

After baking for ten minutes, the cheese was browned on top like every good casserole ought to be.

This soup tasted unexpectedly French in a way I couldn't explain. But it was also a lot better than a boiled onion has any right to be. The bread on top, despite being thoroughly dried out in the oven, got very soggy but kept a very thin layer of toasted crispness top. Some people might find that comforting, but I would rather make croutons and serve them on the side. However, I would definitely eat this again, and often.

The Last Chocolate Pizzelles I Want To Make

Today, we are asking Fante's to help us with our chocolate pizzelles.

Chocolate Pizzelles ½ cup butter ¼ cup cocoa powder 1¾ cups flour ½ tsp baking powder ⅛ tsp salt 3 eggs 1 tbsp vanilla Melt the butter, getting it really hot instead of merely warm enough to melt. Then stir in the cocoa powder, beating out all lumps. Set aside for three to five minutes to cool. If it has re-solidified after this time, re-melt it and allow it to cool until it is barely warm enough to stay liquid.* Meanwhile, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, set aside. Beat together the eggs and vanilla. Once the cocoa and butter have cooled, add them and beat everything together. Then mix in the remaining dry ingredients. Cook on a hot pizzelle iron according to manufacturer's directions. These may take up to fifteen seconds longer to cook than other pizzelle recipes. *This is called "blooming" the cocoa powder. It draws out a lot more chocolate flavor than simply stirring the powder in. Source: Fante's Kitchen

Our previous chocolate pizzelles were a frustrating failure. Granted, I was not in a good mental state when I made them. But today, I decided to look elsewhere for chocolate pizzelles that might actually let go of the iron.

After I got the ingredients onto the counter, I thought "Is it really this easy?"

When I beat the egg into the chocolate, the batter turned an unexpectedly light color. I wasn't even trying to whip it.

This recipe was suspiciously easy to mix together. Things got a little tricky when I had to switch from whisk to spoon upon adding the flour. But that was the only non-problem I had. When our batter was ready, it looked and tasted like it could have become really good brownies.

I put our first dollop of delicious chocolate batter onto the iron. A few minutes later, I opened the iron and saw that this would be a very long process. We would have no free-falling pizzelles tonight.

After dislodging the first pizzelle with a spatula and a lot of force, I had to clean out all those little grooves with a wooden skewer. This has happened so often that I can now do it in less than a minute. I can't decide if I'm glad for the many opportunities I've had to practice.

I was so glad I used the flat iron and not the ridged snowflake one. No amount of generously-brushed shortening could persuade these to free-fall out of it. I had to jam the spatula under them like I was ruining a batch of hamburgers that had fused with the grill. But to my surprise, the spatula didn't rip the pizzelles to shreds. They actually managed to come off the iron intact(ish).

I tasted one and almost thought this recipe was worth it. The pizzelles had a really nice chocolate flavor. They had the same crisp fragile texture as the cinnamon wafers. For those who don't remember, the cinnamon wafers were my very first recipe on a stovetop iron (unless you count instant waffle mix). It's interesting to sort of come back to where we started, but this time with chocolate.

If you don't mind your pizzelles looking a little roughed-up after divorcing them from the iron, these are pretty good. But I absolutely DO NOT recommend these for your first pizzelle recipe.

After every single pizzelle resolutely glued itself to the iron, I wondered if I had lost my way. Or was the iron gummed up with something I didn't know I should clean off? Was the cocoa powder making these inherently sticky? Are chocolate pizzelles only suitable for nonstick irons?

As a sanity test, I made a batch of chocolate-free pizzelles. I went with Fante's recipe because they always come out so nice. I hadn't planned on making them, but we had all the ingredients anyway. The first pizzelle cooked to golden perfection and fell right off of the iron. After such a frustrating evening, I really needed that.

After a few near-perfect pizzelles made me feel better about life, I decided to be a bit daring and get out the snowflake iron. To repeat, you're screwed if your pizzelles stick to this thing. Or at least, you can't dislodge them intact. So I only use it if I am feeling really confident. Things got a little scary when I saw how wispy our first pizzelle was in the center, and I feared that I had ruined it by squeezing the iron too hard.

But to my delight, the pizzelle fluttered out completely intact-- even the dangerously thin center part. After this, I will forever swear by melted shortening, and never use cooking spray on a pizzelle iron ever again.

I'm tempted to say that a good batch of pizzelles fix a crappy mood. But I should also warn that a failed batch of them can add a special sort of misery to your night. So, I don't necessarily recommend making pizzelles for stress relief. If the recipe comes out right, you'll go through the rest of the day humming happy little tunes to yourself. But if things go awry at the iron, you'll feel rotten for quite some time.

As for the chocolate pizzelles that brought us here, I don't know if I recommend making them or not. They tasted so good that I very nearly want to say that everyone should try them at home. But at the same time, they were very irksome to get off of the iron. I'm not sure if these would be better on a nonstick iron since I don't have one laying around. Sorry to end this on such a mixed review, but these were exactly as delicious as they were frustrating.