Cottage Oat Waffles with Fried Chicken Cutlets @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: The happy thing about writing my food critic character Hayley Snow is that we are forced to try the new restaurants that she might try, and she (and I) might write about. This past spring, we went to lunch with new friends at the Square Grouper on Cudjoe Key. I’m a sucker for fried chicken over waffles, which was the special of the day and that’s exactly what I ordered. I had a feeling Miss Gloria would order it, too. 

Here’s my version of the dish, which started out as the one on the New York Times Cooking site. I made some tweaks thinking about Jane Brody's cottage oat biscuits which I've made and loved for years. (BTW, this waffle iron showed up for Mother’s Day, from the animals of course. Aren't they thoughtful?)

Ingredients

• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter

• 1 cup all-purpose flour (next time I’ll try white whole wheat)

• 1 cup ground oats

• 1 tablespoon brown sugar or maple syrup

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt

• ½ teaspoon baking soda

• 1 cup cottage cheese

• 1 cup milk

• 4 large eggs

Chicken cutlets

Melt the butter and set it aside. Grind the oats until fairly fine in your food processor. You want a little bit of texture left.

Add the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda and pulse those into the oats. 

In a separate bowl, whisk together cottage cheese, milk, melted butter, and eggs. Pulse the wet ingredients into dry ingredients. The batter should look thick (and delicious!)

Preheat a waffle iron and lightly coat with butter. Unless your brand of iron tells you this isn’t necessary, as mine did. Cook waffles (using about ½ cup batter per waffle) until golden and crisp. Keep them warm in a 200 degree oven until ready to serve.

For the chicken part of the recipe, I bought pre-fried chicken cutlets from Bishop’s Orchards, a local grocery and farm near us. That way I could simply heat them, slice, and serve over the waffles with syrup. You are welcome to make your own!

This made about eight waffles. You could cut the recipe in half, but why not make them all and freeze the ones you don’t eat for an easy breakfast down the line? I can definitely picture them next time with a big serving of fruit and plain yogurt drizzled with honey or syrup! In fact that's exactly how I served them the second time around:

A Clue in the Crumbs

In bookstores now!

Food critic Hayley Snow and her pal Miss Gloria are overjoyed to welcome Violet and Bettina Booth, aka the Scottish Scone Sisters, to Key West. The sisters will host The UK Bakes!—Key West Edition. But the same day they arrive, the bed-and-breakfast the sisters are staying in gets torched.

The contest begins the next morning featuring three local bakers. One is the inn owner’s wife, Rayna, who is not only the most talented chef of the group but now a person of interest in the fire. The next night, a dogwalker discovers a body near the bed-and-breakfast. The victim appears to be Rayna’s husband, and the murder weapon points directly to the Scottish Scone Sisters.

But the show must go on. In between filming sessions, the three elderly ladies and Hayley must search for clues to the brutal murder in order to find out who wants to force them out of the kitchen. But as they draw closer to the answer, the threats from a murderer grow closer too. Are they now in danger of getting baked off?

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