Hot, fresh waffles on the road

I'm in Arizona, and the hotel I'm staying at offers one item that I've never seen before in a hotel breakfast. A waffle-maker. (And cups of waffle batter.) Pour in the batter, rotate the waffle iron to start the built-in timer (the other nifty feature is the waffle iron rotates), and 2 minutes later you have a hot, fresh waffle.

It was a tasty waffle.

According to reliable sources, at least one other hotel in the area has the same implement of fresh waffleness.

Illegal Sea Food

There's a place near my hotel that reads "Legal Sea Food" on the awning. I'm not sure if it's a store or a restaurant or something else.

Does this mean there is illegal sea food about?

I've only been in Baltimore a short time, but I haven't seen any shady characters in trench coats whispering "Hey budy, want some prawns?"

Saturday muffin blogging

Been a while since I've posted any pictures of breakfast foods. Time to get back to my blogging roots and rectify this great omission. This breakfast food picture even comes with a boring, pointless story.

Last week I had a hankering for muffins. Being somewhat competent in the kitchen, I set about on a quest to make some. I consulted my wife's "Joy of Cooking" tome for proper muffin making technique. The key is to keep the wet and dry ingredients separate as long as possible, and mix them just enough to get them sufficiently mixed. To the consternation of assorted bystanders, I actually *measured* most of the ingredients (okay, so I'm embellishing the story a bit - the only bystander was the cat, and he wasn't all that concerned.)

The pictured pineapple-coconut muffin is from my third batch (for the record, the first batch was blueberry, and the second batch was raspberry).

The recipe called for 4 teaspoons of baking powder. After reading the baking powder label, this seemed like a lot of sodium, so I reduced it to 2 teaspoons. The muffins still appeared to rise okay, and were still tasty.