Everyone has a bizarre cooking shortcut they love, and its usually a device of some sort. It might be a mango peeler, a multi-edge brownie pan, or an all-in-one egg sandwich device. (Yup, that's a thing.) My guilty pleasure: the waffle maker.

A waffle maker can cook almost anything. National Waffle Day, on August 24, is my favorite made-up holiday. Do waffles need a holiday? No. But it's as good a time as any to tell you how I feel about my waffle maker, which can make everything from burgers to hash browns to chocolate chip cookies. And that's just the beginning.

My Waffling Origin Story

My first encounter with non-standard things in a waffle maker came at a campground. My family and I had recently moved into our 1969 Dodge Travco motorhome to live full time on the road. I gutted and restored the RV, but one thing I never got around to fixing was the oven.

We were in a New Orleans campground one day and a few fellow #VanLife travelers had us over for dinner. They also lacked a working oven, so they served us cornbread waffles instead. If you'd have been there you could have audibly heard the ding that went off in my head when I tried my cornbread waffle. Waffles ... cornbread? What kind of sorcery was this? If they made cornbread in a waffle maker, what else could we make?

Traditionally, the waffle was a leavened bread-like thing, made from a dough rather than the runny batter we're used to now. It seems to have grown out of a Greek tradition of cakes cooked between two pressed together hot plates. From there, the idea of pressing batter between plates spread through Europe. Europeans started adding yeast to make a leavened dough, and eventually the hot plates found their modern grid pattern. The French were early waffle pioneers, though the Dutch soon dominated. Now, the word "waffle" is often preceded by the word "Belgian."

Waffle Time

Scott Gilbertson

We were not waffle traditionalists—just a family without an oven, desperate for new ways to heat food. After that first encounter with gridded cornbread, we grabbed the cheapest waffle maker we could find and began to experiment.

We started by replicating the cornbread waffles. After some tinkering, we had the recipe down. Our first homegrown success was chocolate waffle cake. The brilliance of cake as a waffle is that all those dents fill up with frosting. To this day, despite access to ovens, my kids want chocolate waffle cake for their birthdays.