Those of you who know me, either through this blog, Animal Voices, or “real life” know I shoot my mouth off a lot about gluten-free food. I mean, I completely sympathize with celiac sufferers, but I can’t help but wonder if the whole gluten-free thing that’s sweeping the Western World isn’t some big conspiracy to make my food taste like crap.

But that being said, I know that a lot of the NCVA’s members are gluten-free, and I wanted to make sure they felt welcome at the upcoming pancake/waffle breakfast. So began my quest for the perfect vegan/gluten-free pancake and waffle recipes.

I’d been working on my regular waffle recipe for a while (Neil is very fat now) and, as of this morning, I thought I had it pretty much down. So this afternoon I tried a gluten-free version.

The outcome of that experiment has nearly shattered my universe.

You see, the gluten-free ones were better than the regular ones. Look at them! Fluffy! Crispy! Golden!

What the hell was going on? They were supposed to be crumbly pieces of cardboard that I would serve with apologetic sympathy to the gluten-free unfortunates in between bites of my own glutenous squares of wafflly magnificence.

But, with every weird gluten-free cloud comes a silver wheaty lining. In this case, my discovery that gluten-free waffles reign supreme over regular ones might actually save me some work. I’ve decided that rather than make regular and gluten-free versions of both the pancakes and the waffles, all pancakes will be regular ones, and all waffles will be gluten-free.

And for all those who doubt my claim that the gluten-free waffles are fantastic, have faith. Or if you can’t have faith – well, have a pancake.