If it were a Belgian waffle it would be perfect for Jean Claude Van Damme, but… Oh, sorry, we were just idly musing on the news that Daniel Shumski, whose Waffleizer blog a couple of years ago was a droll delight, especially in the category of Brilliantly Goofy Website Ideas, has now sold a Waffleizer cookbook. Shumski, whose day job is as a web editor at the Tribune, is always fun to talk to, his wit as dry as a Costco-sized box of Bisquick, as we found when we did this interview with him two years ago. We catch up with him on his big news below.
So you got a book deal, tell us about it!
Happy to tell you what I know.
The book is being published by Workman and is slated for early 2014. As someone who works with hourly deadlines at my day job, that kind of timeline was a little hard for me to wrap my head around at first. But in terms of what I need to get done to make this book a reality, sometimes that publishing date feels like next week.
What can people expect in the book?
New stuff. You won’t be holding a book that just slaps all the stuff from the blog between two covers. I’m working on dozens of new recipes. At the same time, it wouldn’t be right to leave out the waffleburger. Or waffled falafel. So there’s going to be a little room for revisiting some of the blog’s best stuff – maybe with a little bit of refinement, a little more testing, and a few new twists.
As with the blog, I’m planning on bringing in some chefs’ voices too. This won’t be all me alone in the kitchen with my waffle iron – er, waffle irons. (I have four now.)
With, of course, luscious four-color waffle porn, we assume.
I’ll be doing most of the photos too. That took a little bit of convincing.
Of them or you?
Me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a part of any project that would have me as a photographer. But I’m pretty excited about that now.
I would not lay claim to being unequivocally qualified for many things in life— but I’m comfortable with saying that photographing waffled foodstuffs may be a thing for which I am uniquely qualified, if only by virtue of my experience in the field.
