Did you make enough mashed potatoes to feed dozens of people, only to be faced with a handful of friends who stopped eating carbs so they could drink them instead?

Yes, this oddly specific situation has happened to me. I live in Los Angeles.

Anyway…

If you’re looking to repurpose your mashers and it’s too hot to make soup, I’ve discovered a few tricks to making the perfect savory potato waffles.

I found this recipe on allrecipes.com, and after reading the reviews, I decided to be brave and play a little.

Instead of a whole onion going into the mixture, I combined half an onion with three mini peppers and a small palmful of vegan bacon bits, sautéed in oil instead of butter until soft, added garlic and dried parsley, cooked until sweet, and dumped it all into the recommended two cups of mashed potatoes.

The recipe calls for adding two eggs and 1/4 cup of flour, but I found that the mixture was too fragile, so I increased the flour to 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp. Oh! And adding the eggs makes the mixture look super gross, and it takes a lot of stirring to get the eggs to mix in completely. Don’t give up, no matter how snotty the initial combination looks.

Another note: the recipe mentions adding 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup of your mixture to a pre-heated waffle iron (dependent on size of waffle iron), but it doesn’t mention that you need to spread the mixture out across the whole cooking surface in order to end up with waffles that are waffle-shaped.

Once cooked – and that means, with my waffle iron, cooking them through one cycle at Max and then another cycle halfway between Min and Max – I served one with leftover pico de gallo and vegan breakfast sausages and another with shredded Irish cheddar, pico, and vegan bacon.

All in all, this recipe did quite well, and the additions only served to make these waffles more delicious.