Friday Muffins

It's been a long week at work. Even though we only work Monday through Thursday, those four days were intense. The good news is that the weather seems to be cooling off, down into the 80s and maybe even the 70s today, though there will probably be a few more days in the 90s before month's end.  Anyway, we needed a treat today so I made muffins, banana bran muffins, to be precise, and here they are, along with a couple of tiny Halloween table topper quilts I made a few years ago and the gorgeous mums one of my students brought me last week. I just love October!

The recipe is from an old issue of Eating Well, one of my favorite food magazines. The recipes I've tried have all been tasty, pretty easy, and healthy. I really should re-subscribe, I suppose. The recipe as the magazine gives it is at: http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/banana_bran_muffins.html. Here's how I made them, which includes a few minor alterations:

Banana-Bran Muffins - makes 1 dozen 
2 large eggs
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup mashed ripe bananas, (2 medium)
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup unprocessed oat bran 
1/4 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 3/4 cup whole-wheat flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 400°F. Coat 12 muffin cups with cooking spray.
     Beat eggs and brown sugar in a medium bowl until smooth. Mix in bananas, buttermilk, bran, oil and vanilla.
     Stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the dry ingredients; add the wet ingredients and stir/fold gently with a rubber spatula until just combined. Never overbeat muffins; it makes them tough and gives them pointy heads. (I think it probably does the same thing to children.) Stir in the walnuts. Scoop the batter into the prepared muffin cups (they’ll be quite full). 
     Bake the muffins until the tops are golden brown and spring back when touched lightly, 15 to 25 minutes (it was 18 minutes in my oven). Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes. Loosen edges and turn muffins out onto a wire rack to cool slightly before serving.

Nutrition Per serving : 196 Calories; 6 g Fat; 1 g Sat; 3 g Mono; 36 mg Cholesterol; 32 g Carbohydrates; 5 g Protein; 4 g Fiber; 182 mg Sodium; 167 mg Potassium, 6 WW points

The original recipe calls for a mixture of all-purpose and whole wheat flours, along with wheat bran, but I only had whole wheat flour and oat bran on hand, so I used those. It also gives 1/2 cup chocolate chips as an optional ingredient, but I decided against that and added more walnuts. If you go to the website you'll see the walnuts are sprinkled over the top rather than stirred in, as I did it. They look prettier that way but I like a bit of walnut in every bite. I just ate my first muffin, still warm from the oven, and it was very good, not overly sweet, though I imagine that, like traditional banana bread, they'll mellow with standing and taste richer and sweeter tomorrow.

     I don't know why I haven't been baking lately. I've gone back to Weight Watchers and am fairly happy with my slow but steady (sometimes stalled) progress, so that's one reason, but I looked at my favorite breakfast cookbook, Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café, and I'd figured out the points for the muffin recipes and they're within the safe range, most with a point less than these. Oh well, it's fall now, more or less, so that may be why I'm back in the baking and soup-making mood - and I intend to enjoy it.

Brunch in the Garden

A couple of weeks ago we had some friends over for Sunday brunch. It was a lovely, not too warm day, and since one of them is highly allergic to cats (something he discovered while having a nice snuggle with Sophie - apparently he'd managed to make it to his early 30s without much cat contact, but she was furry enough to make up for all those lost years), we ate out on the patio.

Our friends brought a cantaloupe and some nectarines, both yellow and white, and I mixed up a little chopped salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, kalamata olives, and fresh basil. The muffins are the cherry cornmeal muffins from Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café, but I forgot to put in the butter (I discovered it sitting melted in the microwave after they were already in the oven!), but they didn't turn out too badly, actually, just a tiny bit chewy, though still tasty.  They were even better with a little butter and homemade prickly pear jelly. The recipe for the muffins (butter included) is at http://www.molliekatzen.com/recipes/recipe.php?recipe=orange_cherry_muffins.
    The main dish, of course, was that thing that looks like a quiche, made from a recipe I've had since the '70s, back in the days when real men didn't eat quiche, so perhaps that's why it was called Switzerland Cheese and Onion Pie (apparently whoever came up with it thought the "real men" wouldn't know what it was). I used to make it a lot, but it had been many years, and I'd forgotten how good and easy it is. So here's the recipe:

Switzerland Cheese and Onion Pie
1 9" unbaked piecrust (deep-dish if frozen)
1 large onion, chopped
2 T. melted butter
2 c. cheese, shredded (I used cheddar this time,
     but Swiss, pepper jack, most anything is fine)
1 T. flour
3 eggs
1 c. half and half (or part milk)
1 tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Sauté onion in melted butter till tender. In a bowl, toss the cheese with the flour, then mix in onions, eggs, half and half, and salt. Pour into pie crust. Bake 10 minutes, reduce heat to 325 degrees, and bake 30 to 35 minutes longer, until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Let it cool 10 minutes or so before cutting and serving.

There's nothing like a lovely autumn day, is there?

Muffin of the Week, Luminaria Nights, and Other Things of Beauty

First things first: this was breakfast, and it was very good. Well, actually it was brunch, since we didn't sit down to it until 11:30, which justifies it being fairly hearty since I hope it will hold us over till an early dinner. The muffins are Mollie Katzen's Carrot and Currant Muffins; the recipe is available on her website at:

http://www.molliekatzen.com/recipes/recipe.php?recipe=carrot_muffins

In the book she says it makes 8-10 muffins though on the site it says 12. Guess it depends on how full you fill the cups; I got 9. They're quite good, but I like them somewhat less than some of the others I've posted; they don't quite have the intensity of flavor that I crave. But they're better than most you could buy, and certainly a nice way to chip away at the over-abundance of carrots resulting from buying a 5# bag a while back (because it was such a good deal).
Maybe my lack of enthusiasm stems from too much carrot cake. At the University of Arizona every catered event features carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. It's a very rich, dense cake, and I liked it very much the first couple of years - maybe even the first five years. Then I started just eating some of the frosting - I guess I'm a frosting person in that ongoing debate over which is best, cake or frosting. Now, after 18 years at U of A, I shudder at the sight of what used to seem like a treat (of course that doesn't mean I might not still have a taste, just to see if it's improved, of course).
Joe'd been craving bacon and while I was at the dentist yesterday morning (for a broken tooth which, oddly, didn't hurt at all, and that was good because I had to wait two days since the dentist was out of town) he went hunting for it in the freezer and couldn't find it (I'd been shifting things around and it was behind the vodka).
A few words about bacon: I know it's not the healthiest food but we only have it once every week or two, and then only "good" bacon. I grew up on the stuff that comes in plastic packages, Oscar Mayer and his ilk, but I haven't bought it in years. Now we buy only the nice thick bacon from the butcher's case, which goes on sale frequently and freezes beautifully. It's soooo much better and leaner and tastier, especially (I think) the kind with pepper on it. Most markets carry it; we shop at, Sunflower and (less often) Albertson's, good thick bacon at a reasonable price, often less than the stuff in plastic. To freeze it, I separate it into 2-slice units (enough for us each to have 1 slice with an ordinary breakfast) and lay out a fairly long sheet of waxed paper, then I fold up the waxed paper like an accordion, with 2 slices of bacon in each fold, separated from the next 2 slices by a layer of waxed paper (I hope I'm making that clear) so that it's easy to take out just 2 (or 4 or 6 or however many you want) at a time. Then I wrap it all up again in the butcher's paper and put a rubber band or two around it. Usually I cut the slices in half crosswise to cook them so I can use a smaller pan; they thaw very fast at low heat and are easy to separate in just a few minutes.
As I said, the bacon I buy seems leaner than what I grew up on, so it doesn't render out as much fat, but if there is melted bacon grease I save it in a jar for other cooking. I read once that if dinner isn't ready when a man comes home he can be pacified by the smell of onions frying, if you think to put them on the stove in time. With Joe, at least, that would work even better if they were frying in bacon grease. However, many of us aren't in that kind of traditional situation, even if we have partners - Joe and I take the bus home from work together and he's as likely to cook dinner as I am. But it's a nice idea.

This is the big Christmas tree at the entrance to the Tucson Botanical Garden, where last night was the first of the annual Luminaria Nights (continuing tonight and Sunday night, 5-8 p.m.). The pathways are lit by traditional luminarias, with various musical groups performing in different areas. At one point there were bell ringers in the indoor hall, an accordionist near the conservatory, a bluegrass group farther on, Irish dancers in the xeriscape gardens, and a choir in the large pavilion. The performers changed at 6:30 and on our way out we sat for a while in the indoor hall listening to a wonderful string quartet - one of the nicest parts of that was how happy all the players looked! - especially the violist, a young Austrian woman.
There's something magical about the gardens at night in candlelight.

In spite of the crowds and the music (and the food vendors, so it's good to come hungry!), there's a kind of peaceful hush that seems so appropriate to the season, and such a nice corrective to all the commercial craziness that otherwise accompanies it. When you come to the gardens at any season, time seems to slow down, so that it's okay to just sit and enjoy listening to the birds and otherwise being surrounded by things of nature. Even what's mechanical and manmade contributes to relaxation, like the lovely little model railroad in its "Old West" setting (which was hard to photograph last night, but I'm posting these pictures anyway):

And now, after yesterday's busyness, today I'm at home, relaxing, cooking, blogging, puttering...with my beautiful friend and familiar Sophie. You probably can't read it, but the title of the book lying next to her is Mirror, Mirror on the Wall - I'm quite sure Sophie's mirror tells her every day that she is indeed the fairest of them all.

Muffin of the Week - Experimental

I hadn't realized how much I enjoy creating these weekly postings until I got off schedule, but this morning the muffins are back, this time as an experiment based on "Name That Muffin" from Morning Food by Margaret S. Fox and John Bear. Margaret is the former owner of the renowned Café Beaujolais in Mendocino, California, and I bought the book when we were vacationing there a couple of years ago.

The recipe she gives is a sort of basic muffin recipe (though not too basic, since it includes poppy seeds and chopped nuts) with suggestions for several variations using diverse fruits and vegetables. I had one orange and one lemon in the fridge, but they didn't quite give me enough prepared fruit, so I added some of the leftover mashed sweet potatoes from Thanksgiving. No one in my family likes that concoction of sweet potatoes, sugar and marshmallows so many people eat at the holidays - these were pretty basic and, in my opinion, all the tastier for it. Like the equally popular green bean casserole (that I tasted once, just one bite, and swore I'd never touch again), candied yams seems to me to be a vegetable dish for people who don't like vegetables. However, we all have our biases and I'm sure I like things that other people find just as appalling. But I don't think anyone will be put off or appalled by these lovely muffins!

Citrus-Poppyseed-Sweet Potato Muffins - makes 14, more if you don't fill the muffin cups quite so full

2 cups unbleached flour
3/4 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 tsp. powdered ginger
1 1/2 tsp. ground cardamom
2 large eggs
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup canola oil
3/4 tsp. vanilla extract
1 large orange, chopped in 1" chunks and seeded
1 lemon, chopped in 1" chunks and seeded
1/3 cup mashed sweet potato (you want 1 1/3 cups smooshed up fruit/vegetables total)
1/3 cup poppy seeds

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Spray muffin tins with cooking spray or use paper liners (I use the spray).
Put the orange and lemon in the food processor and pulse till the rind is finely chopped and the rest is a mushy mess. Add the sweet potato, eggs, brown sugar, canola oil, vanilla extract, and pulse again till everything is well mixed.
In a mixing bowl, combine the dry ingredients: flour, salt, soda, baking powder, ginger, cardamom, and poppy seeds. Stir in the liquid mixture very gently. To quote Margaret Fox, "Urgent message: Do not overmix or Margaret [and Vicki] will have a nervous breakdown." Of course, if you like tough muffins with pointy heads (hmmm, kinda makes me think of some kids I went to school with), just beat away. I like to use my rubber scraper for this mixing; it's gentler somehow, makes it easier to slow down and be mindful of how I'm treating the batter, which I think requires a folding rather than a beating motion.
Spoon batter into muffin cups, almost to the top (not quite so full if you want smaller muffins) and bake 25-30 minutes. If you're not using all the muffin cups, fill the empty ones half full of water, and then be careful not to get the baked muffins wet when you take them out. My oven temperature's pretty accurate and 25 minutes was just right. Have a delicious day!

Muffin of the Week 11/7

I almost didn't make these muffins this morning. They sounded, quite frankly, a little weird and a little too healthy for today's self-indulgent foodie mood, but then I thought, "Well, I have all the ingredients on hand, and I do love a good bran muffin, and Mollie hasn't let me down yet, so why not?" Like the last two muffins I've posted, these are from Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café, a lovely cookbook devoted to breakfast - and I do love breakfast.

Buttermilk Bran Muffins from Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café (p. 69)

This recipe makes 12-14 muffins, according to the book, but since I added some of the options (3 cups of bran flakes cereal, 1 cup of minced almonds, and 1 cup of dried apricots, cut into raisin-sized bits--actually about 2/3 cup dried apricots with raisins added to make 1 cup) I got 17 muffins. If you go to the book you'll notice it calls for unprocessed wheat bran rather than the oat bran so many recipes use. There is a difference and since Joe and I are both delighted with the texture of these, it's worth seeking out the wheat bran (usually available in the bulk bins at natural food stores). I used Trader Joe's Bran Flakes (not raisin bran as the recipe specifies), which are particularly good bran flakes without the icky stuff that so many cereals, even the allegedly healthy ones, contain. I also want to put in a plug for the organic brown sugar from Trader Joe's; it's moister and has a richer molasses flavor than what you'll get from C&H or other bigger or store brands.

Mollie writes, "After years of searching for a bran muffin I could truly adore and not just eat dutifully, I'm pleased to report that my quest has come to a happy conclusion in this recipe." I totally agree, and so does my live-in taste tester. Actually, Joe said "These may be as good as atomics, maybe even better."

Atomic Bran Muffins have been my go-to bran muffin recipe for years, since I first tasted them at the Northcoast Co-op in Arcata, California. The Co-op published the recipe, but I had encountered it before, and I really don't know where it originated. My friend Linda back in Idaho contributed it to a church cookbook under the name "6-week Bran Muffins" (not sure about 6 weeks!) and I've seen it elsewhere under other names, so I guess I'm not violating any copyright regulations by publishing it here.

ATOMIC BRAN MUFFINS - makes 24

1 c. boiling water

1/2 c. vegetable oil

2 1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 c. buttermilk

1 c. firmly packed brown sugar

2 eggs (at room temperature)

3/4 c. whole wheat flour

3/4 c. unbleached white flour

1 c. oat bran (or use part oat and part wheat bran)

1 c. All-Bran cereal

1 c. wheat germ

1/2 tsp. salt

1 c. raisins

1 c. chopped walnuts

In a large bowl, combine the boiling water, oil, and baking soda and let the mixture stand until it becomes lukewarm. Beat in the buttermilk, brown sugar, and eggs. In a separate, smaller bowl, mix the flours, oat bran, All-Bran, wheat germ, and salt. Add them to the liquid ingredients, stirring only until the dry ingredients are moistened. Gently add the raisins and walnuts. Before baking, let the batter stand in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours. You may also keep this batter, well covered, in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. Spoon the batter into well-buttered [or sprayed] or paper-lined muffin cups and bake at 375 F. for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

When I make these, if I want them for breakfast, I mix up the batter the night before. Unfortunately, Mollie Katzen doesn't post the recipe for her Buttermilk Bran Muffins on her website (www.molliekatzen.com) and copyright considerations prevent me from posting it here, but the book should be easy to find, and the recipe is well worth trying. Her website is very nice, and she has posted many of her other recipes there.

Finally, as Richard Brautigan wrote, "the earth [is] beginning to cool off in the correct manner of eternity"; still in the 80s today and tomorrow but by Tuesday we'll be in the low 70s and, I hope, staying there or even getting cooler. So I've been pulling out sweaters and sweatshirts to wear on our morning walks. I got this sweatshirt more than 20 years ago at the Hallmark store in Arcata (it's a morning for Humboldt County nostalgia, I guess) and I've almost given it away several times but I just can't. Opposed as I am in general to bumper-sticker style rhetoric, this one does seem to say it all. Such a simple message. How come so many of us still don't get it? How have we let so many things get so out of hand? So here's my advice for today, directed as much toward myself as to anyone else.

Stay home sometimes. Make muffins and then enjoy one with a nice cup of tea. Look out the window and watch the seasons change. Read some poetry, or any book, for that matter. Be like Candide and just cultivate your garden, literal or metaphorical. Slow down. Use less. Save the world. We may need it later.

Muffin of the Week

It's Halloween and there've been almost no trick-or-treaters, perhaps because it Sunday night, but there are fewer every year, it seems. Joe didn't think we had enough candy so he bought more - I didn't know that, so I also bought another bag. Seems we'll have quite a bit to take into work - college kids love free food, so it should vanish fairly quickly.

Last week I posted a picture of Cherry Cornmeal Muffins from Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café cookbook. This morning, in keeping with the season, I made her Pumpkin Muffins from the same book. In fact, I may just have to work my way through all the muffin recipes in Sunlight Café. These were also yummy, even though I misread the recipe and put in 1 cup of milk instead of the 1/2 cup it calls for. You can find the recipe at: http://www.molliekatzen.com/recipes/recipe.php?recipe=pumpkin_muffins .

We had them for breakfast with a simple potato and sausage hash, made from leftover steamed potatoes and (to serve 2) just one of those big chicken sausages from Costco, also leftover since Joe cooked a few and then we forgot to eat them. Nothing to it. I just chopped some onion and sautéed it briefly in a little olive oil in a nonstick skillet, then added the chopped potatoes and sausage and cooked them over medium heat, mostly covered, for 10 minutes or so, stirring/turning at least once, until everything was slightly browned and crisped and heated through.
You'll notice the potatoes are of different varieties; they're from Trader Joe's and come in a small bag with a few each of red, blue, and Yukon Gold. I hadn't tried the blue ones before and in my opinion, there's nothing special about their flavor, but they do add a little visual interest. The breakfast fueled a very nice day out in the garden, and I'm happy to say that the frequency of costumed visitors at the door has picked up since I began writing!