Tag Archives: muffins

October 11, 2011

Naturally sweetened carrot rice pudding bites

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Those look good, don’t they? Or maybe I’m the only one who thinks prickly little hunks of healthy stuff look appetizing. Humor me.

Grab a carrot, pull that bucket of dates off the top shelf in your pantry (What? You don’t have a huge container of dates in your pantry? Well go get some!) Put those cashews you’ve been munching on for days to good use. I know you have leftover rice or some other grain in your fridge.

This isn’t so much a recipe post as it is a post about creativity. I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity over the past couple days. Training for my new museum internship started this week and learning through creative design is the institutions main focus.

Creativity…design…those are two crucial aspects of blogging as well as more aspects of our life than we probably realize. They have always been intimidating words for me. I’ve never considered myself to be an “artsy” person and in certain circumstances I’ve felt uncomfortable pressure to be “creative”. Design? How could I ever design anything?

So far, what I’ve learned about creativity in my internship is more relevant to this blog than I thought it would be. I have fresh motivation and renewed ambition. I cannot wait to see what I can really do with this blog if I let loose and break free of how I think things should be. Let’s just find out where this goes.

What does this have to do with carrot rice pudding bites? Carrot rice pudding bites are what happens when I let myself get creative with food. I have some kind of craving for a particular taste, flavor, shape, or texture. I have certain ingredients at my disposal. I really, really want to use something because it’s been in the fridge for bordering-on too long. I look at some recipes – thumbing through cookbooks and clicking through bookmarks online. In the end, I get pull out some ingredients, mash them together in a bowl, smoosh them into a mini-muffin tin, and bake them.

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How do they taste? Pretty good for being a total experiment in culinary creativity. Did Lee and I eat all of these tasty bites? You betcha – every last sticky-sweet little bite.

Unfortunately, I have not quite mastered the practice of writing down what I’m doing when I’m experimenting in the kitchen. Thus, I don’t have a recipe. That said, I think wads/bites/hunks/balls like this are best made as free-form, creative, recipe-free items. Here are the basic components and a method that seemed to work for me at least once.

Naturally Sweetened Carrot Rice Pudding Bites

dates: 10 small pitted
cashews: 1/2 cup, raw

Chop these up in a food processor. Pour this mix into a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients.

carrot: 1 medium, grated
cooked brown rice: maybe 1 1/2 – 2 cups
spices: allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger…you know, those yummy ones…as much or as little of them as you like
flour, whatever kind you want (I used millet flour): 2 tablespoons
egg, beaten: 1 (or make it vegan with 2 tbsp flaxseed meal + 1/4 cup water)

scoop “dough” into a lightly oiled mini muffin pan or onto a cookie sheet (also lightly oiled or lined with parchment/Silpat)
Bake at 375 F. for 10-12 minutes, or until muffins/balls are firm and starting to brown.

Munch away! These are surprisingly sweet for containing no processed sugar.

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September 28, 2011

Apple Maple Muffins (With Millet Flour)

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If you ask me what my favorite season is, I will promptly answer “Fall”, without a doubt. Why, then, am I resisting fall’s arrival this year? I’m still buying summer squash, stone fruit, and corn. Hey, these things stay in season a lot longer here in California. Maybe my resistance comes from San Francisco’s goofy summer weather. Our warm, sunny days just started last week and will be gone by early October. Cool, foggy mornings and brisk afternoon breezes were the norm all summer long. I don’t have a problem with that, especially after living in the oppressive Caribbean heat for several months. I just can’t get into fall until it really feels like fall.

Something about visiting the East Coast last week made me crave fall apples like nothing else. Lee and I made a last minute trip for his grandmother’s memorial service but managed to visit three states in a short amount of time. We flew into Boston, spent the night in a nearby hotel with Lee’s family, and spent the next day at the service and post-service gathering in the Connecticut. The Connecticut countryside feels almost mystical to me. The grass is so green and the little stone walls are so quaint. It’s about at foreign as landscapes get to a Californian.

The next day, my 26th birthday, we were all the way up in Maine at Lee’s parents house. We lived there for a few months last summer so it truly felt like home. I must say, Maine was having better weather than SF. It was sunny and warm. The trees had not started changing yet. Still, something in the air smelled or felt like fall.

Lee and I were driving his MGB down a winding country road when I exclaimed that it would be fun to pick apples on my birthday and it was too bad apple season hadn’t started yet. It hadn’t? The next curve we rounded brought us to the local orchard and we pulled off as soon as we saw the you-pick sign for apples.

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The trees were loaded. I mean loaded. The branches were heavy with apples and the air smelled sweet. The early season Macintosh and Cortland apples were a little tart but I like them that way. We tried really hard not to pick too many, knowing we’d be leaving in a couple days anyway, but it was so hard not to fill our bags. We left with 13 pounds of apples and vowed to eat as many as possible before our flight home.

One can only eat so many apples in one day. When it came time to pack our things, I just couldn’t leave our bounty behind. We boarded the plane with a bag of apples nestled in a carry-on.

I knew I had to bake something with the country-crossing apples. I guess this is an admission that fall has arrived to some part of my being. I started with a recipe from one of my thrift store cookbooks and adapted it to suit my pantry and my laziness. The millet flour was an experiment with a happy result. I expected these muffins to turn out dense and dry because of it but they surprised me with their fluffy texture. They are a bit crumbly, almost like corn muffins, and have that sandy, grainy texture as well. The millet flavor is sweet and subtle. It goes nicely with maple, I think. All in all, I’m excited about millet flour’s prospects as an addition to my baked goods.

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Apple Maple Muffins (With Millet Flour)
Adapted from the Better Homes and Gardens Bread Cookbook, 1963, Double-apple Fantans

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup millet flour*
3 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup finely chopped tart apple
1 beaten egg, 3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup oil or melted butter (I used coconut oil)
1/3 cup maple syrup
12 apple slivers for muffin tops
Optional coating for apple topping: 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg (I skipped this but will try it next time)

*I bought my millet flour at the local co-op but you can make your own by grinding the grain in a coffee grinder until you have a fine powder.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
Line a muffin pan with paper or silicone liners, or coat with a little oil.
If you plan to coat apple topping with cinnamon sugar, blend those ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.
Combine flours, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and chopped apple in a large bowl, stirring until completely mixed.
In a separate bowl, blend egg, milk, oil, and maple syrup.
Add liquids to dry mixture and stir until just combined.
Spoon batter into muffin cups.
Top each muffin with an apple sliver, either tossed in cinnamon sugar mixture or plain.

Bake at 375 for 20 minutes, or until the muffins are golden brown on top.
Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack

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August 31, 2011

Sometimes the Classics are Best

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What kind of muffin do you crave when I see stacks of them in bakery windows? For me, it’s blueberry. As much as I love to experiment with different flavors and ingredients, sometimes I have to go with the classics. When there are two over-ripe bananas on the counter and a bag of fresh from the farmers market blueberries in the fridge, what could I make but blueberry banana muffins?

Also, I was hungry and had muffins on the brain. These came together quickly and made a perfect mid-morning snack. I ate my muffin hot, with gooey, scaling blueberries popping in my mouth. It was pure muffin heaven! If you want a moist, sweet, fruity, whole-grain muffin, these hit all those high-points and then some.

I changed the recipe I started with enough to make this one my own. There is no added oil and very little sugar. I doubted that 1/3 cup brown sugar would make these sweet enough but I went with it anyway. Turns out 1/3 cup was plenty of sugar! I guess my bananas were plenty sweet.

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Blueberry Banana Muffins

1 1/2 cup flour, your choice (I used 1 cup graham flour and 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry)
1/2 cup wheat germ
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3 large or 3 regular-sized bananas, mashed
1 egg
1/3 cup plain yogurt
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup blueberries

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Stir together all dry ingredients in a large bowl.
In a separate bowl, add egg, sugar, an yogurt to mashed bananas, beating until mostly smooth (might be little banana chunks in there)
Stir vanilla into wet ingredients.
Add wet ingredients to dry, stirring until just combined.
Fold blueberries into batter.
Spoon batter into muffin cups and bake at 375 for 20-25 minutes.

Eat HOT from the oven…but don’t burn yourself on a blueberry!

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August 23, 2011

Old-fashioned Nut Loaf

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Here it is, the bread with graham cracker crumbs in it! I considered everyone’s advice about the confusion between graham flour and graham cracker crumbs. I waffled back and forth about which ingredient I would try but finally settled on graham cracker crumbs. It was too unusual an addition (at least for me) to a quick bread not to try.

Once I remembered to get graham crackers at the store (it took a few visits) I was ready to go. The rest of the ingredient list is short an simple. In fact, I almost didn’t notice something rather odd about this recipe: there are no eggs or oil. The only liquid and fat comes from milk. I’d say that makes this an easily veganized treat!

I’ll admit, I was skeptical of the graham cracker crumbs. They looked so insignificant blended into the flour. Could they really add any flavor? I was wrong to doubt, as Joanne pointed out, graham crackers make everything better!

This bread has a unique sweet, nutty flavor that I can only attribute to the crumbs. They probably also contribute to the beautiful golden brown color of this loaf. It borders on too sweet for me but the flavor is lovely and unique. The nuts are almost secondary to the bread in which they’re suspended.

I felt like I’d entered a time warp eating my half-muffin bread tasting, like I was eating something people made during the depression when they were trying to come up with creative ways to use the ingredients they had on hand. That could very well be the era this recipe comes from. Helen’s file seems to include recipes from almost an entire century and from all over the country.

Break out that food processor (or a plastic bag and hands for smashing) and make some graham cracker crumbs for a old-fashioned nut loaf. Then sit down for breakfast or with a cup of tea in the afternoon to enjoy a little time travel.

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I made 2 mini loaves and 3 large muffins…and had a bit of an overflow in the oven.

Nut Loaf
from Helen’s recipe file

2 cups flour
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 pinch salt
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda stirred in to…
2 cups sour milk (I used buttermilk)
i cup chopped nuts (I used walnuts)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In a large bowl, combine flour, graham cracker crumbs, baking powder, salt, and sugar, stirring with a whisk to blend completely.
Add baking soda to buttermilk in a separate bowl, stirring until there are no lumps of soda left. (Different method for baking soda. I’ve never seen this before but it works!)
Pour buttermilk into flour mixture. Stir gently until combined.
Fold in nuts.
Pour batter into a greased loaf pan or mini loaf pans/muffin cups.

Bake at 350 F for 35 minutes (mini loaves/muffins) to an hour (large loaf).
Remove when the bread is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Let cool, slice, sit, eat, and wonder if food is the best time machine we have.

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