eat! craft! live!

maple blueberry muffins

Through a long series of events including sales, free berries and our Greenling delivery, we recently ended up with more blueberries than anyone should ever own at once. *ahem* Which is not to say that I don't love blueberries - I do. As a kid, we had a giant blueberry bush in the front yard and when it was time to make muffins, my sister and I traipsed outdoors and picked blueberries until our fingers (and our mouths!) were stained with the sweet juices of summer.

This muffin recipe reminds me of home - maple-flavored muffins studded with sweet, bursting berries. As if I didn't long to return to Maine already, now my nostalgia and desire to escape from this hot, southern place are even stronger! Until that becomes a reality, I will have to tide myself over with these summery Maine muffins.

Maple Blueberry Muffins
adapted from The Muffin Book

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg, beaten
• 2/3 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 cup milk
• 6 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 cup blueberries

Preheat oven to 400° and grease 12 muffin cups or line with paper liners.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a small bowl, whisk together the egg, maple syrup, milk and melted butter. Add to flour mixture and stir until just combined. Carefully fold in berries.

Spoon into 12 muffin cups and bake until golder brown, about 15-18 minutes.

I found that these muffins are so deliciously buttery to begin with, they don't need to be buttered...it's like holding a little portable pancake in your hand! But by all means, butter them if you want to...

noodles with bok choy and tofu

As I was making this dish for what seems like the millionth time, I realized I had never shared it with you! How is that possible? This is one of my all time favorite dishes - wonderfully tasty, fairly easy to make and more or less healthy! It's one of the few dishes that M requests time and time again, even if we've just eaten it the week before.

You can use regular or baby bok choy, depending on what you have available and what your personal preference is. I've used both and preferred the baby bok choy, but M preferred the larger type, because he enjoys the bigger chunks of veggie in his noodles. If you don't want to lightly fry the tofu at the beginning, for health reasons or whatever, feel free not to - you just won't need as much oil for the recipe. I prefer it fried because I have a weird prejudice against squishy tofu. But that's just me.

Noodles with Bok Choy and Tofu
adapted from Bon Appétit, July 2000

• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 2 tablespoons chili oil
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 teaspoons cornstarch
• 8 green onions, chopped
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 2 heads bok choy, bottom third discarded, leaves and ribs thickly sliced
• 12 ounces extra-firm tofu, cut into 1/2-inch pieces, drained well
• 12 ounces udon noodles, freshly cooked

Pour soy sauce into measuring cup and whisk in vinegar, honey, 1 tablespoon chili oil and cornstarch, blending thoroughly. Heat remaining 1 tablespoon chili oil and olive oil in a large heavy pot over high heat. Add tofu and fry briefly until slightly golden. (If desired, you can dust the tofu cubes with cornstarch first - they will crisp up faster. For this recipe I generally don't bother.) Add green onions and garlic and stir for 30 seconds. Add bok choy ribs and sauté for about 2 minutes. Add bok choy leaves and sauté until beginning to wilt, about another 2 minutes. (If the ribs are small, go ahead and add the ribs and leaves together.) Mix in noodles and soy mixture. Stir to coat everything with sauce and continue cooking and stirring for a minute or two until the sauce thickens slightly.

See? I told you I'd be back with recipes! Have a great weekend everyone!

making the best use of hot weather?

My usual crafty pursuits and cooking adventures have been lacking of late. As such, I feel like I haven't had much to say here! And why have my hobbies been put on hold? It's hot. Really, really hot.

Adding to the suffocating heat from the great outdoors, our oven is terribly inefficient and makes the entire front part of the house into a sweltering chamber of doom this time of year. It's bad enough in the winter, but at least then the AC and the oven aren't fighting each other for world (or duplex, at least) domination! Tonight, for instance, we briefly baked some chicken breasts and sweated through our whole meal. It's an old oven.

So needless to say, there hasn't been a whole lot of cooking going on. And for that I apologize. We've been eating a lot of Jell-O (yes, really) and light sandwiches 'round these parts.

I did however, as you can see above, cook an egg! On our sidewalk. (I wasn't kidding about the heat!) It took a good three hours, but I also set it out in the morning, before the heat of the day had reached its peak. Here, the hottest part of the day is usually late afternoon. I've seen several different numbers, but apparently eggs solidify somewhere between 140°F and 170°F. So. There you have it!

I blame the heat for my lack of knit blogging too... It's not that I haven't been knitting - I have - it's that it's too darn hot to take photos of the finished projects! Because if it's hot enough to cook an egg on my sidewalk, the last thing I want to do is head outdoors in wool socks.

Anybody have any cool cooking and crafting ideas? I sure could use some...maybe I need to get into smoothies...

:: photo friday :: summer in Texas

It's hot here right now. Really hot.

garlic chive-parmesan biscuits

One of the pleasures of getting fresh, local groceries delivered (or shopping at the farmer's market!) is finding new uses for familiar vegetables and herbs and getting to try new vegetables and herbs! I'm a big fan of chives - we are growing two big clusters in the garden after all - but I generally eat the onion-flavored variety. It's not that I hadn't ever tried the garlic kind, it's just that when I think "chives" I think "onion." Onion chives are delicious, with their snappy little tubular stems. But garlic chives, with their flat stems, are delicious too. They add just the right amount of garlicky flavor to these tartly cheesy drop biscuits. And since they're drop biscuits, they're super easy to make - no kneading, rolling out dough or cutting! Just plop them down and they're ready to go. I've been making batches of these and freezing them, so I can have fresh biscuits at the drop of a hat! Delicious with a cold summer soup.

garlic chive-parmesan biscuits
adapted from Joy of Cooking

• 2 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 5 tablespoons cold butter, cut into pieces
• 1/2 cup grated parmesan
• 1/4 cup finely snipped fresh garlic chives
• 1 1/4 cups buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425°F. Whisk together in a large bowl the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add the butter pieces and cut them in with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs, with a few larger pieces. Add fresh chives and parmesan and whisk thoroughly. Add the buttermilk all at once and stir until the flour mixture is thoroughly moistened. (The dough will not be smooth.) Drop by heaping tablespoons onto an ungreased baking sheet 1-2 inches apart. Bake until the bottoms are golden brown, about 12-15 minutes.

blackberry buttermilk cake

When a girl gets fresh blackberries in her grocery delivery box and stumbles across a recipe for a deliciously simple cake calling for raspberries, what does she do? Why, substitute, of course! A tiny substitution, to be sure, and one that might be repeated this weekend with, get this, blueberries! It's that glorious time of year here when the fruit is all juicy and bursting with flavor and it's hard to even save enough to bake with because it's just so easy to pop them all in your mouth... But restrain yourself! Because this cake is amazingly delicious with its crisp, sugary top and so simple I had to make two. In two days. It's that good.

blackberry buttermilk cake
adapted from Gourmet, June 2009

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
• 1/2 stick butter, softened
• 2/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, divided
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk
• 1 cup fresh blackberries

Preheat oven to 400°F. Butter and flour a 9-inch round cake pan. (My cake pans have gone missing so I used a pie plate. Worked great.) In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon, if using. Beat the butter together with the 2/3 cup sugar with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 2 minutes, then beat in vanilla. Add the egg and beat well. At low speed, mix in the flour mixture in 3 batches, alternating with buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour, and mixing until just combined. Spoon batter into prepared pan, smoothing top. Scatter blackberries evenly over top and sprinkle with remaining 2 tablespoons sugar. Bake until cake is golden and a wooden toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Cool in pan 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack and cool 10 to 15 minutes more. Invert onto a plate. Apparently, two cakes serves two people over the span of about three days, if you're us and there aren't a lot of other groceries in the house...

fruit crisp!

It's summer in Texas! Summer means hot weather. Hot weather means not wanting to spend hours slaving over a hot stove. Conveniently, summer also means an abundance of cool, fresh fruits and veggies. Lovely, delectable things that require little to no cooking. (I've been really getting down with some fresh veggie sandwiches lately...)

Fruit crisps are some of my very favorite warm-weather desserts. The fruit is (hopefully) in season, the ingredients are few and the effort is minimal! But the reward is delicious...especially with a wee bite of cool vanilla ice cream or a dollop of fresh whipped cream. Wash and chop a few fruits, combine a few ingredients in a bowl, toss them all in the oven for a bit and voila! Scrumptious fruity dessert.

This recipe comes to me, and thus you, from my mom. One year in college, I asked for a blank recipe book for Christmas and asked family members to write down recipes for their favorite foods. This is one that my mom entered. It is rich and crumbly and very sweet - reduce the brown sugar a bit if you're not into that sort of thing or if your fruit is already quite sweet. Also, the recipe calls for cinnamon, but feel free to experiment with whatever spices your little hearts desire! The fruits are up to you too - in the past week I've made one with the last of the good apples for the season and another with the first of the blackberries and peaches!

Fruit Crisp

• 1/4 lb. butter (1 stick) - slightly softened and cut in pieces
• 3/4 cup oatmeal
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon (or spice of your choosing)
• about 3 cups fruit, give or take - washed, possibly peeled, and in bite-size pieces

Optional additions: raisins, chopped nuts, coconut, extra spices...

Preheat oven to 350°. Have ready an 8x8" or similar sized pan. Dump the fruit in the pan. (See? Easy.) If I'm using apples, I like to dust them with an extra sprinkle of cinnamon at this point. In a medium bowl, whisk together the oatmeal, brown sugar, flour and cinnamon. Add the butter pieces and combine using a pastry blender or a fork until the mixture is crumbly. (The largest bits should be about the size of peas and most of it should resemble breadcrumbs.) Pour mixture over fruit and bake for about 35 minutes at 350°. Serve warm or cold, alone or with ice cream or whipped cream. Or serve with a bit of honey-sweetened Greek yogurt for an indulgent breakfast treat!

strawberry bread

If strawberry scones aren't quite your speed, maybe some delicious strawberry bread? (But seriously. If strawberry scones don't sound completely delicious to you, I'm not sure we can be friends.) With the first strawberries of the year in our Greenling box, we received a printout of a recipe for strawberry bread. "Strawberry bread?" I thought to myself. "Hm." I must admit that upon first inspection, it seemed a little odd. Banana bread, sure. Zucchini bread, of course. But strawberry bread? So I hesitated. But I was wrong to do so! After seeing a few tweets about how delicious it was, I made it myself. And boy was it tasty. But it was also chock full of oil and sugar and the recipe may have been halved at one point because it had the very odd requirement of 1 1/2 eggs. So I played with the recipe a bit and came up with a version that still holds on to the delicious flavors and moistness of the original, but with added whole wheat flour and less sugar and oil. The end result was definitely delicious and a whole lot healthier than the original!

Strawberry Bread

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 pint strawberries, washed and sliced (about a cup)
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1/4 cup applesauce

Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a loaf pan. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. In a large bowl, or the bowl of a mixer, beat together the strawberries, vanilla, eggs, sugar, oil and applesauce. Gradually add the flour mixture to the strawberry mixture and beat until fully combined. Pour into prepared loaf pan. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean. For extra deliciousness, sprinkle powdered sugar on top of the loaf after it has cooled. Yum!

strawberry scones

I was going to blog about these scones. And then I forgot I was going to blog about the scones and started making plans to blog about these socks that I finished a few days ago. (They're swell.) But then I forgot to actually take photos of the socks and so here we are back at scones again! Which is really just fine, because these scones? Are delicious. I whipped them up Sunday morning before M was out of bed and would have loved to eat them all myself, but I refrained. At some point in the mid afternoon, I asked him if he'd tried them yet and he said they were the best he'd ever had. "Seriously?" I asked. His response? "Yeah. I've had three."

They're that good. They aren't your typical scone. When I think "scone," I all too often think of chalky, crumbly, somewhat dry, wedge-shaped, semi-sweet, but generally bland, concoctions. Maybe there's a currant or two tossed in. And maybe they've got that godawful sugary icing drizzled over the tops in little zigzags. (Am I the only one who hates that stuff? It's like they're trying to make up for the fact that they know the scones are dry and boring.) These are moist and flavorful and slightly sweet and slightly tart. They make use of the very first of the spring strawberries - somewhat tarter than I'm used to and oh, so fruity and wonderful! (My apologies to those of you in northern climes who are still anxiously awaiting anything resembling a fresh, local bit of fruit. You can gloat later in the summer when I'm frazzled and hot and my garden is yielding nothing but chili peppers.)

Strawberry Scones
adapted from the Joy of Cooking

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 5 tablespoons cold butter, cut into pieces
• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• slightly less than 1 pint of fresh, barely ripe strawberries, cut into small pieces - you don't want them to be overly ripe or they will get mushy when you try to mix them in

Preheat the oven to 425°. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Add the cold butter and cut it in with a pastry blender (or your preferred method) until the largest pieces are about the size of peas and the rest look like breadcrumbs. Add the strawberries and toss them around so they get coated in the flour mixture. Whisk together the egg, heavy cream and vanilla and add all at once to the flour mixture. This is where things get messy! Stir in the wet ingredients just until the dry ingredients are moistened. I found that the easiest way to do that was to stir a bit with a wooden spoon or spatula and then just use my hands. The dough will not be firm enough to roll out but it will be a bit firmer than your average drop biscuit type dough. Pull off small chunks in the vicinity of, oh, about 1.5-2 inches in diameter? (I really should keep better track of these things!) Form them by hand (or use a spoon, if you're not down with getting a little messy) and place them on a cookie sheet several inches apart. I used parchment because I'm a little lazy about cleanup. Bake for about 15 minutes. Remove and cool on a wire rack. I thought they were delicious on their own, but M said they were "mind blowing" with a bit of honey. You be the judge.

A side note, completely unrelated to scones: Whole Foods finally put up their own recap of the food blogger bash I wrote about last week and they're giving away a free goodie bag to one of the lucky commenters on this post over at the Whole Foods blog. It's a great goodie bag - I'm still munching my way through the pita chips, though most of the other delicious tidbits are long gone. So head over, if you're so inclined, and leave a comment before Friday, March 27 for a chance to win!

caramelized cabbage over egg noodles

I really didn't intend for there to be such a long gap between my last cabbage recipe and this one! It's just that this one? This completely unassuming, incredibly simple, peasant-like recipe? It's so good. It's so good that I've made it at least three or four times in the past month or two. And so I held off on posting the recipe because what if I made some drastic improvements to it? But I didn't. I just kept making it the same way because, really, why mess with perfection?

It's subtly sweet and somewhat savory, with a squishy yet hearty texture that's perfect for a cold, rainy evening. It's simple too - nothing more than a little chopping, occasional stirring, and boiling a pot of water for noodles. As if it didn't have enough virtues already - it's also cheap!

With mounds of cabbage slowly cooked with onions and apples, this meal is a caramelized vegetable delight. I was looking for something very simple that I could throw on after work and mostly ignore while I went about other business. I took inspiration from several word-of-mouth recipes, an old Romanian cookbook a coworker brought in, and a handful of Google searches. The end result is a winner, in my opinion!

Caramelized Cabbage over Egg Noodles

• 6 c. coarsely chopped cabbage
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 med. apple, peeled, cored and diced
• 4 T. butter
• egg noodles, for serving
• cottage cheese or sour cream (optional), for serving
• salt, to taste

Melt butter in a large heavy pot over medium high heat. Add cabbage, onion and apple and stir to coat with the butter. Continue cooking over medium heat, stirring occasionally. When the cabbage and onions have started to cook down, you may need to stir more frequently. You want the mixture to become a nice brown color, but not burn. (There's a nice tutorial on how to caramelize onions here - the same general principles apply to this dish.) You will want to cook the mixture for anywhere from 30 minutes to over an hour, depending on how high your heat is and how caramelized you want your dish. Near the end of cooking, add salt to taste and cook some egg noodles according to the directions on the package. (We used a 12 oz. package and had some noodles left over after the cabbage was finally all devoured.)

To serve, place some egg noodles in a bowl, top with the cabbage mixture and a dollop of cottage cheese or sour cream. (Cottage cheese was my fave - M preferred the sour cream.) Delicious!