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!

Gardening? In Texas? In July?

Well, it's still unbearably hot. It feels a lot like this:

But after a whole lot of this:

We've got some of these:

Small reward for all the mulch, water and love that goes into our garden, but what did we expect? It is summer in Texas after all...

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 :: I work with some pretty awesome people

They threw me a party! (In honor of my recent marriage and my successful recovery from surgery.) Yay!

:: photo friday :: summer in Texas

It's hot here right now. Really hot.

:: photo friday :: tasty touring and public knitting

We went tasty touring to a few food trailers last weekend - check out Chris' Little Chicago for delectable dogs, Lulu B's for scrumptious Vietnamese sandwiches and Molly's Sno-Cups for sweet sno cones! In honor of WWKIP Day, my knitting accompanied me to all our destinations.

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...

:: photo friday :: The County Line on the Lake

Austin has a really great food blogger community. Big thanks to The County Line on the Lake in Austin for hosting us. Great food, yummy wine and a gorgeous location!

For more of my photos from the evening, including a weiner dog ON A BOAT, see my Flickr set.