if Starbucks can do it...

I know that Thanksgiving is still six weeks away, meaning it's probably too early for the seasonal deluge of pumpkin-pie-spiced foods. But here in Minnesota it's COLD already, cold enough that I've been hunting for my box of winter clothes that got somehow misplaced in my move. Cold enough that I heard the "s-word" on a weather report yesterday. (snow? in October? we are not in Manhattan anymore...) And cold enough that I felt justified in needing to make these pumpkin muffins when I saw the recipe while flipping through my enormous cookbook collection. Plus, Starbucks is already hawking their pumpkin pie latte. If they can do it, so can I.

I made these muffins last Saturday night, to give me something to do other than watch bad TV and get nervous about our race the next day before I went to sleep early. (I just started coaching a juniors rowing team. They're the best, but I now have enormous compassion and sympathy for all the coaches I worked with growing up.) I've always found baking to be a productive form of stress reduction, and these muffins did their job.

These muffins have the dubious distinction of being "healthy," with whole wheat flour and a relatively limited amount of fat compared to many other muffin recipes. Unlike some lower-fat recipes, they were still nice and moist, and the molasses adds a distinctive fall flavor. The pungent combination of spices made the whole house smell good as the muffins baked, and the finished product was a big hit in the food tent at the regatta.

I adapted this recipe from Ellie Krieger's The Food You Crave, which seems to do a great job making healthy food taste like it might not be so healthy. The recipe as written calls for 1 c. of pumpkin, which is just slightly over half of the standard size 15 oz. can. I hated to see the extra pumpkin going unused, so I not-quite doubled it to use all the pumpkin, and adjusted for the fact that I was missing some of the suggested flavoring.

Pumpkin Pie Muffins

2 c. all purpose flour

1 3/4 c. whole-wheat flour or whole-grain pastry flour

2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. kosher salt

2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 tsp. ground ginger

1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp. ground allspice

1 1/2 c. firmly packed dark brown sugar

6 tbsp. molasses (I used full flavor, and the finished product was VERY molasses-y, so I would adjust according to your taste)

1/2 c. vegetable oil

15 oz. canned pumpkin

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 1/2 c. lowfat buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter or spray 24 standard size muffins, or twice as many mini-muffins.

Whisk the flour, baking soda, salt and spices together in a medium sized bowl. In a larger bowl, combine the brown sugar, molasses, and oil, whisking until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time. Whisk in the pumpkin and vanilla. Stir in a third of the dry mixture, then half the buttermilk. Repeat, ending with the last third of the dry ingredients, being careful not to overmix. Pour into prepared muffin pans, and bake for approximately 20 minutes or until the top springs back to the touch (mini muffins will bake more quickly). Let cool, unmold, and store in airtight container. I imagine these would freeze well, however none of ours lasted long enough to find out!

cookies (according to me)

My family does care packages better than any other family I know. My freshman year of college, I was the only kid on my hall who received a customized copy of "The National Enquirer" with her pet's face posted over the "World's Fattest Cat!!!" picture. Another only-in-my-family winner was the CD labeled "We Love You, Liz" that contained only 17 tracks of my least favorite song. With no set list, so I had to listen to every track to find out exactly what was on it. (The song, in case you were wondering, is "Teen Angel." So tragically stupid.)

But the best care packages always involved food. I have a very clear memory of getting a large container of my mom's chocolate oatmeal cookies sophomore year, and sharing them with hall-mates only to become mired in a deep philosophical debate - were these cookies actually cookies? Some stubborn friends insisted that to be a cookie required spending time in an oven, making these no-bake goodies unworthy of the cookie title. But there's chocolate, and sugar, and butter, which makes them a cookie in my book.

Now that I have a classical pastry education, I feel free to unilaterally declare that these morsels of fudgy goodness, are in fact cookies. But whatever you call them, they're delicious - a winning combination of chocolate and peanut butter combined with the chunky solidity of oatmeal. They're also quick and easy to prepare, and require only one pot and one spoon. It's true that beauty is not among their many attributes, but I think once you taste them you won't mind one bit.

This latest batch is destined for a care package to my sister Kathleen at graduate school, but of course I saved a few for us here!

Chocolate Oatmeal Drop Cookies

3 c. sugar

3/4 c. cocoa

1 c. milk

1/2 c. butter

1 c. peanut butter

1/2 tsp. salt

2 tsp. vanilla

6 c. quick oatmeal

Bring the sugar, cocoa, milk, and butter to a rolling boil for one minute over medium to medium high heat. Remove from heat.

Add vanilla, peanut butter, and salt, stir still smooth.

Add oatmeal, stir to coat.

Drop with tablespoons onto waxed or parchment paper. Let cool.

Enjoy!

I'm baaack

Sorry it took so long! Hopefully these new posts and recipes will help make up for my absence, and I'll try to be more diligent in the future...

vegetable adventures, part 1

As I mentioned earlier, my family is participating in a CSA with a local farm, and so far it's been an interesting and delicious experience. The first week we got lots of fresh lettuce, some herbs, the greenest pea pods I've ever seen, and one pint of delicate, beautiful early strawberries, which I turned into a strawberry tart for Kathleen.

Since then we've gotten at least two pints of strawberries every week, and more lettuce. Beets, radishes, zucchini, sweet little pickling cucumbers, and fresh currants (both red and white) have all come through our kitchen. And then last week we got our first UVO - unidentified vegetable object. Spiky and maleficent looking, it wasn't really like anything I'd seen before. My mom stripped its green crown so it would fit in our crisper drawer, where it sat for several days before an illuminating newsletter arrived from the CSA with the weekly list of box contents. By process of elimination (not lettuce, not beets, not strawberries), I deduced that I was facing a kohlrabi.

I should have known to keep a weather eye out for this strange vegetable; a friend who'd participated in a CSA previously had warned me about them. "I didn't know what to do with it," she said, "so it just sat in our refrigerator all summer and eventually I threw it away." Being a child of the Internet generation, I turned to Google for answers. Wikipedia and the University of Minnesota website informed me that kohlrabi is part of the cabbage family, and can be eaten raw or served baked, roasted or steamed. Taking a cue from Deborah Madison's book Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which I checked out of the library and have been loving, I decided to steam it and serve it with sour cream and dill, potato-like.

Ten minutes and a sharp chef's knife transformed the kohlrabi from something alien to something ordinary, just a pile of small white matchsticks. My youngest sister, whose general disdain for all things vegetable has been observed in this blog before, wandered by and tried a few of the raw pieces. "This is good," she said, surprising both of us. "It tastes like cauliflower."

Which it does, vaguely, being clean and starchy with just a bit of a peppery finish. In a midstream change of tactics, and in deference to the fact that cauliflower is one of two vegetables Laura actually likes, we decided to roll with the kohlrabi's cauliflower-like properties and prepare it the way we like our cauliflower - tossed with a little bit of olive oil, kosher salted, and roasted in a 400 degree oven. Since the vegetable had already been cut into matchsticks, we ended up with a dish that resembled kohlrabi fries - salty, crispy, a little burned, and really not half bad. So our first vegetable adventure ended very well, and I'm looking forward to whatever next week's basket brings us.

take out the trash fruit crisp

Shortly before I left New York, I was thrilled to discover that Bravo showed reruns of The West Wing almost every day. I bribed myself to pack and clean between 9 and 11 each day with those two hours of political skullduggery and smart, witty rapid-fire dialogue (and Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborne). The show is crammed with throwaway lines and funny little conceits, one of my favorite being "Take Out the Trash Day" from the first season. The White House deliberately releases several sensitive and potentially damaging stories on the same day, realizing that with a finite amount of column space each issue will receive less press. This concept, slightly transmuted and with a positive spin, is just as applicable in a summer produce-filled refrigerator, and the results are much tastier!

Now, I'm not suggesting you use any fruit that actually belongs in a trash can. But if you find yourself facing, as I did recently, half a case of cherries going slightly soft, a few nectarines whose better days have passed, and the remains of a pint of strawberries, do not despair. An oatmeal-topped crisp is the perfect solution when you don't have quite enough of anything to make a fruit-specific dish and the fruit in question is no longer pretty enough to be served raw or on its own.

Exact technique or recipe will vary depending on the fruit you use, but most fruit can be cleaned, sliced, tossed with a little bit of sugar, lemon juice and spices to taste, spread in a glass or metal baking dish and sprinkled with generous handfuls of an oatmeal/butter/brown sugar topping. I like to add a little kosher salt and cinnamon to round out the flavor; fresh nutmeg or ginger can also be delicious. Bake the crisp in a 350 degree oven for 30-45 minutes, or until the fruit starts to juice and bubble and the topping becomes golden and crisp.

If you want to use a harder fruit like rhubarb, I recommend sauteeing or poaching it before placing it in the dish. Rhubarb is delicious cooked on the stovetop with butter, a scraped vanilla bean, sugar, and a little rose wine. Sliced strawberries can be added after the rhubarb is cooked and before placing the crisp in the oven for a deliciously seasonal take on early summer ingredients.

One of the best things about this fruit crisp is its versatility - it will be perfect with strawberries and rhubarb in June, raspberries and peaches in August, and apples and cinnamon through the fall and winter.

birthday blueberry muffins

My sister Kathleen turned one year older last week. Birthdays are a pretty big deal in our family, especially Kathleen's birthday - she's always claimed it's her favorite holiday, and once we celebrated for a week. I offered to use my new pastry super-skills to make her a birthday cake, but was rejected in favor of a Sebastian Joe's Oreo ice cream pie. There were no hard feelings about this, since I'd rather eat Sebastian Joe's ice cream than pretty much anything else on earth, especially on a lovely June day.

I did want to contribute something to Kathleen's birthday though, so I offered to make blueberry muffins for breakfast. We had a giant Costco-size container of blueberries in the fridge (one of the many wonders of being back in suburbia) so I lacked only a recipe. With my cookbooks all still packed away in the cardboard boxes I'd shipped from New York, I turned to my mom's copy of The Joy of Cooking. It's missing the front and back covers and the first few pages, so I can't tell you when it was published, but it certainly looks like it's been well-loved since then.

There are several muffin "base" options in The Joy of Cooking, including bran and sour cream. I decided to stick with the recipe called simply "Muffins", varying as suggested for blueberries and adding some orange zest. They turned out beautifully, the perfect start to a birthday, or any day.

Birthday Blueberry Muffins, adapted from The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit

Ingredients:

2 c. sifted cake flour

3/4 tsp. salt

1/3 c. sugar

2 tsp. baking powder

2 eggs

1/4 c. butter, melted and slightly cooled

3/4 c. milk

1 1/2 c. blueberries, fresh or frozen

1 tsp. grated orange zest

Combine all dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk eggs, melted butter, and milk. Make a well in the dry ingredients, pour in wet ingredients and stir just until combined - it's ok if the batter is still lumpy, and you don't want to overmix. Add zest and blueberries, and pour into prepared muffin tin. Bake until golden brown on top - approximately 18-20 minutes.

(Note: while the original recipe suggests that this makes 2 dozen muffins, I found that it makes 12 standard sized muffins. Muffins must have gotten a lot bigger since this book came out!)

goodbye New York, hello Minnesota

At some point in the last month - actually, at many points - I intended to update this blog with some big, exciting news, and offer some hopefully profound thoughts on What It All Meant and what I'm going to do with my life now that I officially have a certificate (with honors, no less) in Classic Pastry Arts.  But that obviously didn't happen, and so here I am writing to you with the Big Event - my move from Manhattan to Minnesota - having already come and gone about as well as a cross-country move from a studio apartment into my high school bedroom could possibly be expected to go.  (Read: there are still multiple boxes of homeless books and kitchen appliances lying around).

My last weeks in New York were a blur of friends visiting, dinner parties, and sentimental "lasts," interspersed with my daily chores of begging boxes off the friendly guys at my local liquor store, packing as much in them as possible and then walking to the Post Office and back often enough that the panhandlers and United Way employees along my route stopped asking me for money.  There were moments of excitement - my first trip to the Metropolitan Opera House - and moments of sadness - our last Sunday Supper Club and my last night out with former Lehman colleagues.  (well, considering how many of those nights ended, maybe that one's not so sad!)

And of course there was great food along the way.  My sister graduated from college and one of my best friends turned 25, both events requiring special homemade cakes.  I made the best slice and bake cookies ever, tried my ice cream maker for the first time with some interesting results, and punched up this summer's first batch of my favorite sangria with tangy sliced rhubarb.  All adventures I hope to share with you.

I'm also looking forward to cooking (and writing about) all the great local produce here - Minnesota in the summer offers some of the best eating opportunities around.  My family signed up for a share in a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) this summer, so every week we'll be getting a delivery of produce from a local farm.  My goal is to create dishes from this food that even my vegetable-hating youngest sister, who could eat medium-rare steak or or Chinese takeout every night, will like.  Our first shipment arrives next Monday - we're expecting strawberries and some cole crops (broccoli, cabbage, bok choy, etc) in the first weeks, so I've been perusing recipe books to prepare.  I'm thinking the strawberries would be perfect with some of the rhubarb that's growing in the garden at our cabin.  

Taking advantage of trading my studio apartment for a house with a yard, I've also planted some herbs in our garden, hoping to have fresh basil for pesto, and fresh mint for the mojitos my dad makes so well.  My thumbs have always been more black than green, so we'll see how this experiment goes - hopefully I'll have some good garden pictures for you soon.  I'll leave you with the number one reason I'm happy to be back in Minnesota for the summer, my favorite (and in my biased opinion, the best) place on Earth.  I hope you all are enjoying a relaxing summer evening somewhere just as special.