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.