May 29: Raspberry-Cream Cheese Muffins

Blahhh, that's enough of that. My mother was here for a week and now she's gone. I am a little surprised at how uncomfortable I am with people in my personal space, and I live in a 700-square-foot condo. All of my space is personal.

I like a good muffin from time to time--chocolate chip, blueberry, cherry pecan, lemon poppyseed. Have you seen those new "muffin top" pans? They just make the muffin "tops" which are of course arguably the best part of the muffin anyway.

This thing sounds irresistable. I get about eleven email newsletters about food and cooking and that sort of thing, and this came in one of those. It sounds like dessert, not anything I'd eat for breakfast, but muffins are really too sticky-sweet for breakfast for me anyway. This thing sounds like cheesecake made portable. I'm all over it.

Raspberry-Cream Cheese Muffins

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 of an 8-ounce container cream cheese with strawberries
2 beaten eggs
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup butter or margarine, melted
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup fresh or frozen raspberries
Powdered sugar (optional)

Lightly grease eighteen 2 1/2-inch muffin cups or line with paper baking cups; set aside. In a medium mixing bowl stir together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt. Using a pastry blender, cut in cream cheese till the mixture resembles crumbs about the size of a pea. In a small mixing bowl combine eggs, milk, melted butter or margarine, and vanilla. Add all at once to flour mixture. Stir just till moistened. (The batter will be lumpy.)
Fold in fresh or frozen raspberries. Spoon into the prepared muffin cups, filling each two-thirds full. Bake in a preheated 400° oven about 20 minutes, or till golden brown. Remove from pans; cool slightly on racks. If desired, sprinkle lightly with powdered sugar.

May 10: Cinnamon Honey Compound Butter

When did I become such a little old lady? One glass of wine with dinner and I'm falling asleep on the couch. What if I have to give up drinking? Oh my God!

Compound butter: if you haven't tried them yet, you're missing out. I baked bread today, something I love to do but don't do often enough. The exactitude required by baking does not suit my free spirit in the kitchen. Measuring stuff is sort of stifling to me. But I love fresh homemade bread, particularly with compound butter. All it is, is butter with stuff mixed in. Seriously--butter and stuff.

Compound butter is good for all kinds of things: popcorn, fish, pasta. I love bleu cheese butter on a freshly grilled steak; I love chicken breasts with chipotle butter; I love spaghetti with garlic-basil butter.

For the homemade bread, I made my favorite sweet compound butter. Let me just say that I think this would be amazing on pancakes, or waffles, or toast. There was a restaurant in Kalamazoo that we used to go to that served warm rolls with this butter, and it is so good, it is all I can do to not slather my three-year-old in this stuff. Believe me, based on his behaviour today, it would be an improvement.

Cinnamon Honey Butter

1 stick salted butter, room temperature
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Whip butter with a fork until fluffy. Mix in honey and cinnamon.

Keep cool. Will keep, tightly covered in refrigerator, for up to 2 weeks.

April 28: Breakfast Burrito

I like a good sandwich, I really do. It's a whole self-contained and portable meal, all in itself. When it's done well, it's a balance of flavors that all works together, the way a good balanced meal does.

I like a breakfast-for-dinner thing now and then, and a sandwich is just the thing. That sounds awfully British, doesn't it? I'm watching The Painted Veil as I'm writing this, and Edward Norton is adorable, as usual; he plays a stuffy British dcotor and I am finding him irresistable, as usual. I love brainy, awkward guys. Liev Shreiver is awfully cute in this as well.

Anyway: breakfast for dinner. I am a big fan of the breakfast sandwich, and by turn, the breakfast burrito. A tortilla stands in beautifully for a couple slices of bread in the case of a breakfast burrito, and as for the insides, anything goes.

Here's my favorite breakfast burrito. Out of respect for our arteries, I usually make it with turkey sausage, but nothing's off limits. Sometimes, I leave out the salsa and I make a little sausage gravy to dip the burrito in. I'm kooky that way.

Breakfast Burrito

4 large (12-inch) flour tortillas
1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
6 eggs
1/4 cup sour cream
1 tbsp butter
1 1/2 cups roasted tomato salsa
2/3 pound spicy pork or turkey sausage, crumbled and browned
2 cups home fries

Melt butter in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. While the butter melts, beat together the eggs and sour cream, then pour into skillet. Cook over medium heat, stirring with a rubber or silicone spatula, until scrambled medium-hard. Mix in cooked crumbled sausage, salsa, and home fries. Keep warm.

Wrap tortillas in plastic wrap and microwave until hot and pliable. Sprinkle each tortilla with 1/4 of the cheese, then microwave a few seconds more, until cheese melts slightly.

Divide the egg mixture evenly among the tortillas. Fold in each side, then roll up from the bottom. Serve.

April 25: Government Cheese Omelet

Well, thanks to company restructuring, I am now on what I like to think of as a prolonged vacation. It's not like it caught me totally unexpected; things have been moving in this direction for quite awhile now and I've got some other options in the works. All the same, I am collecting unemployment at the moment.

As goes my check, as goes our food budget. Here is a breakfast-for-dinner recipe that takes advantage of leftover pasta and whatever other odds and ends you might happen to have in the fridge: grilled chicken, leftover sauce, steamed vegetables, or cheese. Whatever you like. I like a nice simple cheese omelet. With a side of bacon. A large side.

My mother-in-law gave me The Magic Bullet for Christmas a few years ago. It is wonderful at some things, terrible at others: salsa, for example, is not great. On the other hand, it makes really fairly spectacular omelets. You can really just beat eggs with a whisk, or a fork even, but I make them in the Bullet, and they are light as air, incredibly fluffy, and tender.

Government Cheese Omelet

4 large eggs
2 tablespoons sour cream
1 tablespoon butter
4 oz. shredded cheese (cheddar, mozzerella, provolone, or fontina, all delicious)
salt and pepper

Whisk together eggs and sour cream until uniformly blended. Mix in salt and pepper to taste.

Melt the butter in a 10-inch non-stick skillet over medium heat, swirling to coat it. Pour the egg mixture into the pan and, using a rubber or silicone spatula, stir the eggs around the pan constantly until they begin to firm up. Let the eggs sit undisturbed until the bottom of the omelet is set, 3-4 minutes.

Sprinkle shredded cheese over half the eggs. Using a spatula, fold the eggs over the cheese. Continue to cook until the omelet is as done as you like it. Serve immediately. Serves 2.

March 30: Home Fries

Just in case anyone is interested, it's March 30th. The only significance to this date is that, five years ago, my husband and I started a conversation in the parking lot after work, decided we were enjoying the conversation so much that we wanted to continue it, went back to his apartment, and talked until 2:30 in the morning, at which point he made a somewhat clumsy overture which I pretended not to find hilariously funny and kissed me for the first time, my last first kiss (I hope.)

I just asked Dan what the first meal I ever cooked for him was. What he said to me was, "If I had known there were going to be pop quizzes later, I would have written some of this crap down." For the record, it was a roasted chicken in his Ron Popeil Showtime Rotisserie oven. I had never met anyone who had one of those; I'd been dying to try it out. It really was as simple as they make it look in the infomercial. That chicken was delicious, and I think it clinched it for Dan, that I really was the ideal woman.

I have cooked very few meals that my husband hasn't loved. To be fair, I'm married to a man who loves food, almost all of it, but before me, he always dated (and married) women who couldn't cook and didn't care about food. In contrast, he and I plan days around certain meals, take road trips in order to eat at specific restaurants, and have a monthly food budget nearly equal to our monthly rent.

My husband makes perfect Kraft Macaroni and Cheese; he always lets the butter and milk and cheese bubble in the pot for a few minutes before stirring the pasta back in. He loves meatball hoagies. Green bell peppers give him indigestion. He likes his hot dogs simmered in water and then pan-fried for a few minutes in butter with a little sprinkling of pepper, with mustard and onions and cole slaw. He eats salad with whole-wheat pasta and sliced chicken breast and vinaigrette dressing every day for lunch. And he once played the unspeakably dirty joke of telling me he was eating a peanut butter sandwich, and then when I took a bite, it turned out that he was actually eating a peanut butter and mustard sandwich. I still have not totally forgiven him.

One of the things that I really appreciate about Dan is that on weekend mornings, he gets up with Max and makes a very elaborate breakfast. One of the best things he makes is home fries.

Here is Dan's recipe for home fries. You can make as few or as many of these as you want, just by varying the amount of the ingredients and the cooking time. This is enough for about 4 people, if you're making them as part of a full breakfast. Dan made them this morning for me along with scrambled eggs and bacon.

Thanks, babe. Here's to five more years, and another fifty after that.

Home Fries

2 russet, all-purpose, or Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch dice
1 small white onion, finely diced
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoons black pepper

Put potatoes in a microwave-safe bowl and toss with garlic powder. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and poke a couple of small holes in the plastic wrap. Microwave, on high, for 8 minutes.

Heat oil and butter in a large (12-inch) non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. When butter stops foaming, cook potatoes in skillet over medium-high heat, turning occasionally, until golden-brown and crispy, 10-15 minutes. Mix in diced onion, continue to cook another 6-8 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot.

March 28: Blueberry Buckle

My son was born on June 21, 2005. On June 18th, 2005, my parents arrived in Washington D.C. They hadn't seen me since Christmas. I am very tall--5'11"--and a little wide, and when I was nine months pregnant, I looked maybe six months pregnant, with a baby spread out all over the front of me. The last time they saw me was on my birthday, when I was 3 months pregnant, and didn't look pregnant at all.

It must have been fairly shocking for them to see me looking like a landmass, hot, sweaty even in the air conditioning, unbearably bloated, having contractions--but not knowing that the almost constant discomfort that I was having were contractions--and grouchy beyond all compare. My mother responded to all of this by treating me like a spoiled beauty pagent queen and indulging my every whim. She even went with me to a local barbecue joint, where a skeevy creep leaned up against me from shoulders to ankles, stuck his face in my ear, and said in this yucky, breathy whisper, "So what's good here?"

My mother looked horrified, and I was absolutely enraged beyond compare. "I'm ordering pulled pork with a large side of personal space," is what I told him, loudly. "Don't touch me again or I'll defend myself." I meant it too. I was 9 months pregnant and Skeev was lucky I wasn't carrying a weapon of some kind. He was stunned that I would stand up for myself, clearly, and very defensive about it, claiming to have meant no harm by it. I didn't give one tiny rat's ass, though; don't be creepy and rub up against me when it's 96 degrees outside and I'm as pregnant as I can possibly be or I'll stab you in the skull with a screwdriver. How's that for the moral of a story?

After I made a huge scene in a crowded take-out restaurant, my mother was even more inclined to indulge me. She did so by baking me a blueberry buckle, a tender yellow cake full of fresh blueberries and topped with a crumbly, buttery brown sugar topping. It's sort of half dessert, half coffee cake, rich and not-painfully-sweet but gorgeously indulgent feeling. She found it in Cook's Illustrated, and I've baked it for every friend whose had a baby since then. It's one of my favorite things.

Don't use frozen blueberries. They're too mushy and gloppy, and they'll leave you with a homogenous, creepy blue-green cake. Hold out until mid-June, at least, and make it then, when blueberries are sweet and fresh, and preferrably local. Yum.


Streusel
1/2 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Pinch table salt
4 tablespoons unsalted butter (1/2 stick), cut into 8 pieces, softened but still cool

Cake
1 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
10 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/4 stick), softened but still cool
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs, room temperature
4 cups fresh blueberries(about 20 ounces), picked over

1. For the streusel: In standing mixer fitted with flat beater, combine flour, sugars, cinnamon, and salt on low speed until well combined and no large brown sugar lumps remain, about 45 seconds. Add butter and mix on low until mixture resembles wet sand and no large butter pieces remain, about 2 1/2 minutes. Transfer streusel to small bowl and set aside.

2. For the cake: Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position; heat oven to 350 degrees. Spray 9-inch round cake pan with 2-inch sides with nonstick cooking spray, line bottom with parchment or waxed paper round, and spray round; dust pan with flour and knock out excess.

3. Whisk flour and baking powder in small bowl to combine; set aside. In standing mixer fitted with flat beater, cream butter, sugar, salt, and lemon zest at medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes; using rubber spatula, scrape down bowl. Beat in vanilla until combined, about 30 seconds. With mixer running at medium speed, add eggs one at a time; beat until partially incorporated, then scrape down bowl and continue to beat until fully incorporated (mixture will appear broken). With mixer running on low speed, gradually add flour mixture; beat until flour is almost fully incorporated, about 20 seconds. Disengage bowl from mixer; stir batter with rubber spatula, scraping bottom and sides of bowl, until no flour pockets remain and batter is homogenous; batter will be very heavy and thick. Using rubber spatula, gently fold in blueberries until evenly distributed.

4. Transfer batter to prepared pan; with rubber spatula, using a pushing motion, spread batter evenly to pan edges and smooth surface. Squeeze handful of streusel in hand to form large cohesive clump; break up clump with fingers and sprinkle streusel evenly over batter. Repeat with remaining streusel. Bake until deep golden brown and toothpick or wooden skewer inserted into center of cake comes out clean, about 55 minutes. Cool on wire rack 15 to 20 minutes (cake will fall slightly as it cools).

5. Run paring knife around sides of cake to loosen. Place upside-down plate (do not use plate or platter on which you plan to serve the cake) on top of cake pan; invert cake to remove from pan, lift off cake pan, then peel off and discard parchment. Re-invert cake onto serving platter. Cool until just warm or to room temperature, at least 1 hour. Cut into wedges and serve.

June 1: Extra-Light, Extra-Crisp Waffles

Waffles are one of my favorite things for breakfast. Crispier than pancakes, lighter than toast, a waffle is a great vehicle for cinnamon-honey butter and a spoonful of sauteed, diced apples. Yum.

A great waffle is a thing of beauty, but it's also pretty rare. America's Test Kitchen has an unorthodox approach to waffles: a basic batter with egg whites whipped and folded in, vegetable oil standing in for butter, swapping cornstarch for some of the flour, and the unorthodox addition of Rice Krispies, which seem to disappear into the batter, magically leaving behind their crispy texture.

I love a mystery ingredient. It does something for the recipe without changing the character of the dish. It's one of the many ways in which food becomes more than the sum of its parts. This is crazy, but honest to God, it works like a charm. I would happily eat these waffles for any meal of the day, including with fried chicken, which is apparently quite a big thing--I'd never heard of it before, but it sounds good to me.

Extra-Light, Extra-Crisp Waffles

1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 cup Rice Crispies

3/4 cup cornstarch

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs, separated

1 1/2 cups milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup vegetable oil

Preheat a waffle iron to medium. Stir the flour, Rice Krispies, cornstarch, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt together in a large bowl. Whisk the egg yolks, milk, vanilla, and oil together in a medium bowl.

With an electric mixer or ballon whisk, beat the egg whites in a bowl to soft peaks. Pour the milk mixture overthe dry ingredients and whisk until combined. Whisk in the beaten whites until just combined. Do not overmix; a few streaks of whites should be visible.

Pour 2/3 cup of the batter into the center of the waffle iron and use the back of a dinner spoon to spread thebatter toward the outer edges. Close the lid and cook until deep golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Serve immediately. Repeat with additional batter.