Muffin: tops.

Blueberry muffins are not just for breakfast, especially when they are excellent. First made as an early afternoon snack on Saturday, these muffins have been no less than excellent over the past 3 days.

The weekend was quite hot and muggy in NYC, so what on earth brought on this burst of baking? It's like this, cats: I once mentioned my mustard collection. Well, I'm also guilty of book hoarding. This habit does include cookbooks. I own just more than my fair share. So, in the interest of assuaging consumer guilt I've had it as a goal for a while to use every one of them at least once a year. So far I've failed. I may yet make it in 2008. This time I combined (with a few modifications) two recipes so as to get at more of the collection of cookbooks.



Represented here are Betty Crocker's Hostess Cookbook: Guest-Tested Recipes and Party Plans for Every Occasion (1973) - which I may never have used before - and How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food by Mark Bittman (1998) - which I use all the time. Beautiful blueberries at the farmers' market didn't hurt the inspiration process, either.



Zesty Blueberry Muffins aka Blueberry Dreamboats
(makes 12-18 muffins)

Grease or line muffin pans. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Prepare crumb topping: With fingers or fork, combine 1/4 cup brown sugar (packed), 1/4 cup chopped walnuts, 1 tsp grated lime zest, and 1/2 tsp. cinnamon. Set aside.

Mix dry ingredients: 2 cups all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup granulated sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 3 tsp. baking powder

In another bowl, combine wet ingredients: 1 T. vegetable oil, 2 T melted butter (or 3 T of your favorite butter or oil), 1 beaten egg, and 1 c. milk with 1 tsp. lime zest.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients. Pour wet mixture into dry ingredients. Stir until all ingredients are combined and you do not see any loose dry ingredients in mixture. Resulting batter will be thick and have lumps. That's okay. Feel free to add a splash of milk if it doesn't look moist enough. Now add 1 1/2 cups fresh, washed (stems removed) blueberries, folding them in to combine. Don't overmix.

Fill muffin cups 2/3 full. Sprinkle crumb mixture on top. Bake 20-30 minutes at 400 F. A toothpick inserted into the center of a fully-baked muffin should come out clean. Let cool in pans 5 minutes, then remove from pans. Eat right away! I found these to be so good and moist that I did not even butter any of them, which is rare for me.

Don't hate me because I'm brownie-full.

Homemade is best, right? In most cases I do think so, and sort of snobbily, but perfect homemade brownies elude me. I've made dozens of brownie recipes and dozens of batches from store-bought mixes, and I just plain prefer the kind out of a box. But I can't stop believing that someday I will discover "that" brownie recipe that will knock me off the box forever. So if you're reading this and you have a good brownie recipe, please share.

Personally, I like brownies moist and chewy and fudgy, without nuts or chocolate chips, and a little underdone. I don't want cakey brownies because I can make a cake if I want to eat something that is like cake. Brownies should be easy to smoosh into a ball with your fingers while they're warm.

This time, Pillsbury Brownie Classics Traditional Fudge (Family Size) met my needs. Beat that, homemade brownies! Please?

"Would you say I have a 'plethora' of Pizzelle?"

A pizzelle (or is this noun plural?) is an Italian cookie that is like a thin, crispy waffle. These are slightly sweet and have a light, clean vanilla flavor.

How have I snacked on pizzelles since I bought them for a picnic last weekend?

• Plain (yum!)
  
• Atop a bowl of raspberry ice cream (dreamy!)
  

How have others eaten them in my presence, thereby grossing me out?

• With bean dip (bleah.)
  

I still have a ton of these. Ideas?

The Silent Snackstress

While browsing vintage cookbooks on Ebay (trying to look-but-not-buy), I ran across one from the early 1930s titled, The Silent Hostess. Produced by General Electric, I expect that the "silent" to this book is the silence of G.E. appliances, and that it's not a treatise on why the woman throwing the party should keep quiet, but the title made me wonder what I might serve at a "silence" themed dinner party. I mean that the food would need to be silent, not the guests (or the host/ess). Nothing crunchy or crispy or that needs to be sawed into with knives and forks. Still, you'd want enough variation in flavor and texture that dinner guests don't feel like they're eating an institutional dinner for the infirm. And I'd hope everyone would wear muted colors and soft-soled shoes.

As a silent snack, the marshmallow is a revelation, if not particularly healthy. I like a jumbo Jet-Puffed with a smear of peanut butter on top. But if you're more of a jelly lover than a p.b. fan, why not go with these?



There's jelly in them thar marshmallows. Grape jelly.



I like that they're individually wrapped because it increases portability (and because of this they don't stick together in lumps or go stale like other bags of marshmallows can). They have a pleasant, powdery sweetness that soothes the palate and neither too much nor too little of the jelly filling. The marshmallows used in these treats might even taste better (leaving aside the probably artificial grapeness inside) than the plain, bagged variety available everywhere. I'd buy these unfilled, too, if that were an option, and put them in dark chocolate cocoa.

Want to go wild? PBJ marshmallow (one of these with a little peanut butter on top). Or two held together with peanut butter spread in between. Why not?!

Our Sandwich

As far as I'm concerned, Dan invented this open-faced beauty. And I became a believer when we ate dozens of them on a day's drive from Colorado to Kansas in my little used Saturn (deceased). They're good at home, in the car, while camping (you may want to swap out mustard for the mayo), while picnicking, at the beach...

The variation pictured here (from last weekend's bocce picnic) is bread, spreadable cheese, Viennese mustard, and Hormel Turkey Pepperoni, but the original version (still classic and my favorite) is a Triscuit, a dab of mayonnaise, a small slice of cheese, and a slice of the turkey pepperoni on top.

Eating my words

Ah, the pleasure of the found snack. This chipmunk enjoying a bit of granola bar left behind by a messy hiker (I try to resist feeding the beggars, myself) reminds me of the time I found a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup (unopened) in the gutter while I was walking home from school. But now's not the time for that story.

Let's continue Poetry Tuesday with another peek into my (food-related) poetic past!

The backstory:
Before my thirtieth birthday I copied one of Tony's inspired ideas and sent friends an email with the suggestion they bring poems they'd written for me to my birthday celebration (or that they send poems by email, in the case of far-away friends) instead of giving other sorts of gifts. In my email, I included a list of thirty words I'd chosen for potential inclusion in those poems, inviting my friends to use any number of the words but hoping some would take the challenge to use all thirty in one epic work. I got some good pomes that year. I have some pretty great friends.

After I got home from receiving the struggled-over poems at my birthday "party" at a Korean BBQ joint, I thought it only fair that I use those same 30 words to write my own thank-you note poem to those who helped me celebrate. It was pretty hard -- much harder than writing the one I'd written for Tony's birthday. But I persevered.

Sidebar: Because of this site's theme, I will point out that three of my thirty words were potentially food/drink -- cocoa, sheep, and buzz (as in the fictional cola) -- but I was surprised by the additional food references I ended up with in the final thank-you poem.

The words were:
rasp, portent, dwindle, gloaming, buzz
phantom, button, veer, disorient, fog
noise, cocoa, rube, Cerberus, hank (or Hank)
sheep, spade, bundle, low, aluminum
luster, sieve, perforce, ever, France
are, lapse, rather, under, laser

Now comes the poem part.

-------------------------------------

Thirty:

I'm not the first to press the button of this number
and smell: something like portent, burnt toast
a buzz of age, warm cheese (from France?),
the low promise of lapse -- its sour scent of aluminum,
pee after a bundle of asparagus, sad and threatening,
the faded perfume of hands clasped with the past,
and dry with time.

OK, poor me. But, some of that is noise.
I mean, it's not like the world slips into
black and white
or grey or cocoa
or a sepia fog (at 30). I can't hear
that scrape of spade against my grave
just yet.
No laser dot of red pins me between the eyes.

Rather, I dwindle as I grow. The gloaming spreads
bruise purple between cattails on some shore,
a phantom of an edge horizon-deep and -wide.
I slog in mud, sometimes, to veer with sucking sounds
from orient to disorient and have few maps
and want for friends and sunny days.
And I can feel pretty damn sorry for myself.

But sometimes a hell-hound is just a dog
("His name's not Cerberus. It's Hank")
tied up outside the sandwich shop.
It's okay for you to pet him.
He's not guarding a thing.
And some milestones mark a journey to, not from,
or "historic point of interest" pull-out on the road.
And tonight, on my birthday, leaving some warm company so late,
cold-marching toward my sleep,
I walked over a rasp of ice under a scrape of sky,
mostly unwounded,
and thought of all the things that can come in thirty(+)
but are not scary,
like sheep and pastry
and words and friends and years.

Am I the rube who plays at carnivals, believing she could win?
If so, I ever win. My friends,
and here's the sappy part,
you are the clink of ring-toss made,
you are the grains of gold against my sieve.
You are the luster of
my many warming suns in Feb. and Mar.
I love you so, perforce,
because you'll maybe be (it's just a hunch)
my lights of dawn
at thirty one

and then some.

O Taste and See

I'm no Denise Levertov, but I've decided to institute Poetry Tuesdays on Snackreligious. From now on, Tuesdays' posting will be ever-so-poetical. Let's get classy around here!




The Smiling Mouth

[A tribute to Kikori No Kirikabu ("chocolate and cookie snack"), which are Japanese chocolate-covered tree stump cookies featuring a happy lumberjack on the box. In the style of (and with apologies to) Charles d'Orléans.]


The smiling mouth and laughing pipe smoke gray,
The chestes strong and long small armes twain
The handes smooth, the axe you hold plain,
Your bootes lit* - what should I further say?
It is my craft, for I am not blasé,
To muse theron in stinting of my pain --
The smiling mouth and laughing pipe smoke gray,
The chestes strong and long small armes twain,
So would I eat your, if I could or may,
Crunchy stumps with chocolate I've seen,
Forwhy that snack me is most fain,
And will be to the hour in which I day** --
The smiling mouth and laughing pipe smoke gray,
The chestes strong and long small armes twain.


* lit = little
** day = die


p.s. What is he saying to me here on the inside flap?