Puffy Muffins

After eating granola bars every day for breakfast for two weeks, I decided I needed to actually cook.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for granola, particularly in bar form which is so easy to just toss in my backpack as I run out the door to math class. Can't be late for math class. No, really, can't. Freaking class is packed and the rows are closer together than movie theatre rows, and they fill up from the edges inward. If I want to actually find a place for my ass (without having to first drag it in front of the faces of 8 people) I need to get there early.

Muffins are quick and easy (can mix and bake in the time it takes to do a load of laundry) and freeze really well. Perfect for eating in the car on the way to school or work. And these ones use yogurt for the liquid component because I forgot I already had yogurt and bought more.

Blueberry Muffins:

What you need:

• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp lemon zest
• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup yogurt
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 1 cup fresh blueberries (use fresh, if you can)

What you gotta do:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. (totally remembered to this time)

Zest your lemon. If you don't have a lemon zester (and I don't), you've got a couple options. A vegetable peeler can work, but a small sharp knife is my preference. Mostly because I find that when I use the peeler, I take of more than just the zest. With a knife, I've got enough control that I don't end up with any of the white pith, which is extremely bitter.

And since my brain is totally broken by math, I realized as I was zesting with my paring knife that optimal zesting occurs when the knife is coplanar to the plane tangent to the lemon's surface. That is, the slope of the plane on which the knife is cutting is the derivative of the curve of the lemon.

See? Broken.

For those of you whose brains don't think in terms of calculus: Hold the lemon in one hand and with the other, keep the knife flat on the lemon and do small amounts at a time.

Chop the zest as finely as you have the patience for.

Juice the lemon.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and lemon zest in a large bowl and then make a well in the middle.

In another bowl whisk together the lemon juice, oil, vanilla, yogurt and egg.

Pour the wet mixture into that well in the dry mixture. Mix the mixtures. But don’t do it with a whisk. Why not? Well, because this is more of a dough than a batter and your whisk will end up looking like this.

Use a wooden spoon or a spatula, and you'll eventually end up with a very squishy, sticky dough-like batter.

Gently fold in 1 cup of blueberries with either the spatula or your hand.

The strong acids in your yogurt and lemon juice start reacting pretty much instantly with the bases in your baking powder and soda, and these things start rising as you’re spooning the batter into the muffin tins.

If you’ve got more than a cup of berries, sprinkle the last few on top of the muffins.

And if you’re feeling totally wacky, sprinkle a forkful of sugar over top of each, too.

Seriously, puffy. After only a few minutes.

Bake these for 17-19 minutes or until a piece of spaghetti stuck into the biggest one comes out clean.

Remove muffins from the pan as soon as you're done folding the laundry, and put them on a wire rack to cool. I didn't use muffin papers, so they do need to sit in the pan for a bit after they come out of the oven. If you use the papers, you can move them to the rack right away.

Wrap them individually and put them all in a large freezer bag until you need breakfast on the go. Like tomorrow.

What do you eat for breakfast when you have to eat in the car?

Teddy Bear Picnic

Ah, dinner. That meal I used to cook with leisurely ease.

I had a whole three hours to make dinner last night (well, all night really, but I was getting hungry) and I ended up with a stirfry. Tons of time and I make a super fast dinner. I am highly amused. It was one hell of a tasty stirfry, and based on a dish I used to have at a little Asian fusion place on the island. It’s actually gained a lot of popularity and you can find it as a “tapas” sort of dish all over the place now. It’s fun to eat, totally sharable, and a little on the messy side, but that just makes for tasty sticky fingers to lick, which is always fun on date night. ;)

But it’s not just a stirfry, it’s a wrap that you build as you eat. Think tacos, but with lettuce instead of tortilla shells, and stirfry instead of meat, beans and cheese… mmm… tacos…

Stirfry. That’s what I made (but I may need to make tacos some time soon)

The place on the island used a wicked hoisin sauce in theirs. Hoisin is like bbq sauce, but with Asian flavours. It has all the same elements: a base (usually tomato in the west, beans in the east), some salt (soy works), some sour (rice vinegar rather than cider or white), some sweet (brown sugar is what I usually see in bbq, but honey sometimes too), and then the seasonings.

Black bean paste is the typical base for hoisin, but peanut butter can work to. And since I was fresh out of bean paste, I opted for the pb. And before I start, I have to admit to a bit of a guilty pleasure.

So, when I was a kid, my mom refused to buy this one kind of peanut butter that I was sure that aaaalll my friend’s moms bought. And now that I’m a reasonable hand drawn facsimile of a grownup, I can buy what ever kind I want. So there. I know it’s going to make Taneasha have half a heart attack, and so I apologize in advance for my love of sugar sweetened, partially hydrogenated oil stabilizied, Kraft (*cringe*) peanut butter. I know the all natural stuff is better for me. I don’t care. I want the one with the bears on it.

Chicken Stirfry in Lettuce Wraps with Home Made Hoisin Sauce

What You Need:

Hoisin

•  4 tablespoons soy sauce
•  2 tablespoons peanut butter or black bean paste
•  1 tablespoon honey or molasses or brown sugar
•  2 teaspoons rice vinegar
• 1 clove garlic
•  2 teaspoons sesame oil
•  1 tsp Sriracha cock sauce

Stir Fry:

•  1 clove garlic
•  1 bit of minced ginger
•  1 tbsp peanut oil
•  a few drops sesame oil
•  1 chicken breast
•  1 large red bell
•  ½ small onion
•  a few mushrooms
•  ½ c cashews
•  1 head lettuce

 What You Gotta Do:

Dump all of the ingredients for the hoisin into a bowl much bigger than you need.You can leave out the hot sauce and add it a bit at a time once it’s mixed.

Mixing the hoisin doesn’t take long, but it really looks strange at first.

Don’t worry, keep whisking and it’ll all come together. See.

Add as much or as little (or none if you insist) of the hot sauce as you like. Dip a bit of lettuce in to taste as you add.

There, you just made hoisin sauce. Fancy schmancy. It really does work well on the bbq too.

Since the stirfry cooks really fast, it’s best to have everything chopped and ready to go before you start heating the pan. Start with the chicken, then grab a fresh cutting board.

I used a head of romaine for my wraps. I like the boat shape of them. The restaurant where I first had this dish served it with a quarter of a head of iceburg. Use which ever lettuce you prefer, but make sure it’s one that will hold up under the weight of a warm stirfry.

Rinse the lettuce and dry it well. I lay my leaves out on a teatowel and roll them up. Works just fine, and keeps them out of the way while I’m cooking.

 

Chop the onion, pepper and mushrooms into less than bite sized pieces, and mince the garlic and ginger.

Heat a dry pan over medium heat, add the cashews. Those are some wrinkly nuts.

Shake them around from time to time so they don’t burn, just get nice and toasty brown. Dump them out of the pan and back into the bowl.

Add some peanut oil and add a few drops of sesame oil to the hot pan. Peanut oil has a really high smoke point, and sesame oils is probably one of the lowest. Combining them tempers sesame’s tendency to burn before you can get anything else into the pan.

Sautee the chicken in the oil until the pink is all gone,

Then add the veggies.

Shove them around in the pan until the onions are just barely translucent and have lost their crunch.

 

Add about half of the hoisin sauce. The rest can be stored in the fridge for… probably as long as the shelf life of the ingredient with the shortest shelf life. I dunno, it’s never lasted more than a week or two in my fridge.

Mix in the sauce then add the cashews. Cashews will soften quite a bit in a saucy stirfry, so you only want them in there long enough to get them coated.

It looks good, but it seems to be missing something…

I haven’t been able to find cilantro or beansprouts to save my life lately, so I scrounged a half wilted green onion from the bottom of the veggie drawer.

That did it. Cilantro would have been much better, but this'll do.

Serve the stirfry in a bowl, with the lettuce leaves on the side.

Hold a leaf in your hand and spoon in a bit of the stirfry. Just like building a taco.

mmm…. Tacos….

What are you bringing to the teddy bear (peanut butter) picnic??