The Art of Pefect Muffins

Years ago a small spiral-bound book called “Muffin Mania” was published in Canada by two sisters, Cathy Prange and Joan Pauli. It’s out of print now, and if you try to find it online, sellers are asking ridiculous prices, as much as $200 for a copy. If you ever manage to find a copy, seize it and don’t let it go. If you find it in a friend’s cookbook collection, copy every recipe you can. This little book is a gem among cookbooks. Every time I make muffins for someone, I use this book, and they always, always, ask for the recipe after raving how good the muffins are.

Jen W asked me a while ago to make her pumpkin-chocolate muffins, which I did, using this cookbook for the basic recipe and making a couple of small changes: no brown sugar topping, changing the raisins for semi-sweet chocolate chips. Here is the recipe for you to try, with my changes:

Pumpkin Muffins

4 eggs

2 cups white sugar

1 1/2 cup oil (a vegetable or canola oil is fine, not olive)

1 3/4 cups cooked mashed pumpkin

3 cups all purpose flour

1 tablespoon of cinnamon

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Beat the eggs slightly. Add sugar, oil, pumpkin, and beat thoroughly. Add dry ingredients and mix.

Stir in chocolate chips.

Fill greased muffin cups and bake at 375F for 15-20 minutes.

I usually halve this recipe and fill the cups high to make 7-8 large muffins.

A couple of words on the key to making good muffins:

1. Start off with a good recipe. Obvious I know, but some people say they can’t cook when they’ve been using bad recipes that no one could make turn out well
2. Next, don’t beat your batter smooth. Barely mix it until the flour is in the wet mixture, and leave it a bit lumpy looking. The point of muffins is that they are tender with a nice crumb. If you beat the batter smooth you will end up with tough, leathery muffins
3. Don’t overbake. When you touch the top of the muffin and gently press it with your fingertip, and see it bounce back, they are done. You want to keep as much moisture as you can in the cooked muffin, no one likes a dry muffin.
4. Use quality ingredients. Real vanilla, ripe fruit, plump raisins, good chocolate. The final taste depends on how good the ingredients are when they go in–the oven doesn’t magically transform bland tasteless things into delicious things

Muffins are quick and easy to do. I think you’ll like this recipe.

I am in love with Rick Stein

I’ve just now finished watching Rick Stein’s “Seafood Odyssey” series. I’ve seen his “Food Heroes” series, and tried some of his seafood recipes, and I have to say that I love him. He has this wonderful enthusiasm, is a great teacher, and gives you recipes you actually want to make. I love his food and his cooking philosophies….I think I love the man, too.

In one of his “Seafood Odyssey” episodes he goes to eat cockles. For some reason they looked so good I am half-frantic to try eating them. Next time I am in Britain it is on my lists of must-dos. My grandfather always loved cockles, I can’t think why I never had them with him before when I had the chance. My mum and aunt say cockles are no good to eat but I do not believe them, because my grandpa liked them, and Rick Stein does too.

Unfortunately Rick Stein is not on the TV here, although we can always hope PBS will bring him to the masses. If you get the chance to watch one of his programs or read any of his stuff, do. You will be so glad you did. And if you get the chance to go to his seafood cooking school in Padstow Cornwall, please write and tell me about it so I can live vicariously through your experiences.

If anyone is interested in knowing a good seafood cookbook author, always go with Rick Stein. His knowledge is encyclopedic, he’s very clear on technique, and he’s solid in his flavour combinations.

Is this where I disclaim any financial interest in the Rick Stein empire?

Peppermint Bark How-To

My mum and I did some Christmas baking today (did you say “aren’t you doing your thesis”? Yes, that rings a distant bell….). We didn’t do a whole lot, just some mince pies and peppermint bark. I love our mince pies, especially since a few years ago we started making our own mincemeat. My mum got grossed out by all the fat in our first attempts and kept pushing for us to find a lower-fat version. I, of course, regarded the fat with perfect equanimity, but she has more say than I do on these things. Anyway, the past three years we’ve made a recipe that belongs to another family we know, handed down from their great-grandmother. It’s a great vegetarian recipe. Of course, once you eat it you can never go back to store-bought mincemeat.

My one brother in law always refused to eat the mince pies and no one could understand why, until last Christmas. It turns out all these years he thought the mincemeat had meat in it. I explained that in the Middle Ages it did, but the meat has been dropped for a couple of centuries or so now, and it’s all fruit these days.

Anyway that’s all sideline information because I wanted to tell you how to make peppermint bark. My sister has made it the past couple of Christmases, and it’s delicious and a really cute gift to give as an accompaniment to a card for those people you need to acknowledge but for whom you don’t buy a gift. We made it for the first time ourselves today and it’s very easy, but there are a couple of things you need to know for it to turn out looking professional.

Peppermint Bark

1 pound good-quality milk or dark chocolate

1 pound good-quality white chocolate

9 medium candy canes or 15 mini candy canes (approximately)

Line a jelly-roll pan or rimmed cookie sheet with either waxed paper or parchment paper. The pan should be about 15 inches long and 10 inches wide, if that helps you figure size. If you don’t have a pan that size, or like thicker bark, use a 9×13 pan (if you do this size remember to use fewer candy canes).

Melt the milk or dark chocolate. I use a double-boiler method whenever I melt chocolate, where I boil water in a pan and put a metal bowl over the top to hold the chocolate while it melts, but use a microwave if you feel confident. Once it’s melted, spread the chocolate into a thin, even layer in the prepared pan. Let it set.

You can speed this stage up if you like in the fridge, but don’t use the freezer. I did that today and it did set up quickly, but then the next layer froze almost instantly as it came into contact with it. Not good.

While the first layer becomes firm, crush or chop your candy canes into bits. You want little chewable shards of peppermint, not chunks or powder. We tried doing this with a rolling pin over a plastic bag but it wasn’t working, so we chopped it with a big knife.

Once the milk/dark chocolate is firm, then melt the white chocolate and pour it over the first layer. Use an offset icing knife or spatula to spread it out evenly and leave the top smooth as you can.

While the white chocolate is still liquid, sprinkle over the crushed candy cane evenly. Gently press the bits of candy down into the chocolate so they stick when the chocolate cools.

Leave the peppermint bark to become firm and hard. You can use the fridge to help speed this up. Once it’s hard, take a big chopping knife and cut the bark into diagonal, jagged pieces. Expect some splintering, and for some of the candy cane bits to fall off.

You might be tempted to use your hands to break the bark. Don’t. The pressure you exert in breaking it will cause your fingers to mark the chocolate.

We put our gift peppermint bark in little cellophane bags tied up with a bit of sparkly ribbon.

Sunday Dinner for Christopher Hitchens

This morning on the web I came across an odd link for Slate magazine. I clicked it, and wound up reading a virulently negative and nasty extract from Christopher Hitchen’s atheist book. Since the excerpt was criticizing my religion, I was in a position to recognize certain untruths in statements he made.

Now, if you set yourself up as a smarter person than the rest of us–fine. If you want to do it without any qualifications, that’s OK too, if people want to listen to you. But I had always just sort of assumed that if you were going to go around telling people how stupid they are and that they should listen to you, that you would at least do some basic research. Apparently I was wrong. And, apparently, I was wrong to think that the publishing industry would still employ fact-checkers….I guess they went the way of many editors who would otherwise catch the misspellings and bad grammar I frequently find in the books I buy.

So, please let me get this off my chest: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (“Mormonism”) was not founded with roots in militant Islam. ….Please stop giggling, he seems to be serious. I have no clue where he would have gotten that idea– I’m pretty sure Islamic militants weren’t recruiting in 1830’s Vermont, so no tie-in there– but I now have a pretty good idea of how much attention I should pay to his statements about other religions, of whom I know less than my own.

As I got ready for church, drove to church, and looked around my congregation, I felt sorry for a man so miserable and so eaten up with bile. I listened to the speakers encourage us to be better citizens in our communities, to treat our families with kindness, and was treated with great love and welcome myself. I wish that this man, who wants to label all of us who go to church fools, could think better of mankind.

I then went home, forgot about him, and made Sunday dinner.

One of the great, wonderful joys of growing up in a British church-going tradition is that it includes coming home to a cooked dinner, regardless of whether it’s lunchtime or evening. My mum, like my grandmothers and great-grandmothers before her, has always had a cooked dinner for us: roast leg of lamb, roasted chicken, or a baked ham. Potatoes or Yorkshire pudding (if one of my brothers in law is here, we might have both because my mother believes in spoiling them so they want to come back often) with gravy. Two or three vegetables, the trickiest part of all. Carrots, peas, corn if grandchildren are here, because they won’t eat anything else– brussel sprouts if it’s just my parents, because I hate them– parsnips or turnip if the women at our family table outnumber the men– sometimes mashed sweet potato if the weather is cold. Dessert to follow, perhaps a trifle, or a fruit crumble with ice cream or custard, or a cake.

Sunday dinner is one of the things that make life secure and loving, especially when the family sits together and talks over the meal. I love it when my siblings and their families are here and we try to cram in around the table. We coax Maggie to try–just please try–something, we’re sure she’ll like it. Can’t she set a good example for her little sister? We push John to eat more of his vegetables. Grant needs smaller bites. Has the baby had enough food? Has my brother in law? We try to figure out if we’ve managed to address everyone’s allergies and special diets. We talk about church that day, what was discussed, and who we saw. We tell each other what we have planned for the week ahead, and try out ideas for future get-togethers. Usually some politics will get thrown in at some point. We compliment the food. Oh, Mr. Hitchens, have you never had a good Sunday dinner after a lovely church service? I don’t think you can have.

I made an apple-raisin galette tonight. I didn’t do a special galette pastry because I wanted to see if regular flaky pie pastry would work as well. It did work just fine. I was thinking as well that if any of you want to make a kind of mini-pie, because there are only two or three of you, this would be a good technique to know because you can make it a regular pie size or make it smaller very easily. Make and roll out the dough for a single pastry shell, lay it on a cookie sheet, and heap up the middle with the fruit mixture you would normally put into a double crust fruit pie. Fold up the edges of the pastry over the fruit mixture, leaving an exposed circle in middle that shows the fruit. Don’t worry if the edges are ragged. I brushed the edges with some milk and sprinkled them with sugar to make it pretty, and then baked it as I would a normal pie.

Fruit Salad

For one of my restaurant-industry jobs, so many years ago, one of my tasks was doing some food prep for a cafe in downtown Victoria (Bastion Square, for those of you who know the city). One of our dishes was fruit salad, and it was served there in a fine dice: apples, oranges, whatever, finely chopped so it all came together in a kind of half-soup. Some people seemed to like it–I didn’t.

To me, fruit salad should contain recognizable parts. Chunks of fruit that are chosen to come together in complementary flavours and textures–no chunks of apple in with summer berries, for example. Tonight after a standard “whatever” meal at new restaurant in Sidney where we had a big lunch, we didn’t feel like a proper dinner, so I went down to the kitchen and put together a light supper for in front of the TV, as we searched in vain for a decent Christmas movie. As part of that meal, I came up with a sort of ambrosia salad with a twist that I liked so much I thought I’d share it with you.

Put together some tropical fruit–fresh, not canned– bananas, pineapple, etc. Take an orange (or two, depending on how much you make) and cut the segments away from the pith into the salad, squeezing out the remaining pulp and juice from the rind and pith over the fruit. Roughly grate some apple, not a lot (I used half an apple for three people), and mix gently into the salad to get the strands separated a bit. Don’t bother peeling the apple. Shake over some grated coconut (packaged is fine for this) and mix in. Now add some plain yogurt. This yogurt is going to mix with the apple, coconut, and orange juice to make a kind of sauce. Add enough that you see sauce, not so much you make soup. Scatter sliced almonds (skin on, so they show up on the white background) over the top for a bit of additional interesting texture and to make it pretty.

I loved this salad. The juice and apple sweeten the yogurt but the whole tastes fresh and almost dessert-like. In fact, if you were on a diet this is exactly the sort of thing I would make for you to have as a dessert, though it would be fine for breakfast too….hmm, maybe I’ll have to make that again tomorrow morning.