Red, White and Blueberry Muffins

Happy 4th of July! 

This morning I found myself face to face with a mostly full carton of blueberries in my fridge.  Now, I like blueberries as much as the next guy, but the hubs and I aren't such blueberry fanatics that we could eat 2+ cups of them on our own before they go bad.  Dash woke us up extra early this morning, so I decided to take advantage of the morning and bake some blueberry muffins.

I got this recipe from my mom and modified it a little; this recipe also works for chocolate chip muffins or pretty much whatever else you feel like tossing in there.  You can increase the amount of whole wheat flour or eliminate it all together depending on what you're in the mood for - the proportion doesn't really matter as long as you end up with 2 cups of some kind of flour total.  This makes about a dozen muffins, but I doubled it so I could use all of my blueberries.

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbs baking powder

1 egg
1/3 cup oil (I used olive oil - melted butter would also work instead of oil)
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup plain yogurt (or sour cream)
1 tsp vanilla

1 cup blueberries

Preheat oven to 400F.  Blend the wet ingredients together.  Blend the dry ingredients together and then combine with the wet ingredients.  After rinsing the blueberries, sprinkle about a teaspoon of flour on them to coat - this will help the blueberries stay suspended in the batter so they won't all just sink to the bottom.  Mix the blueberries into the batter.

Grease a muffin pan and add the batter (I put about 1/3 cup into each muffin).

Bake for 15-20 minutes.

Allow muffins to cool for a few minutes and then turn out onto cooling rack.

Try not to burn your mouth with the molten blueberries as you shove the muffins into your mouth!

Brown Sugar Peaches

When my parents came to visit us last weekend they brought along a bunch of peaches and other produce from a farm stand off exit 39 of I-94 in Michigan.  Everything that they got from there was incredibly good.

We all ate at least one peach every day, but after a week we still had several left and they needed to be eaten before they went bad.  I decided to cook some peaches and put them over pound cake.

After tossing this idea around in my head for most I started to get everything ready.  As I was washing the peaches I wondered if I should look up a recipe but realized that since my plan involved butter, brown sugar and fruit it would be nearly impossible to go wrong, so I decided the wing it.  Here's what I did:

3-4 Tbs butter
3-4 Tbs brown sugar
4 peaches, sliced
2 generous slices of poundcake

Start off by washing and slicing the peaches.  If you cut all the way around what looks like the seam of the peach and back again then you can just twist the two halves apart.

Then remove the pit and slice each half into 4-6 pieces.

Put the butter in a non-stick frying pan on medium/low heat and began to melt it.  Then add the brown sugar.  Make sure you stir it around so it doesn't burn in the pan.  Once the sugar is fully dissolved add the peaches.  Stir them around to coat.  Allow the peaches to cook for about 10 minutes, stirring periodically and flipping the peaches over.

Then all you have to do is spoon your peaches and the sauce over some pound cake (or ice cream) and enjoy!  This made for a delicious Saturday morning breakfast.

If you're watching your waistline (or your bloodsugar) you could cut the amounts of butter and sugar in half and it would still turn out great; you would just have less of the sauce.

I like to pretend it was healthy because of the fruit, but deep down inside I know that cooking the peaches removes a lot of vitamins, not to mention that the butter and sugar sort of cancel out any remaining redeeming nutritional value from the peaches.  But it was really delicious; the hubs said it was like peach cobbler.  He mentioned that it could probably have used a little cinnamon or nutmeg, so I'll probably toss in a little next time, but overall this was definitely a win!

Biscuits with Blueberry Compote

Yesterday morning I wanted something a little different for breakfast, so I decided to make biscuits.  I also remembered I had some blueberries in the freezer and wanted to make something with them to put on the biscuits to make things a little more special.

For the biscuits I went to my Fannie Farmer Cookbook.  These were so easy and quick to make it's almost silly, and they were oh so good.

Baking Powder Drop Biscuits

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup cold butter (original recipe calls for vegetable shortening, but I prefer butter)
1 cup milk

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.  Mix all of the dry ingredients together in a bowl. 

Then cut the butter in using a pastry cutter or two knives.  For this step it helps if you chop the butter into small chunks before adding it to the dry ingredients. 

 You don't want to create a paste, just kind of a coarse texture where the butter is broken into small pieces. 

Then add the milk all at once and stir until just combined. 

You can see that the dough isn't perfectly smooth and there are visible chunks of butter.  That's what makes the biscuits so tender!  Drop by large spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet.  I used my trusty Silpats to make sure they wouldn't stick to the cookie sheet at all.

Bake for about 10 minutes.  Done!  Makes around a dozen biscuits.

While the biscuits were baking I got started on a blueberry compote that I whipped up on the fly and turned out great.

Blueberry Compote

2 cups frozen blueberries, divided
1/3 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons orange juice
generous dash nutmeg
generous dash cinnamon

Put 1 cup of the blueberries (no need to thaw), the water, sugar, juice  and spices into a small pot over medium heat. 

Be sure to keep an eye on this and stir periodically as it boils to keep anything from burning.  After around 5 minutes I smashed the berries a bit with the spoon I was stirring with to thicken it a little. 

Continue heating and stirring for another 5 minutes and then add the rest of the blueberries.  Keep heating and stirring that for another 5 to 10 minutes.  That's it!

Now put a biscuit on a plate, cut it in half and ladle in some of that blueberry goodness.

Mmmm, delectable.

Pancakes, anyone?

For the last few weeks I've been making pancakes and bacon for breakfast on Sundays.  I think I'm going to try and stick with this routine; I feel like it makes the weekend a little more special.

I make my pancakes from scratch.  It's not terribly complicated once you get the hang of it and I love the flavor.  Not to mention the good feeling I get from making something from start to finish.  I use the recipe from my Fannie Farmer cookbook.  Doubling the recipe is a must because it doesn't take much longer to cook and then I get to have the leftovers for breakfast or snacks for a few days afterward.  The recipe below is already doubled so you don't even have to do any math.  Here we go!

1 3/4 cups milk
4 tablespoons melted butter 
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cup whole wheat flour  
4 teaspoons baking powder
4 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt

First off, a few notes.  The Fannie Farmer recipe only calls for 1 to 1 1/2 cups of milk, but I like my pancakes to be a little lighter, so if you want a denser pancake use less milk.  It's also very important that the milk be at least at room temperature; I usually pour my milk into a measuring cup and then microwave it until it's slightly warm to the touch, but not hot.  As for the melted butter, let it cool off for a few minutes before using it.  It's important that the milk not be too cold or the butter be too hot, otherwise the butter will congeal when you add it to the milk, and that messes everything up.  Try to get the eggs slightly closer to room temperature, too.  Basically, you want the milk, eggs and butter to be as close to the same temperature as possible.

For real now, let's go!

Mix the milk, eggs and butter together.  In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients.  Add the dry ingredients all once to the wet once.  Stir until just combined, lumps are okay!  I find that putting some of the batter into a spouted measuring cup makes for easy pouring onto the pan.

 See the lumps?

Speaking of which, once you finish the batter, go ahead and and turn on the stove to medium/medium-low heat for your pancake pan.  You'll know the temperature is right when you flick some cold water onto it and the water droplets dance around and sizzle.

Pour the batter onto the pan in small amounts (I probably use about 1/8 cup of batter per pancake).  When you see bubbles coming through and bursting, go ahead and flip with a spatula.

Wait a slightly shorter period of time on the flipped side before removing them from the pan.  I heat up a plate ahead of time to help keep the pancakes warm and also use my microwave cover on them.  It's perfect because it keeps the heat in but lets the steam out so they don't get all soggy.

Part way through making the pancakes I heat up a pan and start cooking my bacon.  I'm still trying to master the art of properly cooking bacon, but it gets better every week.

Serve your pancakes with some maple syrup, jam or even plain.  Yum!