Cinnamon Raisin Muffins

I made these muffins for a brunch with H&J a couple of weeks ago, and then again to send to my dad. They taste a LOT like cinnamon-raisin bagels, and are thus especially tasty toasted with butter or cream cheese. I’m also on this kick where I’m replacing cream cheese with goat cheese as my go-to spread, so I bet you could do that, too, if it doesn’t gross you out. It grosses Tom out. 

Anyway! Here goes. 

You need:

• 2 C flour
• 1/3 C sugar
• 1/3 C brown sugar
• 1 T baking powder
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 C canola oil
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1 C skim milk
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 C raisins

 

Sift together the dry ingredients (flour through salt), then combine the wet ingredients and mix in. Add the cinnamon and raisins, then pour into greased muffins tins and bake at 400 for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar while still warm. 

Eat.

Rhinebeck Farmer’s Market, June 2009

Summer Night

Dance Party in Central Square!

Funk of Forty Thousand Years

CSA Dinner

Pasta with Italian sausage, chard, garlic, sage, and a crap ton of cheese.

Whilst at Home

I said to my mom, “Well, one thing you can say about this place is that it’s green.”

She said, “It does have that going for it, I suppose.”

Five Good Things: Universal Lady Edition

1. Home for the weekend to love on my Dad for Father’s Day. We have tickets to West Side Story tonight! And if I’m lucky we might be going to Bond 45 for dinner.

2. Away We Go. Guys, I went to see this with my mom yesterday, and it was JUST the best thing I’ve seen since Nick and Norah. Completely delightful and hilarious and sad in all the right places. What up, Dave Eggers. I might even try Heartbreaking Work again.

3. Drinking Bud Light at sketchy White Plains bars with my little sister and a girlfriend we’ve had since we were tiny kidlets. Because sometimes you just want to listen to Sean Paul and judge people in bad outfits, then come home and eat a pizza. I’m sorry, but sometimes you do.

4. Home Things: Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee, the Harlem Line on Metro North, navigating the subway, my sister’s down comforter, lying in the grass, people who have the same accent as me, and a much-needed eyebrow wax by Lena, who has kept me from looking like Bert since I was twelve years old.

5. This song.

What’s Embarrassing:

When you get the name of someone’s secretary, call up said secretary and start blathering away about scheduling for Mr. So-and-So, only to have said secretary interrupt you to say she is not in fact a secretary, but an associate, and she has no idea what the eff you’re talking about.

 

Sorry, lady.

Comfort Food

At work yesterday I opened up a container of Trader Joe’s Almond Windmill Cookies–and holy COW, was immediately four years old and insisting on a bite of my mom’s Stella D’Oro Breakfast Treats. You know how smells can do that? I don’t even LIKE those S-shaped cookies (and I definitely didn’t when I was four), but all of a sudden I wanted one something fierce.

Also some Arrowroot Biscuits, a nap, and my mom herself.

 

What foods remind you of home?

CSA Week Two!

Lettuce

Mesclun Greens

Chard

Kohlrabi

Sage 

Strawberries

8-Grain bread (I signed us up for a bread share and it is wicked expensive but I don’t care, because HOLY CRAP that’s good bread)

So far: Chicken with Sage Leaves, which I bastardized from a similar recipe for pork chops from Best of the Best.  I hardly ever use that book–I find it weirdly intimidating–but this actually came together pretty quickly and was, as a bonus, totally gorgeous. Basically you mash up some of the sage with some butter and cut little pockets in the chicken breasts to put it in. Then you brush some full leaves with olive oil and flour (it makes kind of a paste), stick them to the chicken, and fry the whole business up in some olive oil until it’s nice and brown. Finish in the oven. I think Tom was kind of impressed. 

We inhaled the strawberries again (well mostly I did), and I’m going to roast up the kohlrabi to go with some sammiches on the aforementioned ass-kicking bread. I’m also all over this recipe to use for the chard. 

Have I mentioned I love summer? Because I do.