Today has been one of those days that feels like several in one. I got up to dark and thunderstormy, went to work for a few hours, and when I came out, it was hot and sunny.
In that first dark hour of the morning, I made some plum muffins while listening to Daniel Shore reminisce about Nixon's resignation - I always thought I watched him resign on my 19th birthday, a few days before I moved to Wisconsin for the first time. But I guess - if it was really August 9th, 1974 - it was really two days before my 19th birthday.
The muffins were on the cover of my Waitrose Food Mag, Brit food porn, worth every penny of the $50 a year it costs me. It was in the mailbox the day I came home with a basket of plums because they smelled so good; I had yogurt, and I even had the right kind of tulip-style muffin papers from King Arthur Flour.
Anyways, here's the muffins, adapted for us in the U.S.
Plum Yogurt Muffins
Makes: 12
1/2 stick (4 TBLS) butter
4-5 slices of candied ginger, chopped
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1/4 tsp. salt
1 3/4 cups unbleached flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup vanilla yogurt (I used Mountain High, my current fave - it has a little more milkfat and a little less sugar than Dannon - but any vanilla yogurt will work!)
1 1/2 cups chopped plums
Line a muffin tin with paper cases or squares of parchment paper that have been cut to fit each hole. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Melt the butter (I just do this in the microwave in the mixing bowl) and set aside to cool slightly. Chop the plums. Chop the ginger into the bowl of butter, and add the sugar and the eggs. Mix well. Add the soda, salt and yogurt. Dump the flour on top. and mix until the flour is moistened but the batter is still lumpy. Add all but about 1/2 a cup of the plums, and mix to combine. Spoon the batter into the muffin tins, dividing evenly, and press a few hunks of the remaining chopped plums into the top of each muffin. Bake for 20–25 minutes, until golden brown and risen. Cool in the tins for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.
After the day turned hot and sunny, I went for a bike ride and came back with a basket of peaches - but no magazines with something peach on the cover came in the mail today.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Waitrose Cook the Cover
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1 comment:
Probably what I shoulda done with those peaches was make peaches in white wine, a la Molly, but I blanched them and put them in a vanilla syrup, and we ate them with vanilla ice cream and pie crust cookies and raspberry sauce, for my birthday dessert, on Tuesday evening. After grilled cheese sammiches with tomato (a little soggy, but good) and John's Miller park parking lot dead car battery fiasco.
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