Greenery

If what they say about April showers is true, we should be smothered with blossoms next week.

The good news is that in the last couple of days, the trees have finally decided it's time to think about making some new baby leaves.  Must be time for some green foods, too.

Happy spring, everyone.

Breakfast of champion

Last weekend, I competed in the US Masters Swimming Michigan state championship meet.  Now, I don't mean to brag, but I wanted to tell you that I had a great time, and that I won four events: the 50 and 200 freestyle, the 200 backstroke, and the 100 IM.  And sure, that's the result of hard work and months of training, but let's be honest: I think we all know that it's mostly about what I had for breakfast during the meet.

As you may recall, I wouldn't settle for something as simple as Wheaties.  I believe that breakfast is far too important a meal  to waste it on cereal.  In college, I got in the habit of cooking or baking for myself most mornings.  Later, when I started working regular hours and having less time for morning baking, I started making a large batches of something on the weekend and reheating it throughout the week.  One of the easiest items to make, freeze, and reheat is muffins.

Coincidentally, muffins were also one of the first breakfast items I tackled back in the good old Wanda days.  For one thing, I had a 6-muffin pan that was a perfect fit for the limited space in a toaster oven.  But more importantly, muffins are quick and easy and are super tasty.

I've played around with a number of recipes, but one has really stuck with me.  It's a little denser, and a little less greasy, than your average all-white flour muffin (no bald cupcakes for me), because it's made with oats, bran, and whole wheat flour, which give it a full, hearty, wheaty flavor.  I nearly always toss in a handful of berries or diced fruit - strawberries are probably my favorite - which cook into pockets of sweet, fresh goodness.  Fresh out of the oven, the warm muffins are heady with sweet aroma and pleasantly crisp on top, but after a day or two in an airtight container, when the flavors have had a chance to meld together for a while, I think they're even better.

This past weekend I packed myself a dozen of these muffins (made with raspberries, which I happened to have in my freezer awaiting just such an occasion) to have for breakfasts during the meet.  Though I can't promise they'll make you a champion swimmer all on their own, I can say that they make a fantastic breakfast spread, whether served hot from a basket at Sunday brunch, or room temperature in a cheap hotel room.  Yum.

Berry Oat Muffins

This is one recipe that I love to play around with.  Try using fresh or frozen strawberries, raspberries, cherries, or even rhubarb (with a little additional sugar).  With blueberries, toss in half a lemon worth of zest.  Alternatively, you could use diced apple and a 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon.  Try replacing 1/4 cup of flour with 1/4 cup of almond flour for a rich nutty flavor, or replace half the sugar with honey for a different take on sweet.  I've even added in a half cup of canned pumpkin for quick pumpkin muffins, in which case the fruit could be replaced with chocolate chips. 

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup rolled oats (I like quick cooking)
1/3 cup bran
1 egg
1/3 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup milk
1/2-3/4 cup berries (fresh or frozen), or other fruit cut into small pieces


Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and prepare a muffin tin with 10-12 muffin papers.

In a small bowl, sift together the flours, baking powder, salt, and sugar, then mix in the oats and bran.  Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the egg, then whisk in the oil, and finally mix in the milk.  Stir in the dry ingredients and the berries, mixing until just combined.  Spoon the batter into the muffin papers, filling to 2/3-3/4 full.  Bake for 15-20 minutes, until golden brown around the edge and firm when the top is lightly pressed.  Remove from the pan to cool on a rack, or into a basket to be served immediately.

Makes 10-12 muffins, depending on how full you fill the muffin cups and how much batter you sneakily eat.

Wanda the Wonder Oven

At my first meeting with my advisor during my freshman year of college, I remember being asked what I found to be the most difficult transition in adjusting to college life.  I'm fairly sure my answer had something to do with not having my own oven (isn't that everyone's toughest adjustment?).  Oh, sure, there was a kitchen in the basement of the dorm, but it had just one stove and one oven for all the hundreds of residents of the building.  And besides, the one time I tried to use it to make brownies for my roommate's birthday, the oven got way hotter than the dial indicated, simultaneously burning the brownies while leaving them raw inside - not exactly encouraging results.

But then, some time around January, I got to know Kate, and in between the myriad musicals we watched together, she introduced me to her toaster oven.  Growing up, my family had a regular toaster, never a toaster oven; I'd heard of them, but never thought of owning one.  Kate, on the other hand, knew their worth and had bought one in preparation for college so that she might never face the ignominy of being struck with a desire to bake but having no means to do so.  With Kate's wise guidance, I discovered that a toaster oven could bake anything - anything!- a regular oven could, provided it wasn't too big or tall.  After several baking-deprived months, that was quite the discovery.

You might suggest that, armed with this new information, I could get myself a toaster oven and solve my problem.  Unfortunately, toaster ovens - or, really, any food-heating-device - were illegal in my dorm (in fact, our contraband microwave got confiscated when accidentally left in plain sight during spring break room checks).  And besides, I'd rather invite myself over to Kate's room and bake cookies with her than do it isolated and lonely in my own room.  Luckily, being very accommodating (and very interested in eating more baked goods), Kate happily obliged.

I had even easier access to Kate's toaster oven when she and I lived together our sophomore year.  By our junior and senior years, we graduated to a real apartment, complete with full kitchen and full-sized stove, but the toaster oven came along, too.  I don't know what Kate paid for the toaster oven - maybe $20.  It wasn't a particularly fancy one.  But oh, could it bake.  It got so much action that eventually I decided it needed a name, and was subsequently christened Wanda the Wonder Oven.*  Let me tell you, she was a wonder indeed.

Back then, I would say I was something of a simple baker.  Oh, sure, Wanda and I made the occasional round of birthday cheesecake cupcakes, and once in a while a few (miniature) loaves of bread, and maybe a pie or two with fruit surreptitiously squirreled out of the dining hall in pockets and Styrofoam coffee cups.  But mostly, when I think about that first year of baking in a toaster oven, I think about two things: muffins and cookies.  I'll come back to muffins soon enough, but for now, let's focus on the important part: the cookies.

I managed to amass quite a pile of cookie recipes during college.  I think there was a while there when, each Christmas, my mom gave me a new cook book filled entirely with cookie recipes.  And luckily, since I was on the swim team and training 20 hours a week, I could make my weekly batches of cookies and manage to not gain the dreaded freshman fifteen (or, let's be honest, probably more like fifty).  Wanda and I must have baked hundreds and hundreds of cookies in our years together.  Sure, she wasn't too fast, only able to fit six or eight cookies at a time, but that just made for a longer supply of fresh-from-the-oven warm cookies, and what could be wrong with that?

One of my favorite recipes that I collected is for cinnamon cookies.  I suppose that oughtn't to be a surprise; I'm something of a cinnamon freak.  I'm told that, when I was a baby, I loved eating cinnamon plain from the tray of my high chair.  The surprisingly spicy powder burned my face, but that was beside the point; it was cinnamon, and a little face burn wasn't going to discourage me.  But not to worry if you're not quite the cinnamon aficionado that I am - these are well-rounded and soul-warming and entirely unlikely to burn your face - unless, of course, you use the hot-from-the-oven tray as a pillow (I don't recommend that, by the way).  They're simple enough: just eight ingredients, but they are so much more than the sum of their parts.  I may or may not have scarfed down four as soon as they came out of the oven when I made them again last week - and this at a time when I swim way less than I did in my college cookie glory days.

Eventually, after about five years of hard use, Wanda had had enough and had to be retired.  But when I bake the kinds of things that she and I made together so often, I send a toast her way.  So I'd like to dedicate this post to Wanda, with love.  And milk and cookies.

*Sadly, I don't believe I have a single photo of Wanda.  Luckily, though, she appeared in a photo essay published about the new dorm I lived in my sophomore year - isn't she glamorous?

Cinnamon cookies

1 1/3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt 
1/2 cup (4 ounces, or 1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
cinnamon sugar for rolling


In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt.  Set aside.

In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy, then beat in the egg and vanilla until well combined.  With a wooden spoon, mix in the dry ingredients until just combined.  Cover the dough and let chill for 30 minutes.

While the dough is chilling, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and create the cinnamon sugar mix in a shallow bowl by stirring together about 3 tablespoons of sugar with a teaspoon of cinnamon.

When the dough has chilled, shape the cookies: roll about a tablespoon of dough into a ball in your palms, then roll the dough in the cinnamon sugar.  Place cookies 2 inches apart on the baking sheet - they will spread a lot in the oven.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, until just turning golden brown around the edges.  The middles may look a little underdone, but they will continue to cook as they cool.  Let cool for 5-10 minutes on the baking sheet, then set to dry on racks or on parchment paper.

Makes about 20 2-inch diameter cookies

Honesty, with trout

This whole blogging thing can be a bit tricky.  Take, for instance, how personal I ought to be when I write.  Oh, sure, I can tell stories about meals I've eaten and cakes I've baked, but do we really want to get down to the nitty-gritties?  It seems to me a tenuous balance between unrelatable soap box soliloquizing and baring my soul for the world to see.

But I like you, and I want to be honest with you.  I am currently in the unenviable position of looking for employment.  The story of how I got to where I am today feels long and complicated to me, but I don't suppose it's so different from most such stories: mine is a tale filled with hopes and disappointments, with surprises and difficult decisions.  The good news is that I had an interview yesterday.  The better news is that after the interview, I had the rest of the afternoon free to think about dinner.  The best news is that on my walk home from the interview, I picked up some rainbow trout from the fish monger.

I don't cook fish all that often.  Oh, sure, I like a nice fillet of salmon or a good cod omelet as much as the next girl, but I'm much more likely to order fish when I eat out than to actually cook it at home.  It's just such a long process*.  You have to make a trip to the fish monger, and then you have to determine which fish you want, and then the fish has to be cooked that night, and even if you buy fillets you may have to deal with bones, and because you almost never cook fish, you freak out when it takes longer to cook than anticipated and poke it about a million times to check for doneness... when restaurants are willing to go to all that trouble for me, it's difficult to decide to do it for myself.  But sometimes, when I have a lot on my mind, like, say, when I've just had a job interview, I want to take a little more thought and care with my dinner.  Sometimes, I want fish.

On the rare occasions when I do cook fish, I almost always use the same method: en papillote.  For one thing, it's so fun to say: it sounds like "on poppy-oat," only more French.  It is, in fact, a French method for preparing fish or meats where the raw product is placed in a parchment paper pouch ("parchment paper pouch" is fun to say, too, especially three times fast) with aromatics and baked at a high heat.  In the process, the fish steams itself in its own juices, and the flavors meld together.  Plus, you get to do some pseudo-origami, and if that's not a reason for a cooking method, I don't know what is.

And the best part is that, despite all my complaining about the difficulty of preparing fish, it's actually very easy, as simple as wrapping and baking and eating, hopefully with a minimum of doneness-test-pokes.  And that gives you more time for drinking a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.  Or, uh, submitting more job applications.  It's tough work, this job hunt thing, but if I'm brave and honest, maybe I'll get something out of it.  Like, you know, a second helping of trout.

*Yes, I realize this is coming from the same voice who, just a few short weeks ago, advocated spending upwards of eight hours preparing cassoulet.  But those are eight hours spent in the comfort and convenience of your own home, and plus there's no raw fishy smell, so it's totally different.

 Trout en papillote with lemon tarragon leeks

2 eight-ounce fillets of trout
2 large leeks
1-2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced.
2 lemons
1 tablespoon fresh tarragon, roughly chopped
salt, pepper

Check the fillets for any bones, removing them if you find any.  Keep chilled on ice until ready to cook.

Wash the leeks thoroughly, discarding the tough, dark green upper sections.  Cut them into quarters lengthwise, and cut the quarters into half-inch slices.  In a large frying pan, saute the leeks in the olive oil over medium heat with a little salt and pepper, stirring frequently, just until the leeks begin to turn translucent, about 3 minutes.  Remove the pan from the heat, and stir in the garlic, 3/4 of the tarragon, and a good squeeze of lemon juice from half of one of the lemons. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.  Tear off two large sheets of parchment paper.  In the center of each sheet, create a bed of half the leeks.  On top of the leeks, place a trout fillet, skin side down, and season the fish with salt, pepper, and the remaining tarragon.  Take the second lemon, and cut it into thin slices.  Place the slices over the top of the fillet.

Now comes the fun part: creating your pouch.  I tend to bring the edges of the paper together over the fish lengthwise, fold them down together, and then tuck in the ends.  There are a surprising number of videos out there on how to fold a papillote, though, and there may well be better methods than mine, so if you're unsure how to proceed, I encourage you to have a look.

Once wrapped, it's into the oven.  For a smaller, individual sized portion (around, say, 4 ounces) the cooking time will be about 10 minutes.  With these larger fillets, it took more like 20 minutes.  In any case, the fish is done when it flakes easily on a fork.

Serve immediately.  If you happen to serve it atop jasmine rice and alongside some steamed broccolini, so much the better.

A tale of two batters

It was the best of times - no worst involved - when I recently happened to make crepes and popovers on the same day.  And though the finished products are as different as the opposing superlatives in the opening sentence of Mr. Dickens' book, I noticed something peculiar: the batters were nearly identical.

The ingredients for my crepe batter were:
1 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
3 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon oil

Whereas, the popover ingredients were:
1 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon melted butter

How then - besides the one egg difference - do we end up with two such completely different products?  The crepe is paper (or at least cardboard) thin, while the popover is a testament to the incredible lifting power of eggs, literally popping far over the boundaries of the muffin tin in which it is cooked.

The obvious answer is the cooking method: the popovers cooked in a hot oven for almost 40 minutes, while the crepes spend maybe two total minutes in a frying pan.

But I think it's a result of how the ingredients are combined, too.  Popovers are mixed together in a fairly standard order: dry ingredients whisked together, egg and milk combined, wet ingredients mixed into dry, and then the melted butter stirred in last of all.  The batter then rests for at least half an hour before being poured into a hot muffin tin, and then into the oven.

Crepes, on the other hand, are a little more unorthodox.  I tried a number of ways of mixing ingredients for crepes together before I found one that I liked; standard wet-into-dry mixing always seemed to lead to thin, chewy, unrisen pancake-like creations.  Instead, I sift together the dry ingredients, then create a well in the middle of them, into which goes the eggs.  The flour is slowly beaten into the eggs until fully incorporated, and then the milk is added slowly, whisking constantly, until a smooth, lumpless batter is achieved.  As with popovers, the oil is added last, and then the batter gets a nice long rest before heading into the frying pan a few tablespoons at a time.

Even more intriguing to me is the fact that crepes come from Brittany, the rugged, Northeasternmost région of France, home to a proud, Celtic heritage.  Did the Celts import their batter from Yorkshire (where popovers are made with meat drippings instead of butter and called "Yorkshire pudding"), but not bring the pans to cook them in and have to work something with flat frying pans instead?  Or is it just pure coincidence?

Somehow, eggs never fail to inspire both an epoch of incredulity and of belief in me: incredulity that they can result in such completely opposite dishes, yet belief in their abilities to continually wow me.  Especially mixed into a batter with flour and milk, cooked or baked, and spread with a generous glop of jam, and maybe a dollop of Greek yogurt.