Muffin/Quick Bread – FoodWatcher

double chocolate chip muffins

Something I joke about when introducing a new muffin recipe (not this one!) in my new cookbook out this fall is the gap between the muffins we gaze at in a coffee shop case and those we make at home. Why is one towering, glossy and plush and the ones I make for breakfast so… beige? I mean, I do know. When I’m the one baking the muffins, I balk at all of the refined sugar, flour, and oil needed to make them that pretty. So I stuff them with oats and dried fruit and whole-grain everything and then yes, they’re heavy and beige. But as I was staring at these beauties at my local bagel shop the other morning, I decided: enough.

double chocolate chip muffins-1

perfect, forever cornbread

Here is my almost-summer wish for us: I think we should bring a pan of freshly-baked, thick, buttery, crisp on top, and plush with a flavor that absolutely reverberates with corn underneath, to your next park/picnic/potluck. It goes so well with summer salads and snacky things. And when cornbread is good, really good, it feels criminal not to share. This is.

If you go way back on this site, you might know I’ve been on the hunt for my forever cornbread recipe for almost as long as I’ve been blogging here. I’ve shared a few over the years that I like very much, they’re good cornbreads, I tell them while scritching them amicably behind their ears. But it wasn’t until more recently that I found the cornbread that will end my cornbread studies. Whatever will I do with my newfound free time? [Yes, write that next cookbook, I know.]

morning glory breakfast cake

It’s hardly the biggest surprise of parenting, but I’ve yet to get my head around the idea that I’ve taken part in creating a morning person. My son has always woken up early; if it’s 5/5:30am, he’s on the sofa, reading a thick book, wondering why we do not care to watch the sunrise with him. Over the years, we’ve tried everything to change his wiring — lecturing, star charts, bribery, begging, asking the pediatrician to talk some sense into him [although “he wakes up early and reads chapter books!” didn’t quite have the doom-and-gloom impact we’d thought it would], prayer — and eventually, as you might have inferred from referring to it as wiring, we gave up.

When you wake up at the crack of dawn, you also require breakfast at an earlier hour than normal people, like your parents, who love to sleep. So there’s no, uh, confusion as to what is and is not a “breakfast food,” we’ve taken to packing him a breakfast and leaving it in the fridge: a hard-boiled egg, fruit, cheese, and some sort of muffin. After working my way through my own muffin archives, I realized that I was missing one of those hippie/morning glory-ish muffins that he loves, loaded with carrots and apple and dried fruit, sometimes coconut, and spices. I’ve made a few versions over the last few months, and was about to go another round when a new (out tomororw), wonderful cookbook arrived at my doorstep: Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Cakes.

ultimate zucchini bread

I have a few complaints about zucchini bread and I bet you cannot wait to hear them. I bet you were thinking “I was hoping to hear more complaining today than I usually do.” Or, “Wow, Deb is really going hard on the zucchini content this summer, isn’t she?” It’s all fair — and true. But if you, like me, couldn’t help but notice that a lot of zucchini bread recipes could be better, well, pull up a chair, you’re among friends.