Greetings, beautiful readers! It’s Brian, documenting this week after waking up at 6AM and working for nine hours at a high school jazz festival, so tonight is going to be.....special. (When did a memo go out to high school jazz bands that they should all dress like backup gangsters from 42nd Street? No more black shirts and skinny ties for me, no, not for a long time.)
Another sign of the apocalypse: Alex is following a recipe! For those of you not in the know, this is like Charlie Parker walking on stage, setting up a little stand and putting up some sheet music.
First up: a disagreement about the TV series “Numb3rs”, which Deb loves and Jim thinks is amazingly silly. As Jim just took his final and did amazingly well, Jim wins!
Next up: this week’s menu--DO YOU KNOW THE MUFFIN MAN? Do you know his ability to create an entire meal out of muffins?? The muffin man is as versatile as he is insane. He’s very versatile.
We are having:
MUSHROOM MUFFINS
involving eggs, mushrooms, grated cheddar. We substitute olive oil for butter.Thyme butter, cream cheese, salt and pepper make a savory frosting!
PIZZA MUFFINS
involving parmesan and pecorino cheeses, vegan sausage substituted for olives(yesss), tomatoes,...it’s noted that with the substitution we have less salt than the original recipe, and compensate with a 1/2tsp.
UPDATE: In place of the “Italian seasonings” the recipe calls for, Alex substitutes ‘Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasonings’. As one does.
Update 2: There's a proposed topping for this muffin, roasted garlic/pepper jelly, remembered 4/5 of the way through the meal. Yay! We add the leftover pecorino cheese for added yumminess.
ONION MUFFINS, with Avocado/Brie Cream Cheese.
Already I can tell that we’re going to go into terra incognita here, because Alex’s recipe for the cream cheese reads, in full, “avocado, brie, lemon juice ?” There are a grand total of five question marks in this one recipe, which is always a good sign. A sign, anyhow. Cilantro butter is made as a side note. As opposed to a foot note, which you need stinky tofu for. (I’m sorry.) It turns out this was originally a recipe for Bell Pepper Muffins, only Jim despises bell peppers. We forge ahead!
SOUP: Jim’s CSA Share of Whatever Soup: parsnips, sweet potatoes, potatoes, carrots, leaks. There’s squash, too, which was obtained at the Market Basket, but 70-90% of this item is still local and spending a weekend morning in a Somerville parking lot waiting for a spot to open up earns a little slack. Salt and pepper with a little hot sauce to taste; with such a melange of roasted vegetables it doesn't need much herb help, goes the theory.
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| (Different bird) |
Deb announces that she’s skeptical about the need for salt in food, generally, and is going to test this theory by no longer putting salt in ANYthing. (In her home cooking, not tonight). She and Alex verbally joust about nutrition a bit--Alex expresses dubiousness about anyone who begins sentences with “My favorite nutritionist says...”, which goes over about as well as you’d expect. Deb’s recent experiments with Juicing (vegetables, not steroids) have educated her about things like the inherent sweetness of cucumbers--you add them to juice to cut the bitterness of kale, apparently. Jim has a counter-proposal involving Not Drinking Kale. Deb rejects this, yet notes 20 minutes later that if you have too much kale it can lead to Thyroid Issues. As someone with only one thyroid gland left in his body (long story) that seals the deal for me in a bigtime way.
We get the muffin tins out, and to our delight we realize we’re making mini-muffins!
True food fact: recently someone at Alex’s house washed their hands in broth he was making.
True food fact 2: recent attempts at sesame-soy muffins and cucumber-yogurt muffins were...well, the best thing that can be said about them is that they were recent, and they were muffin-shaped.
Because of the mini-ness of the muffins, we guesstimate the amount of time to bake them as 8 minutes. Alex notes that trying to put tiny amounts of batter in tiny little paper cups is one of the things he hates the most. We carefully avoid invoking Godwin's Law and just assume he hates Hitler more. Deb takes a turn with the batter and notes that it *is* painstaking work. (As opposed to hating Hitler, which is open to all sorts of approaches.)
The avocado/brie frosting is a challenge. We're acting on the assumption that avocado shouldn't get too hot, but the brie needs to be melty, so finding a balance between the two is like finding a balance between a tie-dye t-shirt maker and a high school jazz band...ye gods I have to let go of this.
Deb Tires of chopping cilantro...this leads her to muse that she would be the worst sous chef in the world, as Variety and Stimulation are not exactly highlights of that job. It's pointed out that being constantly asked to taste something when you're on a juice fast would also be challenging for her.
The conversation turns to movies and watching them with your parents: Alex can watch ANYthing with them, even threesome movies...while we greet this news calmly, inside we're screaming at the mere thought of this. I'm still remembering the trauma from the holiday when we thought watching 'Love, Actually' with my parents was a good idea.
As Deb and Jim, our two artisans, begin the frosting process they unconsciously switch from calling them muffins to calling them cupcakes.
RESULTS AND THOUGHTS:
Jim's biggest takeaway from this is that four of us canNOT eat 94 mini-cupcakes.
Alex's biggest takeaway is that making delicious frosting is waaaaay easier than making delicious cake. Alex could eat ALL the frostings. A lot. Really a lot. He's really pleased with how well the avocado-brie came together.
Deb's biggest takeaway is that she came to this meal intending to stay true to her juice fast and only taste each of the items. Nine mini-muffins and a big bowl of soup later, she realizes how foolish this was.
Brian's biggest takeaway is that garlic/pepper jelly is versatile and yummy and should go on many, many things.
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| The finished product |
Soup: A+ from Deb...she wants to make it a million times. A from Jim! The parsnips really gave it an earthy goodness, plus squash is very lovable. Alex gives it a B+...it's Fine. It's a roasted vegetable soup; the mix of veggies is good, but it's not epic. For myself, it felt like other soups we've done, but without the little kicks we've given soups in the past (and by kicks I guess I mean hot sauce and/or cheese). A good supporting character for the muffins.
Pizza Muffin: Deb's favorite. My favorite. Jim and Alex didn't even taste the sausage. Jim's definite winner was the pepper jelly! You lose the concept of a savory muffin with it a bit--the jelly turns the muffin sweet (which isn't a bad thing, mind you). Alex feels it has some goofy flavors that don't quite mesh together, grades it B. I give it an A+, wants to create a Muffin Van that will go around selling them. I quietly note that a carnivorous version with bacon would be even better. Muhuhahaha.
Mushroom Muffin: Deb's not a fan. Doesn't even remember the cake. Didn't like the frosting. Gives it a C. Jim felt the mushroom was superfluous--maybe if we had a stronger flavor of mushroom it'd be better? I enjoyed the frosting, vaguely remembered the cake.
Onion Muffin: Cake was a bit on the bland side, sez Deb. Frosting was delicious. Avocado is tricky since it will begin to oxidize if we leave the muffins out too long, so this isn't the best candidate for food carts or competitive muffin competitions. Jim enjoyed the little bit of onion. I thought, again, that the cake was just a carrier vehicle for the yummy frosting. Would caramelizing the onions or in some other way boosting their flavor have made a difference?
Tonight's Farscape episodes:
Taking the Stone (season 2, episode 3)
An exploration of Chiana's backstory, aka the producers saying to each other "guys, we've got to do something so the viewers like her character and stop thinking of her as annoying. So let's have her go off and try to join a commune of brainless death-hippies. The kids'll love it!" Ugh.
Crackers Don't Matter (season 2, episode 4)
I remembered this episode as being a lot better than it actually was. The shakycam work actually made Jim feel motion-sick, bits seemed ludicrous or jarring, and we were all in food comas. Bad combination.
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