yoga muffins. om.

I surprised Jake today with my favorite kind of gift -- the non-material kind (foodstuffs excepted). He's been working on applications and studying for finals and taking me out to dinners and movies and museums, so I thought he could use a little alignment and balance and downward dog. So I set up a private yoga class for him taught by our favorite instructor. We love this teacher. A lot. He's got this great calm energy and makes everything in the world a little bit easier. I obviously couldn't let Jake do this sort of thing on his own, so I came to class, too. We sweat and breathed and talked and put our feet up the wall and jumped around for two hours. It was awesome.
I had an earth mother vision of myself giving our teacher some homemade muffins as an extra thank you after class (the other thank yous being the approximately 20 hugs I gave him), so this morning after doing some work I whipped up a batch. My other vision was of the healthy variety, since there was a good chance that, as a yoga instructor, my gift recipient could be vegan. I perused a few vegan muffin recipes but nothing without butter was sounding very good to me, so I settled on oats as a healthy, vegan-y type of thing and made (in record time I might add -- I didn't want to be one of two students late for class) a dozen cinnamon-oatmeal-golden-raisin-banana muffins. It was kind of an invention, but after sampling a muffin after class I think it was a successful invention.


here's what I used:

1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup skim milk
1 large egg, beaten lightly
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 stick unsalted butter, soft
3 tablespoons greek yogurt (le fage, 5%)
1 cup flour (1/2 whole wheat, 1/2 white)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup dried currants
1 banana, sliced and halved
1+ cup of golden raisins

here's what I did:

Preheat oven to 400°F and put muffin liners in the muffin tin.

Combine the oats and milk in a big bowl and let them hang out for while (for up to 1 hr, but I only had about 10minutes)

Add egg, sugar, and butter, and yogurt to oat mixture, stirring until just combined.

In another bowl, sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon and add to oat mixture, stirring until just combined.

Fold in banana slices and raisins.

Divide batter evenly among muffin tins. Bake muffins in middle of oven until golden and a tester comes out clean, about 15 minutes.

Makes 12.

food from far away: spanakopita

straight up food porn from Greece.














spanakopita from the island of Symi, just off of the larger island of Rhodes. when I ordered it the boy working at the bakery looked at me and said, "spinach pie?"

whatever.
yes, please.

giant chocolate toffee cookies. get some.

I was inspired by my friend Nicole's hilarious post about our kitchen (in her gorgeous blog) and how, when it comes to baking, it becomes a perfect vortex of disappearing necessary ingredients and multiplying non-essentials (we currently have three full, open boxes of baking soda in our possession, for example). I haven't baked something in a few weeks, which is far too long, so I thought I'd make up for lost time and make my ultimate, conversation-stopping, friend-for-life-making, wide-eyed with delight chocolate toffee cookies. They are insane.
The recipe is from epicurious.com via Gourmet, and I follow it with very little variation and with much success (if chocolate-smeared fingers and trails of crumbs are measures of that sort of thing).

here's the recipe:

Giant Chocolate-Toffee Cookies
makes about 18

Ingredients
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 pound bittersweet (not unsweetened) or semisweet chocolate, chopped
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1 3/4 cups (packed) brown sugar
4 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
5 1.4-ounce chocolate-covered English toffee bars, coarsely chopped*
1 cup walnuts, toasted, chopped**

* I use 6 bars, usually Heath, and I kind of just bang them on the counter to break them up. You don't want the bits too small, because then you lose the rather pleasant sensation of biting into a crisp and gooey piece of toffee mid cookie

** I hate nuts in baked goods, so I skip

Preparation
Combine flour, baking powder and salt in small bowl; whisk to blend. Stir chocolate and butter in top of double boiler set over simmering water until melted and smooth. Remove from over water. Cool mixture to lukewarm.

Using electric mixer, beat sugar and eggs in bowl until thick, about 5 minutes. Beat in chocolate mixture and vanilla. Stir in flour mixture, then toffee and nuts. Chill batter until firm, about 45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment or waxed paper. Drop batter by 1/4 cupfuls onto sheets, spacing 2 1/2 inches apart. Bake just until tops are dry and cracked but cookies are still soft to touch, about 15 minutes. Cool on sheets. (Can be made 2 days ahead. Store airtight at room temperature.)

greenmarket goodness: heirloom cauliflower

behold.











so gorgeous and bizarre, right?
they look like sea creatures from the murky depths.
I haven't brought any of these monsters home yet. they're just too pretty to chop up.

election cupcakes

It will be two weeks ago tomorrow that Obama won the election, and I'm still giddy. I definitely woke up two Wednesdays ago pinching myself, but what with all those presidential-looking magazine covers Obama's been landing on, and the appointing of actual Cabinet members, I almost feel like it's safe to wake up.

I was home in DC a week before the election and stopped by Georgetown Cupcake. Their cupcakes really are the best. The store is teeny-tiny and there's always a line out the door, but I swooped in one morning right after it opened and snagged two election cupcakes. There were red elephant cupcakes available, too, but the thought of putting a McCain/Palin in my mouth was not so palatable. The other two cupcakes were chocolate banana (divine!) and pumpkin spice (adored!). I can safely say they put Magnolia to shame (not a hard feat, really), but I'll need to do some more taste tests before I declare them superior to the ones at Sugar Sweet Sunshine, my NYC cupcakes of choice.
I guess I don't have to choose a favorite, though. This administration I'm all about bi-cupcakisanship.

clafoutis me

Have you ever had a clafoutis? I hadn't, but it's fun to say. It's a super simple French dessert made by pouring a pancake-like batter over fruit, usually cherries. Jamie (half of the brilliance behind eatmorebutter had about a bushel of apples to eat, so we used those instead. I don't know if I'd make it again -- a little too custardey for me -- but it was delicious warm from the oven with a side of Jamie's homemade caramel sauce, and it looked awfully pretty.

i heart alfalfa sprouts

I've always thought of alfalfa sprouts (and sprouts of all kinds, really) to be a kind of tasteless filler. They were like hairy air that crunched. But I was really taken with a cool looking sprout salad at Whole Foods a few months ago and now I probably buy one once a week. It's got all sort of good stuff in it -- clover, radish, garbanzo beans, sunflower seeds, lentils, azuki, etc -- and it's delicious on its own with a little olive oil or stuffed into the hollow of an avocado. I've started using sprouts as a substitute to lettuce for the base of a salad, and it's pretty much delicious.

I've rethought my sandwich stance on them, too, and for the past several lunches I've been smearing a whole wheat tortilla with baba ganoush from the Turkish place around the corner and piling sprouts on top. Jake made sandwiches with sprouts for lunch last week (pictured); besides those they've got avocado, yellow tomatoes from the farmer's market, and a few slices of provolone on fresh bread from Levain Bakery. On the side we had out leftovers from his dinner the night before -- lentils and chick peas that he's spiced up with some garam masala and curry powder. So good.