Bread, Wine, Salt

Muffins can be tricky business. They're great things to make fresh for breakfast, because they're small and bake quickly. On the other hand, they go from deliciously moist to dreadfully over-baked in the time it takes you to finish typing a status update.  Add in all the usual pitfalls of quick-breads and you really need a good recipe and good technique to make good muffins. It started with Christine's pumpkin bread recipe , which I stole shamelessly, because in cookery it's not stealing, it's sharing. It's a fine pumpkin bread recipe, not a thing wrong with it. But I have never been one to leave well enough alone. Perhaps because I don't want to feel like I'm making someone else's recipe, because I want to prove I'm a special baking snowflake who can fiddle with baking recipes. So I fiddled. And the first time it was all wrong. The bread was overly dense and a bit sad looking at the top. Multiple slightly sad, if still edible, attempts f...

I had this idea in my head that I wanted pumpkin granola muffins, with the granola acting as a less-sweet streusel topping. I borrowed Maud's pumpkin bread recipe. (It's not on her blog. You should harass her about that.) The muffins weren't a disaster. Muffins rarely are. But they weren't great. No one loved them. The recipe uses one half of a can of pumpkin, so then there was a half can of pumpkin in my refrigerator, mocking me and my failed muffins. (We'll ignore what else might have been mocking me recently. This is about muffins. Whatever else is wrong it seems only fair that I should be able to produce a decent batch of muffins.) So I went back and tried again. I swapped out some oatmeal for some of the flour, added in crystallized ginger and walnuts. In the process I discovered what might have been a critical error in the last batch.) And then I put it in oven, told facebook all about it, and waited.     Unlike the other things I've been wai...

When the weather starts to turn in Autumn, I like things that are warm, and warming. I love making soup. Normally, when I say I'm making soup I mean a specific vegetable soup that requires a full afternoon of puttering around the house and occasionally tending the soup. There isn't always time for that. So I make other soups. This one has the virtue of being simple and fairly quick, assuming you have average knife skills and you know vaguely where things are in your kitchen. (I just barely meet those qualifications.) And what says Fall better than pumpkin? It's also smooth and creamy and comforting. The smooth does require blending. I use an immersion blender, which you really should put on your wish list if you don't have one, but you can use whatever soup blending technology you have available. A note on spice mixes: People Who Are Very Into Food will tell you that pre-made spice mixes are evil and you should toast and grind your own spices. And they...