Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins with Dried Blueberries

A couple of weeks ago, the fine people at Oh! Nuts contacted me to see if I was interested in trying some of their products gratis if I would discuss my experience on this blog. To which I responded: but of course! I was initially tempted to request hordes of walnuts and pistachios – I keep them in my desk drawer and munch on them whenever I’m snackish at work – but that seemed disingenuous. I bake with them from time to time, but that’s not really why I would have wanted them.

Anyway, one thing I’ve always wanted to try is dried blueberries. They sell small packages of them at Trader Joes, but they’re pretty expensive for a Trader Joe’s product. I’ve hesitated before the dried blueberry bin a number of times but have never been able to persuade myself to spend the $6 or thereabouts for a tiny pouch.

Poppy seeds are likewise overpriced, at least where I’ve tend to do my grocery shopping.   But not at Oh! Nuts!  You can probably guess where I’m going with this.

Anyway, I asked if they wouldn’t mind sending me some delectable dried blueberries and poppy seeds. And they did! Very speedily, too – I got my order the day after they sent it. It probably helped that I’m in an adjacent state.

My intentions were wholly good. I hadn’t made muffins in a very long time – probably not since my last batch of blueberry muffins – and am not sure what explains my neglect of this sub-genre of the baking world.

Lemon poppyseed muffins have always been a favorite of mine, but they are rather unexciting. I like them, but they’re sort of the sugar cookie of the muffin world: one misses the embellishments.

Adding regular blueberries would just seem perverse, however. Blueberry muffins and lemon poppy seed muffins are separate genres. It would be wrong to amalgamate the two.

Unless, of course, one were using dried blueberries. The fact that the berries are dried makes all the difference. And no, I can’t defend that on any sort of logical basis.

In short: these are really tasty! You should try making them, with or without the dried blueberries. If you decide to go with the blueberries and/or are dissatisfied with your local store’s poppy seeds, Oh! Nuts has good prices and fast shipping. I bet their walnuts and pistachios are equally good.

But do be careful if your workplace happens to drug test. Mine doesn’t, so I can eat these muffins with abandon.

Boozy Banana Bread

This is something like the fourth banana bread recipe I’ve posted, which perhaps speaks to a dearth of culinary creativity – but I quite like banana bread. Besides, given how often I over-estimate my weekly consumption of said fruit and end up with brown, cloyingly sweet-smelling bananas rotting atop my countertop, I find it best to have options for how to dispose of them.

Chocolate Chip Banana Bread with Crystallized Ginger

As is usual this time of year, I keep finding myself besieged with over-ripe bananas. Each week, I tell myself that if I buy a blend of ripe and green bananas, I’ll be able to make them last without another trip to the store. It doesn’t work. During the latter half of each week, I inevitably wind up buying fresh bananas because I can’t abide the thought of squeezing banana mush, in lieu of the usual slices, onto my breakfast cereal. And no, I’m not about to give up my cereal with bananas, at least not for so long as bananas remain readily and cheaply available. This may not be much longer, according to Banana, as they are increasingly victim to some hideous blight, but I can’t think about that. I won’t think about it. It makes me sad.

Banana Bread (traditional)

I think of this as my traditional banana bread recipe, but it’s actually quite atypical in its way. It’s loosely adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, but we’re talking about a pretty aggressive adaptation. Mostly, I just really like his suggestion of adding dried coconut to the batter.

Scones with Currants and Yoghurt

I love scones. How much do I love scones? When I travel, I do a lot of walking around and am constantly famished. On this account, I permit myself both morning and afternoon between-meals snacks while on vacation.

When I went to London last year, I ate scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam for both of my daily snacks. I like them that much. And I didn’t tire of them – I could have probably kept it up for far longer than the five-day span of my UK sojourn.

Scones are probably my favorite quickbread baked good. Something about them has an appeal that transcends even that of my beloved biscuits. Maybe that’s just more of my anglophilia manifesting itself, but I did major in English. I’m allowed a little shout-out to the mother country and her iconic baked goods.

So why don’t I bake them more often? Most scone recipes call for cream as a binder. I’m far from a healthy baker, but I have a hard time eating something if it feels just ridiculously artery-busting. These rules do not apply on vacation, mind, but at home, I try to be more careful – especially since, when I’m preparing something, I can’t pretend to be in the dark vis-à-vis its nutritional content.

Since yoghurt serves as a good, non-flavor-killing substitute for fatty dairy in so much baking, I thought I’d try to whip up some scones with it. I wasn’t aiming for health food, but I was hoping to create something I could nosh on without peering down at my stomach to inquire if it were a loose-jeans day before indulging in a nibble.

Banana Bread with Coconut, Blueberries, and Almonds

This is the quick bread which I so tragically under-baked and then dropped in the days leading up to Christmas. Naturally, I was a bit chary of attempting this recipe again, but it’s ridiculously tasty, easy, and a nice way to use up those last couple of bananas of the bunch that always go over-ripe before you’ve had a chance to eat them.

It’s also a nice way to use up flake coconut. I have a ton of coconut on hand because I inadvertently bought two bags on subsequent shopping trips. This used up all the coconut in the open bag, but I still need to whip up some macaroons lest my remaining coconut, horror of horrors, go rancid. That would be a waste of precious coconut.

This recipe was “inspired” by one I found on the internet some years ago, but it’s beyond my powers of recall to tell you from which site. The original made a nice-but-small, flattish loaf that was too insubstantial for my preferences. I’m an American, and we like everything big, right? And that includes quickbreads. I’ve basically superimposed my memory of its flavors onto my no-fail quickbread formula, and the results, as I hope you would agree, are quite tasty – and also quite abundant.

Turkish Spice Bread II

Even though my last attempt at Turkish Spice Bread was pretty tasty, I knew I would be going back to the drawing board. The recipe I came up with was good, but it wasn’t as faithful to the bread we had in Turkey as I had hoped.

Last time, I omitted several key spices and honey. I hoped that adding these items this time around would give me something more “authentic.”

Of course, “authentic” in this case may be totally meaningless. For all I know, in Turkey what we had might be called “Slovakian Tea Cake” and bear no relationship to the native cuisine. But it was good. That was the main thing.

Turkish Spice Bread

In Istanbul, my husband and I stayed at the Hotel Tashkonak. We really enjoyed our stay. The room wasn’t huge, but we had our own little balcony and there is a free breakfast buffet every morning.

Nothing about the breakfast buffet was shocking, but it was somewhat different from what you probably think of as a breakfast buffet.  Non-sweet foods were strongly represented, with cold cuts, savory cheeses, hard boiled eggs, and savory pastries all on ample display.

I prefer lots of sugar to start my day, and fortunately, there were plenty of jams and jellies and a large bowl of honey to placate me. I especially liked the rose jelly, which is hard to come by in the states and which is much lighter than most American preserves. The rose jelly was heaven when slathered on the sweet spice bread laid out each morning.

It was this spice bread that really enticed me out of bed after the first day. I make a lot of quick breads, but I still couldn’t tell what was in it. It was dense and moist and had a soft, tender crumb. I started missing it the second our plane left Ataturk airport and was determined to recreate it in my own kitchen.

Apple Oatmeal Scones

This is another small-batch scone recipe.  I had an extra Granny Smith apple in my veg drawer, and I love them for cooking, but not so much for eating.  Rather than let the apple molder away until I would have no choice but to discard the rotted thing, I thought I would come up with something in which to bake it.

Blueberry Almond Crumb Muffins

This recipe is very loosely based off this one this one, which I pulled from allrecipes about 800 years ago.  Before I became an adventurous baker, I made the recipe as suggested several times.  It's plenty good, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for in the perfect blueberry muffin.  This is.

Sour Cream Cheddar Cheese Biscuits (for one or two)

Among my sorrows is the fact that husband is not fond of biscuits. He is not enticed by fresh-baked biscuits with strawberry jam. He does not like them them slathered in gravy. He does not much care for their British cousin, scones with currants and clotted cream. He is more or less impervious to the appeal of the biscuit family of baked goods.

This is crazy. As a southern girl, I honestly don’t think I ever met anyone before him who doesn’t like a good biscuit. He did not confess his lukewarm feelings toward biscuits until after we were married, so I had been ignorantly and happily baking them for years. Sure, I noticed that I tended to eat the bulk of them, and that we had to throw away stale leftover biscuits with surprising regularity, but I thought he was just being health-conscious.

Carrot Almond Brown Sugar Bread

The picture below shows my cats, Chester and Lulu. Chester is the brown tabby and – though you can’t make out the extent of his girth from this picture – the fat one. We would like to restrict his diet, but he gobbles up food quickly, and we are worried that LuLu, our thin cat, would be unable to obtain adequate nourriture were we to further limit their kibble rations. Please don’t suggest that we separate them and feed them at different times or in different rooms. I’m far too lazy, and Chester derives so much enjoyment from food that it would be cruel to further curtail his appetites. Also, it clearly takes a lot of fuel to power such sweetness.

Raspberry Walnut Bread

This recipe is based off the quickbread recipe (infinite variations) from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food. I love this cookbook, and I love Mark Bittman. However, I found this particular recipe to be off – every time I made quickbread his way, I ended up with the dreaded sunken middle. My version, arrived on after much trial and error, uses less baking powder and baking soda but adds an extra egg. I’d say the difference has to do with altitude, but Mark and I aren’t cooking so very far apart, geographically, so I’m going to call it a rare lapse and let it be.

Sweet Potato Bread

I mostly just tinker with other people's recipes, but this one is pretty much my own invention. I grew up in Florida and whine endlessly about the cold weather up here, but as soon as there's the slightest hint of a nip in the air, I start hankering for autumn foods -- and especially autumn baked goods.