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These are one of my favorites!

A classic blueberry muffin with a little extra zing!

Straight out of Baking Illustrated (my baking bible), these muffins are light & flavorful.  Unlike those banana blueberry muffins, this recipe calls for plenty of dry ingredients (2 c. of flour) so there is a good, firm cake to balance the gushiness of the plump, fresh berries.  The real zing comes from the sour cream, which helps keep the cake light and moist (but not too moist), while adding a little bit of tanginess to complement the berries.  The result is a fluffy muffin with a subtle, yet complex flavor.  I love them.  And they always seem to win.

My only trouble this time around was some uneven cooking in my 12-muffin, aluminum pan.  I didn’t opt for paper liners this time. So when I inverted my muffin tin some of the muffins popped easily out, nicely brown all around the base, while others needed a little more coaxing and were less golden (although not under-cooked).  I suppose I should have popped the muffin tin back into the oven to give those muffins that didn’t easily slide out a few extra minutes of bake time, but that didn’t occur to me until after I’d spent much effort coaxing them all out.  Even still, the muffin that I tested was one of these less golden, pan lingerers — and it was wonderful.

The next time (or few times) I make these, I might try out some changes to cut calories and/or add some subtle flavors:  using plain yogurt instead of sour cream, trying a whole wheat/white flour blend, and/or adding some orange or lemon zest.  I probably won’t revisit these again for a few weeks, but I’m looking forward to it already.

A moist, bulky breakfast treat, this muffin looks nothing like the recipe publisher's photo.

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law emailed me this recipe from Self magazine for Banana Blueberry Muffins.  I love bananas. I love blueberries. So I thought these would be yummy. I also thought they’d make a tasty housewarming treat for my other sister-in-law.

Flavorwise, they are tasty — the sweetness of the banana helps balance the tartness of my fresh, plump Jersey blueberries. And the orange zest adds a nice bit of complexity to the flavor. But the texture is all wrong: The predominance of banana & wet ingredients made for overly moist, almost mushy muffins.  A firmer muffin texture would have helped balance the juiciness of the blueberries.  Instead, these muffins are all mush & gush.  The oat bran adds the only bit of “complication” to the texture — a subtle “grittiness” that I enjoy.  (What’s the positive way to say something is “gritty”??)

My major complaint is that the recipe could have done more to guide the baker in what kind of muffin to expect and how to make it the best muffin it could be. First of all, take another look at the muffin they have pictured with the recipe —  now banish that from your thoughts.  My picture above is what these muffins look like.  It’s actually more of a Banana Blueberry Bran Muffin, but I guess that was too long, less sexy of a name???

Secondly, many muffin recipes suggest serving warm, straight out of the oven.  I tried to test these muffins about 30 or so minutes after I pulled them from the oven, and it was a bad scene. Although they had cleanly passed the toothpick test, when I tried to unwrap one from its pretty paper liner (which I used since I was intending them as gifts), I lost about 1/2 my muffin!!  Not cool!  But this morning, the muffins had firmed up and unwrapped from the liners with ease. I’m not sure if cooking them longer or directly in the muffin pan (sans liners) would have helped firm them up for immediate eating, but to be safe I will let them rest several hours before testing them next time.

Another flaw in the recipe is the number of servings.  The recipe says it will make 6 muffins, but doesn’t call for an oversized or special muffin pan. So I used my standard muffin pan, and since it has 12 muffin cups, I doubled the recipe.  Somehow I ended up with 21 muffins! Not a big deal, really, especially when you consider that the 6-muffin recipe claimed to come in at 130 calories per muffin. By my calculations, my “double batch” of 21 muffins have about 75 calories per muffin — and 2 of them were more than filling for breakfast this morning.

At the end of the day, I learned two big, important lessons by making these muffins:  #1) Thoroughly consider your recipe. Alot of the problems I had with these muffins came from putting too much faith in the recipe (or the recipe’s publisher maybe?). Foremost, as I already mentioned, this recipe calls for very little in the way of dry ingredients; and oat bran makes up more than 1/2 of what little dry is called for. That makes for an extra moist muffin, which has its own set of considerations, as well as a very healthy, but somewhat gritty, fiber-filled muffin.  Yummy to some.  Regularity to others.

Which brings me to lesson #2) Consider your audience.  As a writer, my audience is always looming, goading, encouraging, ignoring, whatever. As a baker, I tend to get wrapped up in the challenge of the tasty treat and, at least sometimes, give less forethought to who will be eating those treats and if they will indeed find them to be tasty. Especially if your “treat” includes a full-day’s serving of fiber! As my husband says, Nobody wants a colon blow as a gift. Doh!!

So, when it comes to gifting, go with a solid, steady favorite — an all-around winner.  Not an experiment!  Not a recipe you’ve never looked at or with ingredients (oat bran, in this case) you’ve never used.  As it turns out, we’ll be keeping these for ourselves, and I’ll be making a batch of nice, classic blueberry muffins for my sister-in-law. I’ve made them before & they’re wonderful. A real crowd pleaser.

The Boy turned 1 last Thursday, and we celebrated on the 4th of July with a not-at-all patriotic, doggie-themed birthday party.   What better for a kid who flails his wee arms and says “woof woof” almost any time he hears barking in the distance?

To complement the pooch-covered plates, napkins and balloons, I decided to make the Boys very first cake in the shape of a puppy.  I had never before done much cake decorating other than writing “Happy Birthday” — and I have to admit I was never really steady at that.

Well, here’s what I came up with:

The Boy's 1st Birthday Cake

I think it turned out pretty good. Both the cake and frosting (all homemade) were entirely eggless since the Boy is allergic. Unfortunately, he was not very into the cake at all.  He took a little taste of the chocolate frosting, but wasn’t interested in eating the cake.  Disappointing, yes.  But not entirely surprising when you consider it took him weeks to accept any bread.  And though his favorite foods are bananas and sweet potatos, he’s not exactly accustomed to *real* sweets.  Eh, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

In case you’re interested, there’s more about the cake & my process after the jump….

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The Little Mister & the Boy have birthdays exactly one week apart — exciting and exhausting for someone who, like me, loves to bake.  This year is a big one for both of them:  the Little Mister turned 30 last Thursday & the Boy turns 1 this Thursday.  So I wanted to do something special for both of them.

The Little Mister's Birthday Treats

For the Little Mister, I made Barefoot Contessa’s Lemon Yogurt Cake.  The cake is a great balance of sweet & tart, is extremely moist thanks to the post-baking lemon juice soak, and is pretty easy to make (I juiced & zested my lemons the night before, and was able to prep & bake during the Boy’s afternoon nap).  It is topped with a lemon juice-confetioner sugar glaze (you can’t really see it all that well in the picture), which may not be necessary but is very nice nonetheless.

The cake is topped with two scoops of home-made eggless vanilla ice cream, compliments of the Little Mister’s fake-out present, the Kitchen Aid ice cream maker attachment.  The Boy does not tolerate eggs, and it hardly seems fair to make ice cream at home & not let him have even the smallest taste.  Even without the eggs, this recipe was great!  Simple & delicious.  As the LM said, It’s like when you let the ice cream sit out on the counter & get soft around the edges — but all of the ice cream tastes like that.  Next time, I’d like to try to get my hands on a vanilla bean (mostly for the aesthetic value… there’s just something about vanilla beans in vanilla ice cream), but otherwise it was great.

…Now to work on the Boy’s cake.

One of the things that makes me crazy about blogs in general, and poetry blogs in particular, is one of the same things that makes me crazy about alot of contemporary poetry:  “I I I I I….”  Clearly, I’m a hypocrite, because I’ve already used 4 personal pronouns in 2 sentences.  Although it is not the personal that so irritates me, it is blog as diary, blog as therapy, blog as billboard.  The place where people post poems without qualification or tell you all about their latest accomplishments.  As I see it, there’s nothing at stake when a person just uses their voice to try to get and maintain unqualified attention.

It seems in this web 2.0 world, we’re all trying to brand ourselves.  I know I do it sometimes.  And over the past several months, when I wasn’t blogging, I was thinking about if I wanted to keep this blog alive — and if I did — what I wanted it to be.  My favorite writing is at once self-reflective and capacious.  Much as I criticize the “I”, I have always needed it. I know no other way to meet the world, than through the lens of my own experience.  And yet that I hope, at its best, it is somehow larger.

So that is what I hope for this blog.  Since my son was born and I left my full-time job in nonprofit for my round-the-clock job as a stay at home mom (SAHM), I’ve found myself questioning the choices women have and the choices writers & artists have.  And, of course, I am thinking about the same social, political and artistic concerns that I’ve always had — only now, I spend most of my days with a pre-verbal little person who can’t real engage in the conversation (yet!).  For better or worse, this space is where I hope to create flash essays (ala flash fiction, perhaps?), discuss the art & poetry in my world, think through my emerging concerns about womanhood & motherhood, and have some fun with domesticity, mostly by sharing my baking exploits.  I may post occassional personal news or links, but I won’t post poems — that’s not my deal.  Although I do hope this blog will become a breeding ground for bigger better essays and poems that will find homes in the publishing world.  Most of all, I hope this blog & its essays will be broader than my own experience and that they will be honest, full experiences — not just glimpses of my best angle.  Anything less and I guarantee I will lose interest in myself, just as I would anyone else.

Okay okay okay.  Enough self reflection.  Onward, to more adventures in writing, motherhood, and life!

Many years ago (I think maybe when I was in college though I can’t be sure) a friend of mine (I think maybe my now husband though, again, I can’t be sure) gave me a slim, silver volume entitled Very Bad Poetry.   I never really knew the motivation and have sometimes wondered whether I should have been offended.  A cautionary gift: “Don’t do this!” my friend may have been warning.  Or perhaps a bit of hope:  “Even if you are truly terrible, there’s still hope for being anthologized.”  Sometimes, I flip through it, find some truly horrific lines such as these from James McIntyre’s tribute to PB Shelley –

Kind hearted man, but ill-fated,
So youthful drowned and cremated.

– and I think to myself, “Well, at least I’m not that bad.”  Then, I wonder: if you can’t be a good poet, is it better to be so profoundly awful or to be just mediocre. Mediocre is always mediocre.  But sometimes, and just sometimes, bad is SO bad that it almost becomes good.

I started thinking about this the other night whilst washing dishes and listening to Monster Ballads, one of my favorite CDs to sing along with.  The CD reaches its zenith for me a little more than halfway through when Damn Yankees’ “High Enough” kicks in.  God I love that song!  LOVE it!!  It’s the kind of song that I will listen to at least 2 or 3 times any time I hear it.  And I know it’s terrible.  It doesn’t even really make any sense.  But something about it makes the blood tingle in my veins.  So, I started thinking, There’s got to be something to this.  There has to be some poetic value — and I’m going to dig right into the lyrics and find it.  So here we are.

Before we get started, you might want to familiarize yourself with the song, if you’re not a hairband fanatic like me.  You can read the lyrics here, and you can listen to it here.  I recommend listening.  As I’ll soon explain, the lyrics don’t have nearly the same impact….

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When I was working on my MFA at Antioch, I attended a seminar with the profound Peter Levitt about writing & meditation.  It was sort of my introduction to meditation and Zen practice.  One of the main things that stayed with me from that seminar was when Peter talked about applying the principles of meditative practice to his writing and to his life.  When you meditate, you are supposed to focus on your breathing, allow your thoughts to come and go and try not to get tangled in them.  You are supposed to do your best to just be in the practice, to just be with your life at that moment without trying to control or manipulate. He said that is the way he tries to write — to give the writing his full attention in the moments of writing, to be with the writing without fretting about whatever else starts rambling through his brain, and to not try to make the writing into something that he thinks it should be.

At least that’s how I remember it.  And I have tried since then to apply that general practice throughout my life.  Now, I was raised Catholic, so I’m way better at guilt than I am at being.  Unfortunately, I don’t practice meditation as often as I would like to. And I struggle to just be with my writing — and not get caught up in the conversations going on around me or chide myself for not writing more or constantly self-censor because everything I write is just crap.  But I’ve found the practice comes easiest, and seems to have the greatest impact on my mood, when I’m doing droll domestic tasks:  washing the dishes, vacuuming, making baby food, cleaning the poop out of cloth diapers.  There is something very peaceful about just doing what I have to do — getting lost in the soap suds and flowing water, taking satisfaction in the imperfection of a homemade puree.

There are those that would consider this some sort of concession — a betrayal of my feminist foremothers — a denial of my intellectual, professional, and personal capacities.  In the days of Betty Friedan & the Feminine Mystique (which I have not yet read, but have read alot of reference to lately), housework was considered the shackles that contained a woman in her domestic prison.   I even read an article in the Atlantic recently claiming that breastfeeding is the new vacuum:  the unreasonable demands of feeding your baby without bottle or formula are now chaining women to the home and denying them equality.  I’m not gonna go there now, except to say that if you don’t want to breastfeed or vacuum, don’t.  There are very satisfactory options that free women from those domestic tasks they find most onerous or entrapping.

I will say, however, that I see a connection between breastfeeding & housecleaning — I just see it differently.  When I breastfeed my son (usually) I am very content with the fact that’s where I am at the moment, that’s where I have to be, and there’s no rushing it.  The boy needs to eat.  If I don’t watch the clock, that time spent breastfeeding is often when I can just think, reflect, maybe plan or dream.  I also get to cuddle & snuggle my son, which is otherwise rare since he’s a super energetic boy.  Other than the cuddling part, I feel the same way about housework.  Often, doing dishes or vacuuming is one of the few times I have to just zone out and be with my own thoughts, without my son or husband, just on my own.  I can listen to a favorite CD or radio program, start dreaming up lines to a new poem, or not really think about anything at all.  That’s not to say there aren’t days when I begrudge my domestic duties, but in general that time is valuable in so many ways.  Maybe that makes me less of a feminist.  But getting into that mindset also makes me more peaceful and content, so I’m okay with it.

… especially if you’re pregnant or have a baby or small child:  What the Chemical Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know.

I started hearing about BPA while I was pregnant and did alot of looking to find BPA-free bottles, teethers, and other plastics.  This stuff is scary.  Lots of people like to say “We’ve been using it for years…” or “We were all raised on plastics, and we’re doing fine.”  But I think its far too early to actually know if we’re all “fine.”  And I mean, okay, maybe there aren’t Erin Brokovich-esque repercussions… or maybe there are… either way, I’m much more comfortable making sure that me and my wee one aren’t consuming extra hormones.

I’ve found two web pages that have been really helpful in sorting through the vast field of baby things in search of BPA-free products:

• This one has reviews for nearly all baby product manufacturers:  ZRecs
• And this one is a good reference for bpa-free teethers & pacifiers: NatureMoms.com

Thankfully, lots of manufacturers are now labelling their products with “BPA free” stickers.  So, even some of the manufacturers with negative reviews from ZRecs have good usable products that aren’t mentioned in the ZRecs profiles.  For instance, my lactation consultant recommended Playtex NaturalLatch nipples for their most boob-like quality — and although I couldn’t find anything about that particular product on ZRecs, most of the Playtex things were labelled (or not).  So there are LOTS of BPA-free options, and you shouldn’t have to go for something that’s potentially poisonous.

So, after a little hiatus and a very impolite hacking, I’m back — for better or worse.  While I wasn’t blogging or keeping up my corner of the web, I haven’t exactly been slacking off.

• I moved from the big city to the ‘burbs.
• I’ve been studying for the GREs (the general & the Lit test), on the off chance that some PhD program wants to accept me back into the fold of academia.
• And I birthed a wee one.  He’s the cuteness.  We spend our days together, snacking & napping & staring at anything in bright contrasting colors (for me that means watching all the Project Runway reruns).

So, I realize there’s some funny bizness — weird characters and what not — all over this site.  I’ll probably fix some of it… or not… we’ll see.  But there shouldn’t be any more of that going forward.  And I have no idea how often I’ll be posting, but I’m pretty sure it will be more than once a year.

It’s good to be back.

After a long summer (which continues to drag on with this ceaseless & stifling humidity), I still don’t have much time for this blog… and I’m honestly not sure I’d know what to write about if I did.

But in case you’re aching for an update, here’s the latest:

• Started a new job.  We do good work & its important & you should support it.  Come check us out on Nov. 8th to find out how.
• The series I host for the Mad Poets Society lost our venue, then got a new one (with barely a moment to spare).  Now, we’re rockin’ 1st Thursdays at Milkboy in Bryn Mawr like nobody’s biznass.  We’ve been packed for every reading — and this month we were standing room only. Be there in October for Jenn & Chris McCreary.
• I got hired to teach a college comp class and then my class got cancelled… all in the space of a month.  Que sera.
• Luckily, the workshops at Big Blue Marble are going strong, 2nd & 4th Saturdays.  We meet up next on Sept. 29 (which I think is actually the 5th Saturday… but don’t tell).
•  The Mad Poets blog is humming along… and when I dare to blog, its over there & its generally just to try and get people to promote themselves.  Feel free to join us in unabashed self advancement every Monday and read the reviews, interviews, etc. etc. all the rest of the week.
• And if you don’t have anything to do next Wednesday, you should come see me read at the Belmont Hills Library in Bala Cynwyd.  There will be free refreshments and an open mic.