Sour Potatoes

I have certainly been subjected to my share of unsavory blueberry muffins. C’mon, you know what I mean, you have been the unwitting recipient at a potluck, or maybe your Aunt Bessie makes them, or, worse, perhaps you (like me) have actually exchanged currency to partake of a muffin that tasted something like a pair of fine cotton socks, which are great for feet but bad for taste buds.

Et Voila!

Well, my friend Gwyneth* has decided to save us all by including in her awesome, new cookbook, My Father’s Daughter, the recipe for her mother’s prodigious Blueberry Muffins! Nothing ho-hum about these babies! They are the perfect muffin-y combination of sweet and light and moist and tart and their tops are ever-so-slightly crusty with a light dusting of sugar…sigh…so darn tasty!

*(Yes, that is Gwyneth Paltrow and actually, we’ve never met, but I do subscribe to her blog and so sometimes I pretend that we are just some Besties blogging away and making blueberry muffins together…yes, get a life, I know.)

So hear we go, straight from the pages of My Father’s Daughter…

Blythe’s Blueberry Muffins

• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled all the way
• 2 large organic eggs (I confess I do not always use organic and they still come out scrumptious)
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (I always use King Arthur because I am in love with it)
• 3/4 cup plus 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon fine salt (regular salt works, too)
• 2 1/2 (2.5) cup fresh blueberries

Preheat the oven to 375. Line a 12 cup muffin tin with papers (or use silicon cups, like I do)

Whisk the butter, eggs, and milk together in a bowl. In another bowl, whisk together the flour, the 3/4 cup of sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and fold in the blueberries. Divide among muffin cups and sprinkle with remaining teaspoon of sugar. Bake until a toothpick test comes out clean and the muffins are golden brown, 25-30 minutes. These are best eaten warm! This will make 1 dozen delicious muffins.

Oh, look, here they are now…

So much Muffin-y Goodness...

Um, I think it might be time for a spot of tea and muffin (or two)…

Happiness…

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I used to have a tab on here labeled “Things I Hate”, I have since removed it because it obligated me to workout (and that is perhaps a story for another time). However, so that you do not stay up tonight wondering what exactly made the list, I shall enumerate it for you here. I hate exercise, spiders, and raisins. And then, during a recent time of deep personal reflection I realized I’d forgotten to mention the loathsome gelatinous mess that is cream soup in cans. I don’t know about you, but I do not like to feed my family anything that looks like someone has just sneezed it out. And that can not be real chicken. And the noise it makes when it comes out of the can is the stuff of bad sci-fi blob movies. Not that I don’t like that kind of movie because I do but as mentioned above, I do not like that soup.

Regardless, we all know that in the course of human events it becomes necessary for us to use something of the creamed soup variety. Where would our Broccoli Cheese Bake be without its creamy center, or Potatoes Au Gratin, sometimes you don’t have all day to brew up cheese sauce from scratch, and I don’t even want to think about my Chicken Pot Pie, all sad and dry.

Enter Stage Left…

Ta-Da!!!

The answer to our cream in a can issues? Dried ” Cream Of ” soup mix you make yourself! Yay!

(Okay, I Googled this forever ago and I don’t remember exactly where I got it from so if this is your recipe please let me know because Dinner Makers all over the world would love to to give you one long standing ovation for you have single handedly made “Cream of” cooking not disgusting.)

“Cream Of ” Recipe

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