I hope everyone had a decent Thanksgiving. For a holiday I actively dislike, this one wasn’t too bad. It is a bit painful to be back at work for an entire week, but I suppose I’ll find something compelling to do. Hopefully. So far today, that’s entailed wrapping up some finance-y things and drinking lots of green tea.
I woke up yesterday morning with the rare urge to bake muffins. WoDM and I have very different viewpoints on breakfast. I love breakfast – if it’s hot cereal, an omelet, french toast, cold cereal, pizza or brownies – it’s pretty much my favorite meal of the day. I tend towards the healthier/lighter fringe of breakfast (oat bran with frozen berries, anyone?), partly because I feel better starting off my day that way (somehow, that breakfast must make up for the chocolate muffin at 2 in the afternoon) and partly because it’s easier. I am not a morning person, and almost never choose to make myself something time-consuming for breakfast, mostly because by the time I think about food, I’m already hungry. Sleepy, hungry, lazy is not a recipe for someone who wants to make breakfast.
But yesterday, the urge struck and I realized that since we had eggs (leftover from making cornbread to go with delicious vegan chili) and an open container of soymilk, I could make just about anything without having to consider replacing important ingredients. So I found a recipe for blueberry muffins, and decided to make them, adding a few modifications to the recipe without really considering the consequences.
- I replaced a third of the wheat flour with amaranth flour. This changed the way the batter reacted in ways I don’t understand, but WoDM could explain it.
- I added both vanilla and lemon juice – the lemon juice likely sped up the baking soda reaction, causing the batter to rise before it could support rising, which probably played a significant role in the collapsing of the muffins.
- I used soy milk for the batter (no change from milk, really) and vegan margarine for the crumb topping (again, no real change noted)
Anyway, they don’t look pretty, but they taste okay and they do a better job of filling me up than most muffins I eat. Haven’t figured that one out yet.
As for eating, we ate like crap this weekend – trying to finish off our sour cherry pie and icecream, not to mention donuts from the Twin Peaks Marathon which lasted only 8 hours or so. We still have a bit more than a quarter of the pie left, but I thankfully haven’t considered the icecream much. But since we’ve gone back to trying to plan meals, we’ve also gone back to preparing food that is mostly, if not entirely, vegan. It’s not something we try to do, it just sort of naturally happens.
Great, just spilled tea on my visitor tag so now I have to peel it off bit by bit. Lame.
K.
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