Apple Muffins: the healthy ones

Once upon a time, muffins were little nuggets of slightly sweet bread that often hid little treasures. They were considered a tea bread or a breakfast bread, and were eaten smoking hot with a bit of real butter.

And then something happened. Over the past few decades the innocent muffin was judged with a fishy eye. Someone decided they should be sweeter and they turned into more cake than tea bread. Someone else decided that the top was the best part and muffin tins were redesigned so the the muffin became almost all top. They became huge, so that they could become a profitable item in shops. Things started to be added to the muffin, things like chocolate and other candies, streusels, and really, I stopped eating them about then so I can barely tell you what was added, other than to say that it didn’t ever seem to be other than sweet. The muffin became a sin, described as “sinfully good” or “worth the calories” and instead of a nice, small thing Mum might make to feed the family, the muffin was then an enormous three dollar blob of fat and sugar with various candifications which was supplied by overpriced coffee shops.

Stop it. Just stop it. Do not allow yet another marvelous treat to become a fast food horror! A muffin should remain simple enough for a kid to make, healthy enough for a kid to eat and should be planted squarely on the flag of the American kitchen.

This muffin recipe began it’s life as a secret recipe of a tea room in Boston of the Twenties and Thirties. My mother worked there as a girl for a while and like the rest of the girls who worked for this very proper tea room, she lived with the owner. They became friends and when she left she was given the recipe along with another even more secret, which I have unfortunately lost.

Apple muffins

makes 12 sane muffins

If you are not using muffin papers, like the foil ones in the picture, grease well and flour normal muffin tins with 12 spaces.

1 egg
1/2 cup (125 ml) milk
1/4 cup (62 ml) vegetable seed oil
1-1/2 cup (195 g) plain flour, sifted
1/2 cup (105 g) sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

2 cups (500 ml) of coarsely grated apple… I use the food processor… skin included, but not the core.

1 tablespoon brown sugar
a few shakes of cinnamon
a few shakes of nutmeg

Heat the oven to 200°C or 400°F.

Measure the wet ingredients using a liquid measuring cup. First the milk, then the oil, then the egg. Use a fork to beat the egg slightly into the liquids.

Measure the dry ingredients into a bowl. Using a mixing spoon or a whisk, add the liquids to the dry, mixing quickly until all is dampened. Add 1-1/2 cups (375 ml) of the grated apple and stir in. Distribute the batter among the muffin cups.

In the bottom of the empty batter bowl, put the rest of the apple, the brown sugar and the remaining spices, and mix briefly. Using your fingers, divide this mixture pinch by pinch and place on top of the raw muffins.

Put them in the oven and bake 20 to 25 minutes until just done. Remove and cool on racks for as long as you can bear, then eat them warm.

I don’t have any way to tell you precisely how many calories there are in those, nor how they compare to other muffins, but I can tell you that every time I have been fed a bit of a modern, souped-up, super muffin I have wished it were one of these. They are filled with invisible fiber, because the apple inside disappears, they are low in fat, of reasonable size and just delicious. They helped pull a small tea room through the Great Depression eighty years ago, and they quite cheer me up, too.

I’ve made them for three different Italian families over the past weeks and they get a thumbs up from everyone. Tina, to whom I delivered them as a post-flu vitamin treat, called them “perfetti”. Maybe you will too?

Peach Crumble: Sweet Interlude sans Photo

I went for the camera to photograph this dessert and all the batteries were dead. It’s such a nice dessert, though, that I am going to post it bare naked. I needed to make a big dessert for a potluck supper farewell party for an expat friend who is moving to Berlin. It needed to be made of peaches, because starting October 1, I have PEACHES coming off my tree faster than I can handle them. Because we did get summer rain this year, they are bigger than ever. Because I grow them strictly organic, they take a while to peel and process. So instead of a pie I made a crumble, choosing to invest the time in prepping the peaches rather than in making pastry.

Peach Crumble
9″X13″ pan full– quite a lot
preheat the oven to 190°C or 375°F

1 kilo or 2.2 pounds fresh peaches (or frozen without sugar) peeled and sliced
65 g or 1/2 cup sugar
30 g or 1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
about 30g or 2 tablespoons of butter

Lay the peaches in the ovenproof pan (mine is a Pyrex, much loved) and then sprinkle with the flour, the sugar and the cinnamon, then dot with bits of butter.

Crumble

200 g or 7/8 cup butter
200 g or 1 cup less 1 tablespoon of sugar
400 g or 3 cups plus obe tablespoon of flour
a pinch of salt.

Throw the ingredients into the food processor and pulse until it becomes like breadcrumbs. Alternately, you can use a pastry cutter to mix the flour and butter together, then cut in the salt and sugar. I think you could also do this with a mixer, but I haven’t tried.

Using your hands, crumble this mixture over the top of the peaches as evenly as possible. Put it in the oven and in 20 to 30 minutes, it will be bubbly underneath and just a bit blonde on top. That’s it!

Serve it warm with whipped cream or plain cream.

How did it look? One of the guests thought it was a dish of white beans. I think it looks yummy, but it is anything but fancy.

Sunday, 23 August

Seasonal

Melon

One of my first failures as a mom, with recipe

This is an adaptation of a recipe I have had for many decades.  It is handwritten on a 5X7 index card by a Southern gal named Thelma who was such a good cook that she is the reason eg wasn’t engaged and all sewed up for a bride at three years old.

Summer fresh

Thelma lived across Chestnut Street from us in Fall Church.  She was Michael’s mother, and Michael was a most unusual four year old.  (She has other children, but Michael has wiped them from my memory if they were ever there.)  Only a few months after we moved into that house, Michael announced to me that he was probably going to marry eg, but he needed to eat more of my cooking to see what kind of a cook she was likely to end up.

Time and again, Michael told me, “That’s good, but not as good as my mother’s.”  My chili was good, but Thelma made Chili Mac.  My spaghetti was good, but Thelma’s had cheddar cheese on it.  It just goes to show, men are hard to please at any age.  Anyway, between Thelma and me the match was unmade and we have not seen nor heard of Michael since.  Some ten years afterward, eg announced she was not going to marry, so failing with Michael has permanently impacted all our lives.

The only alteration to the recipe is its size.  The original is twice as big and feeds lots of people and so is not nearly as useful a dessert these days as this smaller one.  I also left half an egg out of the base and I think it is the better for it.  If you need a big dessert, just double the recipe and cook the crusts in two 8” buttered cake tins.  Assemble it like a layer cake, but use some bamboo skewers to keep it tidy, because it is architecturally a disaster waiting to happen, although glorious to see.

This is fast and easy and can be whipped up in about 15 minutes if you use frozen peaches or have previously peeled and sliced some.  I used peaches I froze last summer when they were coming out of our ears.  I just sprinkled them with a little sugar as I left them to partially thaw.  You probably know that peaches should never completely thaw so they retain a nice texture, but just in case you didn’t hear that before, now you have.

Italian ingredients work perfectly, and if you can’t buy pecans, use almonds, which is sort of the go-to flavor for peaches, although I love the toasted pecan taste in this.

I used my food processor to whip up the crust, but you could use a pastry cutter, too.  I did chop the pecans by hand.

Plantation Peach Shortcake (half recipe: serves 6 )

1 cup (130 g) flour
2 teaspoons (cucchiaini) baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt

Mix these together, then add:

2 tablespoons, heaped, (cucchiai colmi) brown (canna) sugar
2 ounces (60 g) butter

and cut in or process until it looks like crumbs.
Add 1/3 cup of cream and quickly incorporate it
Add ¼ cup (tazza di caffè) chopped pecans and incorporate them.

Fruitful

I am wandering around the neighborhood photographing what is growing.  Here are two images.

Not ripe yet, but figs are coming

Peaches, tiny and green and not ready until 1 October

Macedonia di Frutta

Macedonia at Mamma's

When first I came to Italy in 1973, this was on every menu I saw.  It’s an easy and nearly calorie free way to be dessert in Italy.  Years rolled by, someone invented tiramisu and macedonia disappeared.  I haven’t seen it on a single menu in well over ten years.  I mentioned it to a neighbor, and she said, “Oh yes, we used to have that quite often.”  It appeared she had no intention of reinitiating the old trend.  Too bad!  This is great food.

The way it appears above is my idea of how it might look for Sunday lunch at Mamma’s house.  This version is what has been supporting my diet lately.  It’s terrifically high in fiber and vitamins and astoundingly low in calories.  That wine glass holds pineapple, apple, Red Flame grapes deseeded, Kiwi fruit, strawberries, oranges, tangerines and banana.  The dressing is merely a tropical fruit juice mix that contains lemon to keep the fruits from turning brown.  Specifically this time it is pineapple, carrot and lemon misture.  Only the bananas can’t be held over once dressed that way. I make up large quantities at a time, but add banana daily.

Sometimes you might add wine or alcohol to the juices, sometimes it may need a bit of sweetening, occasionally you might like a dollop of heavy cream, yoghurt or even ricotta on top.  There’s no law against spices, although I never add them.

Here is another photo that shows it ready to go on a picnic.

Macedonia to go

I probably should have put it into a old fashioned glass for a picnic, but I daydream of Edwardian picnics with white linen, lace and parasols.  This would work.

Oh, and this is how you say macedonia:  mah-cheh-DOH-nya

Now you’re all set for summer.  I heard on TV that fruit helps dissolve cellulite!

The Persimmon Crop #1

Nobody ever seemed to know what to do with persimmons when I had them. I have ideas of developing a Persimmon soufflé, but it won’t be while I am on this diet. Still, they are ripening as they always do this time of year. They’re really at their most gorgeous right now before they are ripe. They are velvety, cream, orange and pink, firm, and covering thousands of trees around town now that the leaves are falling. There will be literally tons of them, called cachi in Italian, and free for the taking.

I’ve decided to garner up recipes from around the web and make links to them. The first is Karenuccia’s Persimmon Bread.

That photo above comes from How Stuff Works, a genuinely useful site to bookmark.

Tilda and the preserving kitchen

I am not alone when I work to preserve the wonderful fruits of autumn.

Tilda Curious

Tilda What The?

Tilda and Plums

Let me assure you that once her curiosity had been photographed for her mum, she was removed and the plums were re-washed. Yes, I know wild animals are all over wild fruits until I get them inside, but I wash them off, too.

Nature continues to give

Paola and I went walking again yesterday afternoon and the plums that excited us two weeks ago were still bent with the weight of plums. We filled every pocket, our shirttails, Paola’s hood and staggered home saying, “Next time we carry baskets and take a mule.”

[photopress:Wild_plums.JPG,full,pp_image]

Wild Plums

I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them this morning, especially when I’d promised myself to accept tomatoes from Amelia and make some sauce for the freezer, but after I dumped them into this gigantic copper tray they looked so beautiful I decided to prepare half of them today and the rest tomorrow. The largest of these plums is little more than one inch across.

They are growing so thickly on the branches that they look like bunches of grapes.

[photopress:plum_bunch.JPG,full,pp_image]

Grappola di susine

The colors excite me, the gentle frosting and occasional gleam of a rubbed cheek — what can be more gorgeous? These I will cut in half, pit and freeze in a light 50% sugar syrup. This winter they may become plum cobbler of plum cake or perhaps something more elaborate I haven’t even thought of yet.

[photopress:Plums_ready_pub.JPG,full,pp_image]

And here they are, washed, pitted and ready to pack for freezing. I listened to economic news on the television while I worked and felt very happy that I had been offered these fruits just for a half a mile hike along the road. I’m lucky.