Unlike other granola recipes I’ve auditioned, this one calls for heating the oil, honey, and maple syrup before adding it to the dry goodies. Loosening up the sticky stuff made it very easy to distribute evenly.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 325ºF.
2. Mix together oats, triticale, coconut, nuts, and seeds.
3. Combine oil, maple syrup, and honey in a small saucepan and heat until warm.
4. Pour liquid over oat mixture and toss to coat.
5. Spread granola in an even layer on a rimmed baking sheet.
6. Bake, stirring every five minutes, until the granola is light golden brown, about fifteen minutes. When it’s ready, the granola will still look a bit “wet,” but will smell quite toasty.
7. Stir in raisins or cherries.
8. Let granola cool to room temperature and store in an airtight container.

By the time I made it down to the deck overlooking the chicken coop, the raccoon had her half way down the run. I stood above them, trembling, crying, and throwing rocks until the ‘coon dropped the injured hen and alighted to the top of the fence.

By six am the sun was up, Trotsky was in the ground, and her last two eggs were folded into a batch of blackberry orange muffins. Despite our heavy lids, I knew the Squeeze and I were up. And we may as well eat.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

I always have greater success in achieving a good texture when I mix these muffins by hand instead of in an electric mixer. Lumpy batter is OK.

1. Prepare ten standard-sized muffin cups and preheat oven to 350ºF.
2. Cream butter and sugar. Don’t worry about “light and fluffy,” just get them smoothly and evenly combined.
3. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
4. Add eggs, vanilla, and orange zest to butter mixture. Stir to combine. Do not mix so long that it becomes smooth and uniform.
5. Add flour mixture and milk. Again, stir to combine, leaving some lumps.
6. Gently fold in blackberries. Scoop into muffin tin.
7. Bake until lightly browned and a toothpick inserted into the center of the muffin comes out clean.
8. Cool five minutes on a wire rack before removing muffins from the tin.

Adíos, Trotsky. We’ll miss you and your delicious eggs.

Breakfast number one: Potato latkes and housemade applesauce, hold the sour cream. Best danged latkes of my life, seriously. I figure they must be deep fried as they came out a bit more round than flat, and perfectly—perfectly!—golden and crunchy all over. The applesauce, too, sort of blew my mind. It’s almost creamy and not too sweet. I’m salivating as I remember this.

Breakfast number two: Granola, also housemade, and yogurt with fresh fruit. Orange juice. The granola was pleasantly toasted and neither it nor the ample serving of yogurt was too sweet. Seasonal fruit complimented nicely, though I could have done without the honeydew.

Breakfast number three: Challah french toast, maple syrup. No powdered sugar, no fruit, no garnish, nothing to distract a girl from what’s important here: three inch-thick slices of pillowy challah bread in unobtrusive egg batter and perfectly (there I go with that word again) cooked. It was, without question, the best french toast I have ever had.

I have also witnessed the consumption of bacon, eggs, potatoes (well seasoned, brown on the outside and creamy within), bagels (chewy and delicious, no nonsense—or sweet flavors—here), scallion cream cheese (replete with fresh scallions; obviously made fresh), and rye toast at Kenny and Zuke’s. Every plate was clean; ever diner happy and sated.

I can’t wait to try lunch.

Kenny and Zuke’s Delicatessen
1038 SW Stark St
Portland, OR 97205
503.222.DELI (3354)

I am an occasional beta-tester of recipes for America’s Test Kitchen. Those geniuses over in Massachusetts work up a recipe, and then they e-mail it out to folks like me who’ve volunteered to make the recipe at home and report back. Some months later, something very similar appears in Cook’s Illustrated magazine. It’s pretty neat.

To my great delight, an ATK recipe for Best Blueberry Muffins appeared in my inbox a few days ago for testing. It being August and all, I have quite a lot of berries loitering about in the refrigerator and I’ve been making blueberry muffins about once every ten days, searching for The One. The Universe – heck, the internet – is overstuffed with blueberry muffin recipes, many of which, I have found, aren’t worth the effort it takes a person to chew and swallow them.

Yesterday I shopped for the few ingredients Best Blueberry Muffins called for that weren’t already kicking around at home and this morning I tried out the recipe from ATK.

I can’t say that I have ever had a more delicious blueberry muffin. Though they were more work than your average blueberry muffin, the extra five minutes and three dirty dishes are definitely worth the result. These muffins were tender on the inside and absolutely packed with blueberries, yet they hold their shape and have a pleasant texture on the teeth and tongue. The sprinkle of demera sugar on top makes a great, golden, sweet crunch on the muffin tops, leaving the rest of the muffin more blueberry-and-vanilla-y, rather than just plain sweet like so many inferior breakfast pastries.

It would be cosmically unfair (and arguably illegal) for me to share the recipe with you, and for that I apologize. Whether you are into super fantastic blueberry muffin recipes or not, I enthusiastically recommend Cook’s Illustrated magazine – I hear that the television show is really good, too. They’re geniuses over there in Massachusetts, just geniuses.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Mix oats, milk and sugar. Let sit five minutes.
2. Stir in cooled melted butter and eggs.
3. Mix in dry ingredients until just combined.
4. Fold in nuts.
5. Spoon into muffin cups and bake at 350º F. until an inserted toothpick emerges clean.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. While your jars and lids boil, combine and heat mashed berries, calcium water, lemon juice and honey.
2. When the berry mixture comes to a boil, sprinkle in the pectin. Stir vigorously and thoroughly, taking care to hunt down and eliminate pectin lumps.
3. Return to a boil for a few moments, remove from heat, and fill sanitized jars.
4. To seal jars, first wipe their mouths with a clean cloth, careful not to touch them with your fingers.
5. Apply lids and rings.
6. Place jars into a large, tall stockpot full of boiling water. Boil, submerged, for five minutes.
7. Remove jars carefully with canning tool or tongs. Allow to cool. Home-canned products should be used within a year.

I do not know where the recipe originated – probably a magazine or a webpage instead of someone’s great aunt or Granny’s Dog-Eared Cookbook. They were in production when I took the job as one of the morning bakers, and their cult-like popularity still held long after I left.
Wherever the source, I was initially impressed by the recipe for two reasons.

1. This recipe can accommodate almost any flavor one might dream up. Yep. One formula, endless variation. At the café, our scones were the first and most important thing to get into and out of the oven in the morning.
2. If correctly executed, it makes a shockingly good product. There is a distressing quantity of bad scones in the world – those too dry and flavorless to be edible, no matter how much jam, butter, or coffee is at hand; and those trying to be muffins or cake: over-frosted, too sweet and usually <gasp> jam-filled. Abominable, both.

Upon my 4:30am arrival, I would take three pounds of butter from the fridge, light the convection oven, and take stock of potential flavorings. If there were oranges, I could make Dark Chocolate Orange scones. If not, I just moved on down the list of approved flavors my boss had posted on the wall of the kitchen. Though the list was twenty five or so long, it was understood that the more popular flavors (Ginger Coconut) would be produced more regularly than the less-loved varieties (Mushroom Onion). White Chocolate Raspberry were to be made everyday, if we had the necessary ingredients. Pumpkin Spice and Apple Cinnamon Oat were seasonal favorites. Ginger Pear and Strawberry Black Pepper were both very dear to me, but never really caught on like I thought they should have.

Sometimes folks called ahead to reserve a scone, afraid that they wouldn’t make it to the shop early enough and have to take Cinnamon Walnut instead of their preferred Iced Lemon Poppyseed. One couple, who always brought their ancient pet Dachshund (clad in a sweater and with her own pillow to lay on), invariably ordered one Raspberry and one Golden Raisin Pinenut. The dog, I recall, was content to lazily lick foamed milk out of a Dixie cup while her owners ate their scones. Another man, who I was fortunately never able to identify in person, called around ten a.m. one day to ask if we had made Blueberry scones that morning and if we could please hold one for him. We had not and were done baking for the morning, which I politely apologized for, promising to hold one for him the next day. “What am I going to do?” the gentleman asked. He sounded slightly panicked. When I said nothing, he repeated himself and then added, “I don’t need this; my therapist is even out of town!”

Last Monday morning, I rose early, in a mood to make a breakfast more decadent than the coffee, toast, and fruit that has become the standard in my dining room. The half flat of strawberries I very foolishly purchased the day before was appealingly fragrant and, more importantly, needed to get used. I tossed in toasted almonds, per a recommendation in one of my favorite cookbooks. The only tricky thing about these, which you should know when you set to make yourself some, is that you will need to add more or less buttermilk depending on which flavoring you choose. Berries, being moist things, will contribute to the overall wetness of the dough, which is very important to control. Too-wet dough will ooze out of shape and make goopey, lumpy and generally unattractive scones. If your dough is too dry, however, you’ll end up with the aforementioned type that sucks all of the saliva out of your mouth when you attempt (and ultimately fail) to eat it. It may take a batch or two to nail them, but I promise they are worth the effort. Just make sure your therapist is in town.