I think this may be the World’s Best Quickbread. In any case, I can’t quit eating or baking it. Photo…eventually.

Ingredients

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 350º and prepare loaf pan.
2. Toast walnuts, cool, and roughly chop.
3. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
4. Cream butter and sugar.
5. Add eggs, banana, sour cream, and vanilla all at once. Mix for about one minute, until thoroughly blended.
6. Add flour mixture and mix on low speed until just moistened.
7. Add cranberries and walnuts and mix until well incorporated.
8. Scrape the batter into the loaf pan. It will be about ¾ of an inch from the top.
9. Bake 55 to 65 minutes or until the bread is golden and springs back when pressed lightly in the middle. You may have to tent loosely with foil midway through baking to avoid overbrowning.
10. Cool on wire rack for ten minutes. Loosen the sides, turn out of the pan, let cool completely.

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.

Today was a Hungry Day. Big time. I haven’t learned how to balance my wild appetite fluctuations and nutritional needs with the urgent cravings I am experiencing with ever-greater frequency. I need advice: when I am sure that I will die if I don’t eat a turkey burger immediately (a true story), should I go make that burger happen (I didn’t)?

I’ve always been into food, but not like this. The bowl of lightly-sweetened multi-grain Cheerios I had for breakfast (with real milk, which is pretty crazy considering I “gave up” cow’s milk back in 2001) just about put me into orbit. It’s good, right, but it’s never been that good. By ten a.m. I started to wonder if maybe I should stop at every food cart between PSU and the Library MAX stop in case I needed something to tide me over through my teeny fifteen-minute commute. Some days, all food smells make me want to fill my nostrils with concrete. Today, the aromas of frying onions and baking dough and coffee and even the sort of freaky meat smells (like, I assume, sausages) flipped some kind of switch in my guts, causing me to need everything I smelled.

Though it’s just not possible, I feel like I have been hungry all day long. When I arrived home after that epic quarter-hour commute I wolfed down two slices of veggie pizza left over from last night’s dinner at Old Town Pizza (we had leftovers because yesterday was definitely not a Hungry Day). Shortly thereafter, I emptied all of the vegetables from the fridge and pantry and made a spicy, tomato-based vegetable soup, scheduled to be my lunch tomorrow. While that simmered, I baked off some Cinnamon-Coconut Chocolate Chunk Cookies and gave them to guys installing windows downstairs. Tasting occurred, of course, throughout.

About two hours ago I started thinking about the slice of banana bread I had last weekend. I was at a morning event catered by Grand Central Bakery, and enjoyed a slice of their very moist and nutty banana bread. I decided about an hour and a half ago that I have never had such delicious banana bread in all of my life. I decided an hour ago that if I didn’t make something half as good for breakfast tomorrow, then my day would surely be ruined and the mental and physical well-being of the baby, the Squeeze and me would be irreparably compromised.

What follows is a variation based on the a Cook’s Illustrated banana bread recipe, not meant to be even an approximation of GCB’s banana bread, but one that, what with the wheat flour and the demera sugar and all, I can feel less-bad about eating.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Grease and flour a 6×9-inch loaf pan.
2. In a medium bowl, combine flours, sugar, salt, soda, and poppy seeds. Whisk to combine.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together cooled butter, yogurt, eggs, vanilla extract, and mashed bananas.
4. Gently fold the wet ingredients into the flour mixture, leaving some lumps in the batter.
5. Pour into prepared loaf pan, smooth out the top, and bake for approximately 55 minutes. When a toothpick is inserted into the center of the loaf, only a few crumbs should cling.

Ingredients:

• 3 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, halve and thinly sliced.
• For the tart dough:

• For the frangipane:

Procedure:

• For the tart dough:

1. Cream butter, sugar, ground nuts, and almond paste.
2. Add egg and beat.
3. Mix in flour and salt until just combined.
4. Wrap tightly in plastic and chill before use

• For the frangipane:

1. Cream butter, sugar, nut flour, and almond paste.
2. Add egg.
3. Mix in flour and salt until just combined.
4. Wrap in plastic and chill before use.

• To assemble and bake the tart:

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
2. Roll out dough to ¼inch thickness and line tart pan/ring.
3. Spread in frangipane to just below the top edge of the tart.
4. Arrange apples in fan pattern or, as shown, in a co-centric circles.
5. Bake until edges are dark brown. Cool completely. Glaze, if you like. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Preheat your waffle iron.
2. In a large bowl, thoroughly combine flour, salt, baking soda, lemon zest, and poppyseeds.
3. In a separate bow, whisk together egg yolks, buttermilk, yogurt, milk, and melted butter. Set aside.
4. In a third bowl or electric mixer, whip egg whites and cream or tartar to soft peaks.
5. Make a well in the flour mixture and pour in buttermilk mixture. Mix gently with a whisk until just incorporated. Some lumps are OK.
6. Toward the end of mixing, fold in egg whites.
7. Bake in waffle maker until crisp and golden.
8. Serve with powdered sugar, berry syrup, maple syrup or anything else delicious.

Yields 12 standard muffins.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Adjust oven rack to upper-middle position to heat oven to 400ºF.
2. Prepare muffin tins.
3. Bring 1 cup fresh blueberries and all dried blueberries to a simmer in a small saucepan over medium heat.
4. Cook, stirring frequently and pressing blueberries against the side of the pot, until berries have broken down and mixture is thickened, about five minutes.
5. Remove from heat and cool slightly.
6. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in the large bowl. Set aside.
7. In a separate bowl, whisk eggs and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Slowly whisk in melted butter and oil.
8. Whisk in buttermilk and vanilla until combined.
9. Using a rubber spatula, gently fold in remaining one cup blueberries.
10. Gently fold in flour mixture until just moistened. Batter will be very lumpy.
11. Using a large spoon, divide half of the batter equally among the 12 muffin cups. Cups should be about a third filled.
12. Place a heaping teaspoon of berry mixture on top of batter.
13. Scoop remaining batter on top of berry filling.
14. Using a bamboo skewer, gently swirl berry filling into batter.
15. Sprinkle turbinado sugar on top of the muffins.
16. Bake until muffin tops are golden and just firm, 17 to 19 minutes.
17. Cool muffins in pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire rack and cool for five minutes more before serving.

P.S. For more amazing recipes, you should really go get a membership at Cook’s Illustrated. It’s totally, totally worth it.

Yields two 9″x3″ loaves. (can very easily be halved.)

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Prepare two 9″ x 3″ loaf pans.
2. Whisk together flours, spices, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
3. Beat together sugar and oil until well blended.
4. Add eggs, vanilla, and chai (or water — the chai is just a way to squeeze in more flavor).
5. Beat until mixture is even and smooth, scraping down the sides of the bowl and the beater as necessary.
6. Add flour mixture all at once. Stir gently until just mixed.
7. Fold in pumpkin puree until uniform.
8. Stir in nuts or seeds, and cranberries, if you like.
9. Divide batter between the loaf pans and bake, about one hour, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf emerges clean.
10. Cool on a wire rack about ten minutes, then remove bread from the pans and cool completely before slicing or wrapping.

Procedure:

If you’ve made any of my other scones, the procedure is the same here. You’ll need much less buttermilk, however, since the pumpkin puree adds quite a bit of moisture.

1. Preheat oven to 375º standard/350º convection.
2. In the bowl of your stand mixer, combine dry ingredients: flour, sugar, spices, salt, and baking powder.
3. Add butter cubes and mix with paddle attachment until the butter is reduced to roughly pea-sized pieces.
4. Stir in pumpkin puree and mix to distribute evenly.
5. With the mixer turned on to the lowest setting, slowly add buttermilk. You will need more or less depending on the moisture content of your pumpkin puree.
6. Stop pouring when the dough begins to stick together. It should be crumbly, but not dry. When you press it together between your fingers, it will feel almost satiny, though not slick or wet.
7. Turn the dough out onto a very lightly floured cutting board. Pat it out into a circle, approximately nine inches in diameter and maybe an inch and a half thick.
8. Brush top and sides with egg wash, and sprinkle the demera sugar over the top.
9. Cut into wedges – eight or twelve according to your preference.
10. Use your knife to transfer the scones to your baking sheet. The dough may try to stick to the cutting board; do not be alarmed.
11. Bake until scones are golden brown at the tips and edges.
12. Cool slightly before removing them from the baking sheet.

These muffins require no sales pitch. I will tell you anyway that they are fluffy, flavorful, and easy to make with or without an electric mixer.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 350º standard / 325º convection.
2. Prepare standard-sized muffin tin with grease or papers.
3. Combine flour, baking powder, salt, and spices. Whisk to evenly mix. Set aside.
4. Cream butter and sugar until well incorporated. You do not need to mix until fluffy and light. With muffins, it’s OK (maybe even preferable) to leave the mixture a bit uneven.
5. Beat in eggs and milk. Again, don’t mix as much as you would if you were making cookies.
6. Add flour mixture and, using a rubber spatula, fold gently into wet mixture. Leave some dry spots in the batter.
7. Add pumpkin and continue to fold until the batter is mostly even.
8. Add cranberries and give the batter one or two more folds.
9. Using a measuring cup, large spoon, or portion scoop, fill muffin cups about ¾ full.
10. Bake until set: a toothpick or skewer inserted in the center of the muffin will emerge clean. This morning, my batch took 35 minutes to bake.
11. Remove pan from oven and allow to cool a few moments before removing muffins.