blueberry muffins

I love blueberry muffins. I love them so much that I tend to seek out new recipes for blueberry muffins. I'm amazed that there are a lot of various recipes out there specifically for blueberry muffins. I know Alton Brown's show 'Good Eats' devoted a whole show just to blueberry muffins! It was good, did anyone see it or try his version? I think I have a stash of about 7 blueberry muffins in my freezer for backup. Crazy right? Does anyone else do that? I must eat about 2 or 3 muffins a week. When I go to Whole Foods and see there is a fresh delivery of organic blueberries, I buy 4 pints.
Well, here is the latest blueberry muffin recipe I found. This one uses a crumble topping. Nothing like a good blueberry muffin with some coffee cake crumbies on top.

How many blueberry muffin recipes have you tried?
Which was your favorite one?

Blueberry Muffins with crumbly topping
print recipe

Muffin batter:
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup white sugar
½ ts salt
2 ts baking powder
¼ cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1/3 cup whole milk
1 cup fresh blueberries

Crumb topping:
½ cup white sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
¼ cup butter, melted
1 ½ ts ground cinnamon

Cook Notes:
If you like a lot of crumb topping like I do, then double the ingredients in the crumb toppings.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Grease muffin cups or line with muffin liners.
In a separate bowl combine the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Whisk together to fluff it all up.
In a separate bowl mix vegetable oil, the egg and milk. Combine well. Incorporate the wet with the dry. Do not over mix, only mix till just combined; it's ok to have lumps! Next fold in blueberries. Fill muffin cups right to the top, and sprinkle with crumb topping mixture.
Make the crumb topping by mixing the sugar, flour, butter, and cinnamon.
Mix with fork, and sprinkle over muffins before baking.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in the preheated oven, or until done.

chicken curry burgers w/ tzatziki

I'm going to let the pictures speak for me. Not that I don't have tons to say, I always do, but these chicken burgers were soooooo good. A pinch of this, a pinch of that, and then a pinch or two of curry thrown in and we have a delish burger. Not to mention the tzatziki sauce is one of my all-time favorites to use as a dip, a sandwich spread and on my hummus roll ups. Oh yes, my hummus roll ups have warm falafel balls , some hummus and then smother it in tzatziki. Delish.
This great recipe is inspired by my friend Esi over at Dishing Up Delights, who just made a wonderful batch of Greek Burgers, and from seeing that post I had to have something similiar. So here is my creation of a curry burger...hope you like it or are inspired to create something similiar. And if you can, grill these burgers for the ultimate taste, and serve on warmed Naan bread. ***And for you vegans out there, I've made this before using those Boca burgers and it was fabulous and tasty!

chicken curry burgers
print recipe

1 lb. ground chicken breast
3 scallions, thinly sliced
1 TB fresh ginger, minced
1 TB fresh lemon juice
2 ts paprika
1 ts ground cumin
1 ts curry powder
¼ ts cayenne pepper
A dash of salt & pepper

1 small cucumber, sliced thin
Red onions, sliced thin
Tomatoes, thinly sliced (optional)
Naan bread, warmed
Taziki sauce

In a bowl, gently combine the first 9 ingredients.
Form into mini burgers or meatballs and set aside/refrigerate for 20 minutes or longer to combine flavors.
Grill or fry the patties until cooked through. Remember chicken burgers cook a lot faster than beef. Don't forget to warm your Naan bread before serving!
Place cucumber, onions, tomatoes on warmed Naan bread, followed by the patties. Drizzle, no, smother with the tzatziki sauce.
Made about 7 mini burgers.

Tzatziki Sauce

16 oz. Greek style yogurt*
1 cucumber, washed and peeled
3 - 4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 1/2 to 2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
1/2 tsp salt
A pinch or two of cayenne pepper (optional, but wonderful)

*Greek style yogurt is much thicker and richer than normal yogurt. If you can’t get a hold of it you can make your own. Place some plain yogurt in a cheesecloth, tie up the edges and hang it over a bowl or place the cheesecloth in a strainer over a bowl in the fridge for a few hours.
Cut the cucumber in half lengthwise and scrape out the seeds with a small spoon. Then coarsely grate the cucumber.
Gather the grated cucumber in a cheesecloth or paper towel and squeeze out the excess water, otherwise the tzatziki will be too runny.
Mix the grated cucumber with everything else.

sweet potato-cheddar and oat cookies

Do not let the word cheddar turn you off. You hardly notice it. To be honest, I have never in my life tasted a cookie as good as these. I only had two of them and the rest were sent off to friends as I knew I would easily eat them all. I worked hard on finding the right balance of sweet to savory in a gentle way, and I finally found it. I wanted a cookie that was moist hence the sweet potato, wanted a savory cookie hence the cheddar cheese, and wanted a bit of sweet with some texture hence the chocolate chips and the nice texture of raisins. I knew they would all work together nicely in a cookie. And there is a healthy aspect to this too with the sweet potato and oats. These cookies have all that nice savory and sweet, but not overly so on both. Trust me you will love these; they tasted so good with my morning coffee and were the kind of cookies that 'stick to your ribs' and fills you up.



sweet potato-cheddar & oat cookies
recipe by vanillasugarblog.com
print recipe

1 and ½ sticks of unsalted butter, room temp.
¾ cup brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 cup + 2 TB cooked & mashed sweet potato
1 and ½ cups of mildly sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 ts baking powder
¼ ts cinnamon
¾ ts salt
¾ cup old fashioned oats (or quick cooking)
¾ cup milk chocolate chips
1 and ½ cups pecans
1 cup raisins

In a separate bowl combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt, whisk a bit; place to the side.
In another separate bowl combine the oats, raisins, pecans and chocolate chips, mix well.
In a big bowl, cream the butter and both sugars together. Add eggs, then the sweet potatoes, and then the cheddar cheese, combine. Then fold in the dry ingredients; then pecan, raisins and oat mixture.
Don’t over mix, just fold in.
Drop by tablespoon size onto a non stick cookie sheet about 2 inches apart. These cookies do rise a bit. You could shape them into smaller sizes if you want.
Bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes. Or until a light golden brown around the edges.
Should make about 30 cookies,depending on size +/-

bbq chicken

Too cold to grill outside! But I've been craving grilled anything! So I grabbed my cast iron grill pan, heated the oven to 500 degrees and viola! I have fire! Or I have grill, inside, where it's nice and warm. And you know what? It came out fabulous. My cast iron has grill-nubby thingee's on it so I got the grill marks. It's all about the grill marks right? Oh yeah! Since it was night time I don't have the best of pics, but you can imagine how good this tasted. I used a wonderful barbeque sauce from my buddies at Stonewall Kitchen.

my kind of "missing" cat...

It was such a nice day today, the sun was finally out, it was a warm 33 degrees outside! That's warm for us that have been stuck in the artic tundra for the last few weeks. I decided to get out early and do all my errands, get in my exercise of walking while the sun was still high and strong in the sky. Now normally when I go out and come back home my cat always, I mean always greets me at the door. Not today. He's such a friendly loving little guy. He always hears my car pulling into the driveway, runs over to the sun room watching me get out of the car, walk up the pathway, and at that point he runs to the other side of the house to the front door to greet me. No kitty to be found. I was so scared. I thought the worst....and told myself not to panic. I thought maybe he got outside? We don't let him outside because of all the coyotes we have around here. And then I remembered this did happen a couple times before and I eventually found him in my bedroom closet (he knows how to close the closet door, and for whatever reason he loves to close the closet doors and have a nap on the floor of my closet). He was not in the closet. I searched everywhere in the house, nothing. More panic came over me. I started thinking maybe he got into the back of the washing machine? You know how your mind starts thinking the absolute worst and craziest outcomes? Yeah, that's where I started thinking towards. And then all of a sudden, as I was walking down the stairs to go check out the laundry room, I looked over to the post & beams of the ceiling, over by the skylights and found this.....

Relief flooded over then a little bit of anger as it's not the safest place to be since the drop to the ground floor is a long way down. How did he get there? Upstairs in the bedroom, there is a little lookout window, that overlooks the downstairs. He jumped up onto that little railing, hopped onto the post beams and over to the windows.

This is the little opening. Crazy right? He got down fine and now, goes back and forth like it's nothing. I think everyone in this house has a bit of cabin fever lately, so maybe that's why he was feeling 'creative & daring'. So after that mini heart attack, I put away the groceries and wanted to go outside and see where my duck buddies were. Lately there have been a few ducks brave enough to kind of come close to me and say hi, but only if I feed them some treats. So, I wanted to give a few stale pieces of bread to them. As soon as I opened the slider, they heard that noise and came right over.

But as I was feeding them I turned to my left and looked at what was coming....

I had never seen this before! I was in shock and slowly, walked into the house to get my camera. I mean is this a shot or what? And if you can see in the distance, there are more crossing the little pathway heading over! And just behind that bush, by the pathway, are tons more coming over! It was so cool! I was lucky to get this shot, and wanted to feed them more, so on my way back to the house (to get more bread) a ton of them got spooked and flew back into the river. The fly-away wind they created was INTENSE!