Monthly Archives: July 2007

Monday Muffins

At my request, every birthday brings me a new crop of cookbooks to wallow in. This year was particularly fine, bringing me the two books from bloggers: David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop” and Heidi Swanson’s “Super Natural Cooking“.

Banana pecan muffinsSuper Natural Cooking is the one intriguing me most at the moment (and only partly because I don’t have a freezer yet, so can’t make David’s ice creams!) It is one of the most unusual books I’ve come across in a long time: a book of healthy, natural, vegetarian recipes containing a wealth of unfamiliar ingredients … that all look incredibly delicious and tempting. All this has been said before, but this is a really beautiful and interesting book, and I look forward to getting to grips with quinoa, farro and sprouted chickpea burgers in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, something from my more usual baking repetoire – banana muffins. A bunch of organic bananas had been sitting on the windowsill glowering at me for more than a week, and getting browner and browner. This was the solution – and they seemed to go down very well at work to cheer up a grey and rainy monday.

Espresso Banana Muffins

  • 290g light brown self-raising flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • (or 145g whole wheat flour, 145g plain flour and 2 tsp baking powder)
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt
  • 150g walnuts (I used pecans)
  • 1 tbsp espresso powder
  • 85g butter, room temperature
  • 120g soft brown sugar
  • 60 golden caster sugar
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 250g plain yoghurt
  • 310g peeled bananas, mashed (about 3 large bananas, the riper the better)

Heat the oven to 180C/350F. Spread the pecans or walnuts onto a baking sheet and toast for about 8 minutes. Remove from the oven, cool a little and chop. Set aside. Turn the oven up to 190C/375F. Prepare a 12 cup muffin tin with paper cases.

Mix the flour, baking powder, salt, espresso powder and around two-thirds of the chopped walnuts together.

Mash the bananas and mix in the yoghurt and vanilla. Set aside.

Beat the butter and sugars together until creamy. Mix in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the yoghurt mixture.

Add the flour, and stir together briefly, just until the streaks of flour have pretty much disappeared. Don’t overmix; it’s better to leave it too lumpy than too smooth.

Spoon the mixture into the muffin cups and top with the remaining chopped nuts.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out without batter clinging to it. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Goldilocks’ Chicken

When choosing a recipe to make, I often find myself objecting to some element of each one I read – an unpossessed ingredient, a step that I deem too fiddly – and move right along to the next one. Given the size of my cookbook library (not to mention the awesome power of the interwebs), this can lead to excessive time being lost before even getting to the kitchen. So the right course is often to pick and choose elements from each of them to arrive at a happy compromise – the option in the middle that is just right.

Yesterday’s problem was roast chicken, and my inspiration came from reading Laurie Colwin’s second compilation of cooking writing, More Home Cooking.  Her idea is to roast the chicken relatively slowly but thoroughly, to the point where the joints separate easily, and the leg meat falls from the bone, and to roast some vegetables at the same time. Laurie Colwin prescribes over 3 hours of roasting at a low temperature – I didn’t have time for that, but I liked the idea of the end result.So I turned to a reliable standby:  Marcella Hazan’s Roast Chicken with Two Lemons.

Marcella Hazan prescribes a pattern of temperatures that leads to a good, well-cooked bird, but also that your chicken is stuffed with 2 pierced lemons and the cavity sealed with a toothpick – and I didn’t want to fiddle that much. So I ended up with a compromise – and that was just right.

Roast chicken and vegetables

  • 1 large organic chicken
  • 5 or 6 medium potatoes
  • 1 onion
  • 4 medium carrots
  • 1/2 lemon
  • 6 cloves garlic
  • small handful fresh thyme
  • 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
  • olive oil, salt and pepper

Remove the chicken from the fridge at least an hour before you want to start cooking, to allow it to come towards room temperature. Pre-heat the oven to 180C (160C fan). Spread a little olive oil in a roasting tin. Remove any fat from the cavity, season inside the cavity with salt, and place the garlic cloves (unpeeled), thyme and half lemon in there. There now follows a series of roasting phases:

  1. Place the chicken breast side down and roast for 30 minutes.
  2. Turn the chicken breast-side up, baste it and add the peeled potatoes and onions to the pan. Roast for a further 30 minutes.
  3. Remove the chicken and add the carrots, peeled and halved, and baste again. Roast for a further 30 minutes.
  4. Turn up the oven to 210C (190C fan) for a final 20 minutes.
  5. Remove the chicken to a cutting board to rest. Toss the vegetables in the pan juices and return to the hot oven to brown for another 10 minutes.

Carve the chicken and serve with the roasted vegetables, plus a green vegetable such as green beans or broccoli. I served this with green beans from the garden, which are going great guns in all this rain.