Confession + Recipe = Confessipe?

(the impostors)



(deeeleeshus)

I have a confession: these are muffins. That's right, I made muffins, perfectly good muffins, and then decided I actually wanted cupcakes, so I iced them. Shocking, I know. But hear me out: what really IS the difference between muffins and cupcakes? I mean I know in general muffins can have things baked in them, like nuts or fruit, and are generally larger than cupcakes, but really, you COULD bake cupcakes with nuts in them and make them really big. In this case, I think the plain muffins were a little less crumbly-cakey than a cupcake would be, but I think the real difference between cupcakes and muffins is frosting. I'm pretty sure if you fed a naive test subject one of my frosted muffins, and told them it was a cupcake, what they would say would be "Mmmmm!" and not "This is no cupcake, this is a MUFFIN IMPOSTOR!"

And now, for side-by-side comparison: the muffin recipe I used and a basic cupcake recipe, both found online at either, recipezaar, allrecipes, epicurious, or cooks.com, I don't remember (oops). P.S. - I multiplied my muffin recipe by 3, because it makes 6 muffins, and the cupcake recipe makes 18.

Muffins...................................Cupcakes
3 cups flour.......................................3 cups flour
3/4 teaspoons salt...........................1/2 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder............2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/8 cup of oil.....................................2/3 cup unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar...................................1 3/4 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups milk................................1 1/4 cups milk
1 1/2 eggs.........................................2 eggs
...........................................................1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Not identical twins, but maybe sisters, right? Clearly the muffins aren't as sweet as the cupcakes, but once you slap that frosting on top, they're really not lacking in sweetness. In case you were wondering about the recipe instructions, both follow the usual quickbread formula: you combine the dry ingredients (flour, salt, and baking powder) in one bowl, the wet ingredients (fat, sugar, milk, eggs, and vanilla) in another, beat the wet ones well, then slowly add the dry. The muffins bake at 400, and the cupcakes at 350, both for ~20 minutes.

Overnight Bread

(a few slices of bread for sandwiches)

One of the recipes I'm definitely keeping from the Hillbilly Housewife experiment is her recipe for Overnight Bread. I'd never made bread before trying this recipe, but I found it easy and accessible. I've heard a lot of people talk about using bread makers, but for a bread this simple I almost think it would be more work to take the machine out and clean it and start it up. I make two loaves at a time, which works because I only have 2 pans, and besides that homemade bread doesn't keep like store-bought bread does because it doesn't have any preservatives in it. I also make my bread half-whole wheat, and I think the flavor and texture turn out pretty nicely. This is a light bread, and it tends to be a little crumblier than the store-bought stuff I'm used to, but I'm not sure how it compares to other similar recipes.

Oh, and there's a reason for the name. This bread is best made before bed, because of the very long first rise.

Overnight Bread
adapted from Hillbilly Housewife
(makes 2 loaves, total time: ~18 hours)

2 cups warm tap water
1/3 cup non-fat dry milk
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 packet yeast
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 of 1/3 cup of vegetable oil
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 cups whole wheat flour

1. Mix water, dry milk, and sugar in a very large bowl. Sprinkle the yeast on top, and allow to sit for a few minutes.

2. Add salt, oil, and flour. Mix with a wooden spoon until the dough becomes too thick, then use your hands to bring it together the rest of the way.

3. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead for 10 full minutes. Coat the dough with oil, replace it into the bowl, cover, and let it rise for 12-18 hours, until it has doubled in size.

4. Punch the dough down, divide it into 2 loaves, and place them in oiled loaf pans. Cover both, and let rise again, 2 hours, or until they've doubled in size.

5. Bake the loaves at 350 for 40 minutes. Cool them for a few minutes in the pans, but then turn them out and cool on a rack until they reach room temperature. I wrap mine in paper towels and place them in large zip-loc bags.

Notes: You could of course use actual milk instead of water and dry milk powder, but first you'd have to bring it to the temperature of warm tap water.

Curry in a Hurry Without Worry

(Yes, this is a picture of the recipe book, and not the food. The book is prettier, trust me.)

Have you ever had one of those days? You know, when you get home from Kendo and you're dog tired and starving and it's almost 10pm? And all you have in the kitchen is half a bag of lentils and half a can of tomatoes? Ok, so maybe that's just me, but anyone can appreciate a dinner you can put together when time and ingredients are lacking. That is why I make Dal. I have this bright little paperback cookbook called Curries Without Worries. I normally cook Thai curry (I know, I know, I'll get around to posting that recipe someday), but this book is devoted to basic Indian recipes. I'll admit I haven't gotten around to some of the more effortful dishes from it - Roghanjosh: the ultimate Kashmiri lamb dish, for instance - but there are two pages of my copy that are well worn. One of them is the primer on how to cook long-grained rice (basmati, etc), and the other is the page labeled "Delicious Everyday DAL."

Dal is essentially lentil curry. All you need are lentils, some type of vegetable, water, and spices. It's so warm! So fragrant! So tasty and spiced and comfort food-y! You don't know how many times lentils have rescued me when I'm saying to myself "Oh my GOD there is nothing in the kitchen to eat. I am SO hungry . . . man I really don't want to go to the grocery store. I'm so tired! Wheat thins are not dinner!"

Delicious Everyday DAL
adapted from Curries Without Worries by Sudha Koul
(4 servings - ok, so I ate half -, total time: 40 minutes)

1 cup lentils
6 cups water
1/2 to 1 (14.5 oz) can diced tomatoes
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon ground ginger
S&P to taste
chili powder to taste

1. Bring all ingredients to a boil over high heat.

2. Reduce heat to low, simmer for ~30 minutes, until lentils are tender.

3. Yes, that's really it.

A few notes: the original recipe calls for more authentic ingredients, like real tomatoes, fresh ginger, coriander, and ghee instead of butter. I'm sure it tastes great like that, but it tastes great like this too. You can serve this with rice or flatbread; most recently I served it with garlic toast, but that's just me.

Colors

Well, I'm getting mixed signals, so I'm going to keep playing around with the blog colors a little. Right now I have them set up in an ode to the blue cupcake photo. :)

What Do You Think?

I'm trying to decide whether I like the black background or white background better. What do you think?

The Hillbilly Experiment: What I Learned

(kneading 2 loaves of HbHw's 'overnight bread' /flex)

This was my normal food-day before the experiment: wake up 30 minutes before class, drink a glass of milk, go to class, possibly make a sandwich for lunch, or eat chips and hummus, make a 4-serving dinner, eat half, eat dessert (probably oreos). Not all pizza and ramen, to be sure, but not great either. This has been my typical food-day during the experiment: wake up 1 hour before class, make and eat breakfast with juice or milk, make a sandwich or something more substantial for lunch, make a 2-serving dinner and eat half, make fresh bread, muffins, or iced tea as needed. At first I didn't think I'd be able to eat all the food that was slated for each day, but boy was I wrong. Other things I've learned:

1) Dishes speak louder than words, especially if that word is "vegetarian." I'd discussed trying a mostly vegetarian diet with S before, but he wasn't big on the idea. I think a lot of people think of skimpy, unfilling food, or tons of salads when they think "vegetarian." If you want to cook vegetarian food and you're feeding other people, don't start out by saying "vegetarian;" believe me, you'll have them at "lentil and vegetable soup with dumplings."

2) On the note of vegetarian food: legumes, whole grains, dairy, and greens are your friend. I really already knew this, but I'd never put it in practice. If you're not going to be eating much meat, you can use the proteins found in legumes (beans, peanuts and lentils), whole grains, and dairy to create proteins that are just as complete as those found in meat. Especially if you're a woman, eat your greens to get the iron you won't be getting from meat (believe me, anemia is no fun).

3) Baking is not as complicated as I thought it was. This menu has pretty much been a baking boot camp for me; for some reason I always thought baking as more complex and tricky than cooking in general. Turns out, making everyday baked good like bread, muffins, and biscuits is not that tough. Making your own iced tea's not so bad, either.

4) Homemade bread products taste MUCH better than store-bought. The bread, muffin, dumpling, etc recipes on this menu are pretty much as basic as you can get, but they knocked the socks off anything I've ever bought in the taste department. Never before have I had the thought "hmm, maybe I'll just have some bread as a snack."

5) Lastly, caloric drinks should be consumed like foods, and not like water. In this case I'm just talking about juice and milk, but it really goes for soda and other things as well. Even though orange juice and skim milk are good for you, it's cheaper, and really better for you, to treat them like foods. You might eat bread and ice cream, but you wouldn't just spend all day eating them. Water is free, and great for you, and tea is pretty close to free, and just fine for you if you don't sweeten it with sugar.

Oh, and collard greens are actually really tasty. Who knew?

The Hillbilly Experiment: What I Liked

(The picture S took of the chocolate cupcakes I put together from spare pantry ingredients, recipe later)






(the picture I took of the cupcakes. Turns out I had the "night mode" on or something, but I'll tell you I was really surprised when I downloaded my photos)




Even though I made several changes to HbHw's menu, there are lots of things I like about it.

1) It's cheap. Really, really cheap. A lot of "save money on groceries" articles I read propose things like "save money by cutting out the caviar." Ok, maybe not that extreme, but telling me to skip the Starbuck's bottled lattes isn't really helping. If you really are in an emergency, or if you just want to learn how to pare your grocery bill some, this is a great resource.

2) Nearly everything is made from scratch. Even though I home-cook a lot of food, our normal shopping list usually includes processed snack foods, breads, and drinks. My mother always told me to "eat a variety of foods, in as close to their natural state as possible." I might not always have the time to make my own bread, but I think it's better for us than the processed version.

3) It's nutritious. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a diet menu (although the site does have one), but it does an excellent job of providing the necessary nutrients, especially if you use whole grains, like I did. On a small budget, it's even harder than normal to resist filling up on empty calories, but there are a lot of lean proteins here, as well as fiber, greens, and other good things.

Of course sometimes a woman's just gotta say "Screw nutritious; I have flour, butter, cocoa, sugar, milk, eggs, and baking powder, and I'm MAKING CUPCAKES." They weren't really part of the plan, but they were a delicious detour.

The Hillbilly Experiment: Grocery List

(I emailed S this picture I took of some of the bread I made, to see if he could use Photoshop to tone down the glare. . . .and this is what happened)

In order to adjust the grocery list from Hillbilly Housewife, I began by literally cutting all of the amounts on the list in half. I didn't know off the top of my head what size containers of various items were available at the store, so I just wrote down half the amount on the website and planned to buy as close as possible to my written amount. Of course this also meant I would be halving all of the recipes, and doing it as efficiently as possible. This hasn't been a problem so far; one day I made a recipe that called for 3 eggs, so in order to halve it, I beat one of the eggs and put half of it into a ziploc baggie to use for French toast the next morning!

Next I scratched off the list everything I already had at home: sugar, baking powder, oatmeal, salt, pepper, syrup, bullion (well, Better than Bullion, actually), vinegar, cinnamon, garlic powder, and chili powder. I actually had 5 pounds of all-purpose flour, and a bag of Splenda at home also, more on that later.

Finally I replaced some ingredients with equivalents that I thought were healthier or better-tasting. I replaced all of the grains with their whole versions (brown rice, etc.), and bought a bag of whole-wheat flour to go with my all-purpose stuff. I replaced all of the canned vegetables, except the tomatoes, with frozen; frozen veggies taste better than canned, retain many more nutrients, and are still quite cheap. I replaced the margarine with butter (part of this experiment was about eating less processed food, remember). I replaced the powdered milk that would be used for drinking with a half gallon of skim milk because drinking powdered milk just isn't the same, and I replaced the celery with a bunch of leeks. Leeks cost more than celery, but S isn't fond of celery, and I'm not a huge fan of it cooked.

Besides HbHw's groceries, we also bought a box of pasta and some sauce, 2 frozen pizzas for lazy dinners and the ingredients to make Thai curry, because we loves us some curry. All in all, we bought enough food for 10 days of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, and 1 day of just dinner. The total came to about $80. If you count a snack as half of a meal, that comes to $1.11 per person per meal. $1.11! That won't even buy you a soda some places!

Next time: what I like about the Hillbilly Housewife menu.

The Hillbilly Experiment: Intro

I'd been thinking recently about trying to cut processed food out of our diet as much as possible; besides that, S likes to play "grocery bill limbo" (my term, not his), seeing how low he can get our grocery bill without resorting to buying things that don't taste good (or eating a diet entirely of pasta, for instance). To these ends, we decided to experiment with an interesting online resource: Hillbilly Housewife's $45 Emergency Menu . I'd like to share our experience with this in a few blog posts. My camera's batteries died and I don't have new ones yet, so no pictures for this first post, but they're coming soon, I promise.

Now, the title is misleading for a few reasons: first, the menu is for a family of 4 but the groceries were priced in 2006 and mainly came from Walmart and The Dollar Store. There are only 2 of us to feed, and we shop at Shnuck's, and it's 2008, so we knew the total wasn't going to be the same. Second, this wasn't an emergency, so I changed a few things according to my preferences.

In the next post I'll note what I changed about the menu and what our grocery bill came to - in future posts I'll discuss what I like about the menu/recipes, and what I've learned from the experiment, and highlight specific recipes.

A final note - this is not a wholesale recommendation of hillbillyhousewife.com. The author has a very different worldview from me, and I don't agree with some things she says, but I bow to her greater experience in the arena of home cooking.