Saturday, January 12, 2013

Muffin Tin Cookbook

When I was doing some Christmas shopping with a friend, we visited a cooking store. I picked up some coffee and a Denby crock for LB for Christmas, and had to restrain myself from buying anything for myself.

I didn't restrain myself too well, since I bought a pack of silicone mini-muffin cups. I did not, however, buy the digital scale I wanted, nor did I buy the silicone vegetable steamer. Most vexing, I did not buy The Muffin Tin Chef cookbook I spotted.

I've since checked out some amazon reviews and did find a copy of a different Muffin Tin Cookbook in the public library. I've been playing around with some of the recipes and haven't decided whether I need to own either one of these books.*

I had to buy some special ingredients, like whole wheat pastry flour, which cost about $6 and which I'm storing in the freezer. God forbid a $6 bag of flour get buggy. Even in a big city grocery store, there was only one brand, Bob's Red Mill, so it might be hard to find in a smaller town.

My other complaint is that I felt like I bought a lot of processed food.  I like ramen noodles as much as the next person, but most of my grocery shopping is definitely from the outer aisles of the grocery store: meat, produce, dairy. In shopping for some of these recipes, I ended up buying lunch meat, crescent rolls, thwack biscuits, etc.

So far, I've made monkey bread, pizza muffins, and chocolate chip muffins. They're cute and fun, but none has been particularly stellar, although the dog seemed to enjoy the pizza muffin he stole when I left it unattended. I'm hoping to try some of the egg recipes this weekend. This summer, I started making eggs in ham cups from a recipe I spotted on Pinterest and which shows up in the cookbook as well.

On the plus side, these recipes offer automatic portion control, but I don't know that they're really worth all of the effort.


ps--that's the Denby mini-crock I bought off to the right; the lid is on upside down to remind me to fill it with butter.
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*Don't be silly. Of course I'm going to buy it.

1 comment:

Peggy said...

You should store that flour in the freezer regardless of bugs. If you don't use it quickly, the oils in it go rancid at room temperature.