Book a Resolve

Personally, I have never been one for New Year's Resolutions as I believe that if something is bothering you and you wish to resolve the issue, you should not wait until the new year.  Life is too short any way.

But I have noticed that I could do with some more reading.  Perhaps by listing some of the books I will get to this year will help me to actually get to them.  So in no particular order...

1. The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley
2. Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov
3. Pushkin's Children, Tatiyana Tolstaya
4. To Live, Yu Hua
5. Irish Sagas and Folk Tales, Eileen O'Faolain
6. Evidence! Ciation & Analysis for the Family History, Elizabeth Shown Mills
7. Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley
8. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Yu Hua
9. Finding Your Canadian Ancestors, Irvine & Obee
10. Linear Models with R, Faraway
11. The remaining Shakespeare plays I haven't read
12. Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, Elizabeth Beeton
13. Teach Yourself Gaelic circa 1970, Roderick Mackinnon
14. How to take over the world from the tiny cell you made for yourself with just your laptop and unique personality
15. Cartographies of Disease, Tom Koch
16. Pushkin's House, Andrei Bitrov
17. Frederick Wentworth, Captain
18. Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes, Richard LaFeur
19. The Pattern Making Primer
20. Ancestry's Guide to Research: Case Studies in American Genealogy
21. A Garden Herbal, Anthony Gardiner

Hopefully this is not just another list, making me just another Emma!


With any luck, I also hope to get to:
1. an Aran pattern stitch sampler
2. type up the majority of my great, great grandmother's papers and notes
3. learn to play the violin
4. work on one of the many languages I am interested in
5. try to keep on top of everything

In truth, these are things that I don't intend to complete within this year but rather within the next couple of years, as some of the items are not activities that you want to do just once and then drop.  Guess what I should be doing now is setting up a schedule/time table to get to everything!

Muffins a' Three

Since the recipes for the muffins are available online and already nicely presented, I will provide a quick review of them instead of listing them myself.

The recipes under consideration are:
Cook's Country "Morning Glory Muffins"
Land O' Lakes "Nutmeg Streusel Muffins" and
Land O' Lakes "Eggnog Muffins with Spiced Butter"

Land O' Lakes Nutmeg Streusel Muffins

The first recipe I tried was the Nutmeg Streusel Muffins: a cakey, light and airy muffin that has nice flavor but might do better as a mini loaf or a cake than a muffin.  Perhaps they should rename the recipe "Nutmeg Streusel Cupcakes," or "Non-American Nutmeg Streusel Cupcakes" as all the American versions of cupcakes seem to consist of at least a third of frosting and a bit too much sugar.  Then again it could be my preference for savory and salty treats over sugar ones that has continued since the teen years.  All in all, not bad but not my favorite; thankfully my Mother enjoyed them, having more of a sweet tooth.

Land O' Lakes Eggnog Muffins

The second recipe was the Eggnog Muffins with Spiced Butter.  It should be noted that I made only half of the topping and spiced butter part of the recipe which was more than enough to cover all the muffins.  Also, I did not have any eggnog but the recipe does say one can also use half & half instead, which amazingly I did have despite not being a coffee drinker.  The result, however, was a rather dry and dense muffin which truly requires the remaining spiced butter in order to please the palate.  This was the least favorite of the three and became the hardest muffins over night.

Cook's Country Morning Glory Muffins

The final recipe was the Morning Glory Muffins.  Again, I slightly altered the recipe to fit what ingredients I had on hand and could afford, amounting to replacing the shredded coconut with 1/2 tsp coconut extract and the crushed pineapple with 3/4 cup water.  The water was needed to replace the 1/4 cup reduced fruit concentrate with the amount of water increased to adjust for high elevation baking and loosen the batter.  One of the surprising parts of the recipe was that one has to "over fill" the 12-cup muffin tin as the batter was rather dense (mostly due to the fruit) and does not rise exceedingly despite....oh dear!  This is where I realize that the recipe called for baking soda when I used baking powder.  (Something I seem to keep doing.)  Well, all the same, the muffins did rise as well as the ones pictured in the magazine copy of the recipe and there was no ill effect on the taste.  Indeed, these Morning Glory muffins tasted the best out of the three and could still be considered a healthy treat.  Or at least that is what I am going to tell myself.

So the winner is Cook's Country Morning Glory Muffins!  The next time I try this recipe I might have all the ingredients and substitute the small amount of sugar with agave syrup, just to make them that much healthier.

I am now 30% closer to reaching the cooking goal!


P.S. will not be posting about the Fannie Farmer Chocolate Fudge as it did not turn into fudge; rather a chocolate goop with the consistency of wet sand.  But rather than waste all that good chocolate, I turned the "fudge" into brownies, albeit much too dense and best served with vanilla ice cream.