Loaded Baked Potato Muffins #MuffinMonday

Imagine a loaded baked potato full of sharp cheddar and crispy bacon bits and sour cream and onion tops.  In a muffin.  No kidding.  I think this is my favorite muffin so far.  Have I said that before?  Probably.  But this time I really, really mean it.  I ate two back to back, standing at the kitchen counter.  And then I had to go sit down and clutch my chest.  So rich, so good.  Serve them with a salad and call them lunch.  Or dinner.  But make these muffins.

Ingredients
6 slices bacon
230g or 8 oz potato
Sea salt
Black pepper
Handful green onions
8 oz or 225g extra sharp cheddar
1 1/2 cups or 190g flour
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup or 180ml milk
1/2 cup or 120ml sour cream
1 egg
1/4 cup or 60ml canola or other light oil

Method
Fry your bacon until it is crispy.   Set on paper towels to drain.  I use a single piece of paper towel on top of newspaper.  Keeps the ink off the bacon and doesn't waste a bunch of paper towels.

If your potato is thin-skinned, by all means, leave the peel on, otherwise peel it.  Then cut it into small squares.

Fry the potato pieces in the bacon grease until fork tender and nicely golden on all sides.  Set aside to cool.

Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and liberally grease your 12-cup muffin pan.

Chop your green onions and bacon into little pieces and grate your cheddar cheese.

Set aside a little of each to use for topping later.

In a large mixing bowl, combine your flour, salt, sugar and baking powder.

Add in the grated cheese, bacon bits and green onions.  Stir well.

Add in the cooled potatoes and stir again.

In a smaller mixing bowl, whisk your egg, milk, sour cream and oil.

Fold your liquids into the dry ingredients.

Divide the batter between the prepared cups in the muffin pan.

Top each with some of the reserved cheddar, onion tops and bacon bits.

Bake in your preheated oven for 20-25 minutes or until the muffins are lovely and golden.

Allow to cool in the pan for a few minutes then remove to a wire rack to continue cooling.  You may need to run a knife around the edges if the cheese is sticking to the pan.

These are fabulous warm and almost as good cold!

Enjoy!

I’m on a touring holiday right now with my mom so if I don’t answer comments right away, please know that I am still delighted when you leave them and will respond as soon as I have internet access again. 

Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins #MuffinMonday

These sour cream chocolate chip muffins are sweet but not too sweet, with fluffy insides perfectly complemented by the semi-sweet chocolate chips. Bake a batch for someone you love!

For the relatively transient life that I have led, I have some good friends who have been my friends for a very long time. I was an expat as a small child but we moved to the Houston area when I was going into fourth grade, after my parents divorced.

My father continued with the expat life, always making sure that my sisters and I had bedrooms wherever he lived and his employer always paid for at least one flight a year, when we would spend most of the three months of summer in his latest location. He would have had us year round if he could (always nice to be wanted!) but Mom would never have given us up and he often lived in places where the expat children ended up going to boarding school anyway because of the lack of a good quality local English language school. (Talking to you, Negritos, Peru and Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.)

Once again, anyhoo (feel like I have been digressing a lot lately) we moved to Houston, my mother, two sisters and I in the summer between my third and fourth grade years. Mother didn’t think moving back to New Iberia, LA as a young (unwilling, as it were) divorcee was a good idea and I am sure that she was right. Goodness knows the people of the big, progressive city of Houston were judgmental enough. We are talking about the Seventies, folks, and I was one of only two children of divorced parents in my entire fourth grade class of 60 children (two homerooms.) I don’t even want to tell you what those statistics are now but, suffice to say, that there are a lot of families and children in pain out there.

Dear me, but the start of this post is depressing! Let me go on to say that the friends I made in that fourth grade class are still some of my best friends today. Without explanation or excuse, we can get together and, frankly, sometimes act like fourth graders or perhaps 12^th graders because there is often alcohol involved. (Hey, judgers, the drinking age was 18 back then so all of us most of us were legal.)

Last Thursday one of those dear friends was in the hospital recovering from surgery. She was blessed by the presence of her mother, elder son, only daughter and a caring sister I had just missed greeting. I arrived with these muffins for the nurses, so they would take extra good care of her. I would have volunteered to stay the night but she was being ably cared for by her excellently raised daughter, whom I trained briefly in nurse bribery and cajoling. I hung around until the on-call doctor appeared and we got her meds changed from those that were making her sick (there was some discussion of a replacement Jack Daniels IV, which was rejected) and then I handed over the bribery muffins and responsibility, secure that she was in good hands.

Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins

If you need people to see things your way or to take care of a loved one, these muffins seem to work pretty well. Also, they are part of Muffin Monday, which is good fun for me. This recipe comes from Taste of Home. Aside from adding more chips, this recipe was made as written because you don’t need to mess with a pretty good thing.

Ingredients

1-1/2 cups or 190g all-purpose flour (I used King Arthur Unbleached White Wheat.)
2/3 cup or 132g sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 cup (8 ounces) or 240ml sour cream
5 tablespoons or 1/3 cup or 70g butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (Original recipe called for 3/4 cup but what’s a 1/4 cup of chocolate between friends? The difference between “I like you a whole lot” and “I love you,” that’s what.)

Method
 Line a muffin tin with paper muffin cups or spray with non-stick spray. Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Mix it around a little and make a little well in the middle.

Combine the egg, sour cream, butter and vanilla.

Stir into dry ingredients just until moistened.

Fold in the chocolate chips.

Fill your muffin cups three-fourths full.

Yay! I bought a new muffin tin. I didn't realize how old and grotty mine had gotten till I started taking photos!

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for five minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack.

Enjoy!

You might also be interested in these muffin recipes:
Sheila's Mexican Cornbread
Quick Bread Breakfast Muffins
Banana Bacon Peanut Butter Chip Muffins

Beef Stroganoff

If you’ve been around and reading this blog since Individual Beef Wellingtons then you know the provenance of the beef for this stroganoff.  I had half of a filet mignon or tenderloin and used the thick side to make two generous steaks.  The skinny end of the tenderloin, I sliced up into pieces suitable for stir-fry or stroganoff and threw them, bagged carefully, into the freezer.  In fact, I labeled the bag: stroganoff meat.  It wasn’t a lot of meat, but I knew it could be bulked out with onions and mushrooms and, served over linguine, make another generous meal for two or three.  And so it did.

Ingredients

1 cup sour cream (or 1 cup whipping cream, 1 tablespoon white vinegar, plus 1 pinch of salt)

320g or 11.25 oz beef, cut into thin pieces

2 medium onions

200g or 7 oz Swiss brown or other mushroom of your choice

1/2 cup dry white wine

1 beef stock cube

300g or 10.5 oz linguine or other dried pasta of your choice

15g butter

Olive oil

Sea salt

Black pepper

Method

First, I make my sour cream.  Obviously skip this step if you have store-bought.  Add a tablespoon of white vinegar to your measuring cup.  Fill to the 1-cup line with heavy whipping cream.  Stir thoroughly.  Add a pinch of sea salt.  Stir again and set aside.  This will continue to thicken and will be just like store-bought sour cream by the time you need to use it.  (This can be used anytime sour cream is called for in a recipe, sweet or savory.)

Over a low fire, melt the butter, adding a couple of tablespoons of olive oil to the skillet. The oil will raise the burning temperature of the butter so it doesn’t burn by accident. While the butter is melting, chop your onions.

Add the onions to the pan and sauté gently until they are soft and translucent.   This could take as many as 10 or 15 minutes over a low flame.

Meanwhile, slice your mushrooms.

Add the 1/2 cup white wine to the pan and cook till it’s hot again. 

Add the beef cube and keep cooking over a low heat until the wine is almost completely reduced.  Once again, this could take 10 minutes or more.  You want the onions dissolving almost to a mush.

Put water on to boil and cook your pasta according to package instructions.

When the onions are pretty dry again, move them to a small bowl off the heat.

Turn the fire up high and get your pan really hot.  Add the beef all at once and continue to cook over a high fire so it browns.  You can add another couple of glugs of olive oil at this point. 

When the meat is mostly cooked, add the onions back in and then add the sliced mushrooms.  Your heat is still on high at this point.  Let this cook for several more minutes, until the mushrooms have softened and then turn the fire right back down to simmer.

Add in the sour cream, stirring gently.  Let it bubble along for a few more minutes until it thickens slightly.  Serve over the cooked pasta. 

Enjoy!

Cranberry Cake with Cranberry Glaze

Beautiful buttery Bundt cake made with sour cream and filled with whole cranberry sauce and topped with bright red cranberry glaze.

One of my favorite parts of travel is poking about in foreign stores and markets and lusting over the available ingredients and cookware, only some of which I can bring home in a suitcase. Other people, I hesitate to say normal people because with my new addiction of reading foodie blogs, it appears I am in good company, tend to bring home trinkets and fabric and souvenirs of a more personal or mass-produced nature. Eiffel Tower paperweight, anyone? I went to Switzerland in April and, aside from some chocolate, this is the one thing I bought. From an antique store.

I adore its shape and its potential. I also love that it will always bring back memories of a perfect day in the Swiss countryside, making new friends and reconnecting with one dear friend from many years ago.

Today I am using it to make a delicious, moist cranberry cake – the perfect use for any leftover cans of whole cranberry sauce after Thanksgiving – but good enough to buy a can of whole cranberry sauce, just to make it.  I did. Many thanks to my friend, Lizann, for sharing this great recipe with me!

Ingredients

For the cake:

1 cup or 227g butter

2 eggs

1/2 teaspoon salt

8 oz or 240ml sour cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup or 200g sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 cups or 250g flour

1 can (14 oz or 397g) whole cranberry sauce (3/4 for the cake, 1/4 for the glaze)

For the glaze:

1/4 can whole cranberry sauce

1 heaped teaspoon cornstarch or corn flour

1/4 cup or 31g confectioners’ or powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon butter

Method

Preheat oven to 350°F or 180°C.

Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  

Still beating, add in the eggs, one at a time.  

In a separate bowl or in the measuring cup, add your vanilla to the sour cream.  Sift dry ingredients together and add to butter/sugar/egg bowl, alternating with the sour cream and vanilla.  

First some dry ingredients.

Then some sour cream. And so on. 

Beat until all is mixed well.

Spoon half the batter into well-greased AND FLOURED tube or Bundt pan.  (If you have a vintage one, perhaps a gift from your grandmother or great-aunt, or a trip to Geneva, take a few moments to recall fond memories while you butter it good! Do not skimp on the butter. You do not want this cake to stick.)



Smooth it out and make a sort of very shallow trench in the middle. 

Mash the cranberry sauce with a fork, just to break up the jelly part.  Whole berries are fine.  

Spoon in 3/4 of the can of cranberry sauce on top of the batter.

Top with remaining batter and spread it around.

Bake for about 55-65 minutes or until a wooden skewer comes out clean. If the top starts to get too brown, cover it loosely with a piece of foil. 

Meanwhile, the glaze!  Add the cornstarch to the rest of the can of cranberries and stir until it is dissolved.  Add the confectioners’ sugar and the vanilla and stir again.

Put the mixture in a pan on a gentle fire and cook, stirring frequently, until it begins to bubble and thicken.

Take the pan off the fire and whisk in the butter.  Allow to cool until the cake is ready.

When the cake is done, take it out and allow to cool for 10 minutes.  It should pull away from the sides slightly here.  You can run your toothpick or wooden skewer around the edge of the cake to encourage it to turn loose when turned over.

Turn pan upside down on platter and remove pan while still warm.

Drizzle on the glaze after the cake has cooled a bit.  A too-hot cake will make the glaze melt right off.   Enjoy!

Enjoy!

What do YOU bring home from your holidays?  Leave me a comment.  I’d love to know.