I wish I could report that having so many high-quality vegetables in the house has turned my five-year old son into a great veggie eater. It hasn’t. I am probably largely to blame because I have let him get away with turning up his nose at the good stuff too much. I’m working on that. But research shows there also may be a genetic element. My husband refused almost all veggies when he was growing up and used to heat up a can of baked beans with his meals instead. Now he eats them all (with one strange exception: asparagus!) And I don’t remember being a great lover of veggies either. Salad in particular I never touched as a kid but adore as an adult. So I have hope that the Boy’s aversion to vegetables represents an immaturity of the palate and with time, lots of exposure, and gentle coaxing (but never forcing!) his diet will broaden.
In the meantime, we bake together. And one of our favorite things to bake together is blueberry muffins. Those, he will eat. And they’re pretty healthy — for a skinny, super-active kid, at least. (If not for his mom who has a few pounds to lose.)
A quick word on names: I’m not using his (or mine, for different reasons). The reason I’m not using his is that he has a right to privacy which I don’t want to infringe. At age five, he is way too young to decide whether he wants to expose himself to the world. I (with his father) am making that decision on his behalf, and we are ok with me writing about him but not using his name or his face.
As for my name, I’m also not ready to expose myself — at least not yet. I haven’t figured out how my professional life and my blogging life work together. Even though my blogging is harmless to all, and done purely for my own pleasure, my professional life is complicated and sensitive, and I’m not sure how people involved in that life will feel about it. That’s all I can say right now. I hope to “come out” sometime in the future, when I figure the whole thing out . . . .
Now, for the baking. While recipes are not the main focus of this blog, I will give this one at the end, because it’s good, so scroll down if you want it.
The Boy knows the basic rule of muffins (and a lot baking, actually). You mix the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients separately, and then you combine them quickly without over-mixing. Here he is mixing the dry ingredients. I always include whole-wheat flour when I bake with the Boy, because it helps assuage my guilt that he is not a better veggie-eater.
Then the wet ingredients, which in this case include a generous amount of melted butter and plenty of vanilla extract. The addition of lots of high-quality vanilla improves almost all baking.
Then we combine the wet and dry ingredients and add two cups of frozen wild blueberries. We have good blueberries on the East End too but that season has not started yet and the wild blueberries from Maine are very different. They are much smaller and have a very intense flavor. They are really so delicious and healthy.
Then we put them into the well-used, ugly but functional, blue silicone muffin pans.
Sorry folks. This ain’t no Smitten Kitchen. No food porn here. I would do it if I could — I just don’t know how!
Pop them into the oven (Gaggenau steam-combi, sans steam.)
And voila!
The Boy’s Blueberry Muffins (adapted from Gourmet, September, 2003)
The wet ingredients:
6 tablespoons melted butter
1/3 cup milk
1 whole large egg
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
The dry ingredients:
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt (less if you’re using salted butter)
And finally:
2 cups blueberries (preferably Wyman’s frozen wild blueberries)
Method:
Mix together the wet ingredients. (I find that you don’t really have to let the melted butter cool much before mixing it with the milk and eggs.) Mix together the dry ingredients. Combine briefly just until the dry ingredients are incorporated. Fold in the blueberries.
Spoon into muffin pans to make twelve regular-sized muffins. Bake about 25 minutes at 375 degrees.
farmhopper 