I just spent two weekends and the week in between working on a skirt for my Halloween tree. I finished it up on Sunday morning, and I’ve got to say I’m pretty happy with it just because I think it’s so funny. It’s decorated with …
I’ve been especially pressed for time this month because my cat Josie has started a special kidney care diet and she’s decided she won’t eat her special food unless she’s sitting on my lap. Josie eats so slowly. She takes a few licks, then stops …
My mom recently took a trip to the Smoky Mountains, and she brought me a jar of Amish Wedding peach-pecan jam as a souvenir. I wanted to do something special with the jam, so on Saturday I used it to make Vegan Jam-Filled Oat Bran Muffins from a recipe I found in my all-time favorite cookbook, The Joy of Vegan Baking.
The muffins turned out perfect, and the jam was delicious—it made me wish I could take a trip to the Smokies. I’ll tell you a little about my mom’s visit.
She went up to the mountains with my sister Kris and Kris’s kids, Sophie and Jake, and they stayed in a cabin near Gatlinburg. They had fun every day for a week. They went gem-mining and hiked to a waterfall. They waded in cold mountain streams and got to see elk. They fooled around in the little town of Gatlinburg, which is like a permanent carnival, eating caramel corn for breakfast and giant snow cones for lunch. They visited all the Ripley’s attractions in Gatlinburg, including the Odditorium, the 5D Moving Theater, the haunted house, and the aquarium. Sophie and Jake spent their life savings on souvenirs (Jake got a giant stuffed narwhal).
On the way home they stopped in Dillard, Georgia, so Sophie could feed the goats at a wacky tourist trap called Goats on the Roof, and that’s where Mom got me my jam. She gave it to me last week at Jake’s birthday party, handing it to me as I sat with my cupcake at her big dining room table.
“Now I know you’re not much of a jam eater,” she said in her very Mom-ish way, “but I got you some anyway!”
Vegan Jam-Filled Oat Bran Muffins
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons ground flaxseed
6 tablespoons water
2 cups oat bran
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped walnuts
11/4 cups almond milk
1/3 cup canola oil
1/2 cup jam
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees and add papers to your muffin tins.
In a food processor or blender, mix the flaxseed and water until thick and creamy. This is your “egg.”
In a large bowl, combine the oat bran, flour, brown sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, and walnuts. Set aside. In a small bowl, combine the flaxseed mixture, almond milk, and oil. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until just blended.
Fill the muffin cups about half full with batter. Place a dab of jam in the center of each cup. Add more batter to fill the cups about three-fourths full, covering the jam.
Bake the muffins for 20 minutes.
Last weekend I made my first batch of muffins in our new kitchen. I cooked up some Vegan Orange Cranberry Muffins with a nutty, crumbly brown sugar topping. I used this recipe, which was easy to veganize with ground flaxseed (to replace the egg) and …
Last weekend we spent four days (Friday through Monday) painting the dining room, a project associated with our big kitchen redo. See, there used to be a pass-through from the kitchen to the dining room (it was essentially a big hole in the wall), and …
Rob and I spent last Sunday organizing our new kitchen cabinets. I had fun arranging my Fiestaware into bright, shiny stacks and asking Rob questions like, “So, what’s your favorite color of Fiestaware?” (I always like to chat and bug Rob while we’re working on a project, and I call these dumb questions “conversation starters.”)
If ever we were not in the kitchen, if we happened to stray into another room or find ourselves at Winn-Dixie, Rob would say, “Hey, what are we doing? Let’s go play in our new kitchen!”
And we’d go and organize or reorganize a cabinet.
“So,” I said at one point, “do you think we should put our different vinegars in alphabetical order?”
Rob said he thought arranging the bottles by height was good enough.
“So,” I said as I lined up the balsamic and the red wine, “what’s your favorite kind of vinegar?”
“Let’s not talk anymore,” he smiled.
Well, we finally got our kitchen remodeled. It was a bit of an ordeal. For about a month we had to wash our dishes in the bathroom. Oh, and, of course, we didn’t have a stove. I lived mostly on birthday-cake-flavored Oreos. In July and …
Probably the closest I’ve ever felt to my dad was in the late ‘90s when he became interested in old garden roses. I was living in Atlanta at the time, trying to get my first yard going, and suddenly Dad was offering me these wonderful …
Last weekend I did a couple little projects to spruce up the north side of the yard. The projects were my favorite kind, the kind that mostly involve shopping.
First, I added a short path leading up to the little shelter we call the Vine House. The path is made of five round sandstone steppingstones that I found at Esposito’s. (“They’re hand-cut!” the cashier told me.) The path curves through the powder-puff plants with their ferny leaves and pink flowers.
Clay pots galore surround the Vine House, and I filled them with fresh pentas I got at Home Depot. The pentas were brilliant red, hot-pink, and majenta, and before I even got them all planted, a hummingbird came to visit.
Next, I turned my attention to the bed around the main house. Near the big Meyer lemon, there was an ugly weedy spot that had been bothering me for months. I stared at it for a while and finally I decided on the perfect replacement for the weeds: a bird bath, flanked by a couple of autumn ferns. I love autumn ferns. They’re so tough. Plus, with their bronze-y plumage, they kind of remind me of plump, fluffy, well-feathered chickens—or maybe turkeys.
So I went to Tallahassee Nurseries and picked out a cool bird bath whose pedestal and bowl were encrusted with three-dimensional concrete shells—clam shells, conchs, and chambered nautiluses, all the treasures of the sea. I came home with the bird bath and the two autumn ferns I’d been dreaming about and got everything arranged under the lemon. When it was all in place, I spent some time admiring my new additions. I floated petals in the bird bath and took tons of pictures.
