Muffin Love

I love muffins. I am not sure why they are such comfort food for me but they are. I know everything will be alright if I have a muffin. They can be sweet or savory, pretty much any flavor, homemade or bakery purchased, there's just something cozy and reassuring about them to me. I also love making muffins. Blueberry (wild if possible please!) and lemon poppyseed are my two deep favorites.

A thinks muffins are silly. A bizzare idea, little psuedo-cakes wrapped in annoying paper that you eat at breakfast and call appropriate. Such a waste of calories.

And yet I persist. Never one for rampant sensibility, I am not to be daunted by such views.(Doesn't this recipe look amazing?) Nothing makes me feel more surely that all is well with the world than a sizable pat of butter melting into the open halves of a warm muffin.

Dee has recently started telling me how much he loves muffins and begun not only asking for them to eat but me to make them for him from scratch. Makes a muffin loving mommy's heart bubble right over. Last night A took Ru for a Big Boys Only Outing to the local skateboard park and left me with the smallest littles. I asked Dee what he thought we should do while they were gone and his answer was, "Make muffins mommy!!!! Blueberry muffins, because those are my favorite!" And so I promptly kissed him.

Related articles

• Breakfast Muffins: The Classic and the Unusual (blogher.com)
• Muffins! (bigideaslittleblog.wordpress.com)

Picnicking in Earnest

It was one of those idyllic days with perfect weather. Just exactly perfect. 75 degrees, brilliantly sunny, poofs of clouds, blazing blue sky, light breeze, and as many happy children as you can possibly cram into one minivan. Its crazy at our house lately but, its that good kind of crazy that leaves you collapsing into a droopy, smiley puddle at the end of the day.

This is ideal, dreamy summer. We had a picnic lunch today with Penny, my good friend Nutmeg and also Painterly, another good chum and of course our grand tumble of children. Amazing experience really...the kind of thing that happens in books. There was a big pitcher of ice water, lots of fresh fruit, quilts on the grass, multiple hampers of goods, potato chips, chicken salad, fresh garden greens, goldfish in quantity and a bar of chocolate to share all around, not to mention plenty of babies to pass to any open lap.

All this sunshine has my brain desperately hung up on lemon. Somehow, even though they are ripe in winter and cheapest then and freshest then my mind craves the flavor right about now. To go along with the theme I have this song stuck in my head pretty much perpetually these days. Wish I could share Mason Jennings playing it with you but instead you get to hear this happy little ukulele dude cover it.

Dreaming of making a grand and floaty lemon meringue pie in July...and satiating myself by heading downstairs to mix up the dry portion of these for breakfast. I do so love muffins. And lemon poppyseed is my top, all-time favorite...I think. I also really love blueberry. I had lemon poppyseed muffins for the very first time, made from a really exciting Jiffy mix (mixes were verboten in our house) when I was a little girl by my very artistic and glamorous aunt with the corkscrew curls and the face splitting grin. She was an amazing aunt to have in your back pocket. She knew all kinds of fabulous people, collected black beach rocks, told breath-taking stories and loved chocolate intensely. I was somewhat adoring. And she made lemon poppyseed muffins for me and I was smitten and have loved them ever since.

And while we're on the lemon theme...what about this? Doesn't that look like fun? Can just imagine drizzling it over the fresh ravioli I'm going to make with herbs from my garden in July! Yay summer!