Tag Archives: snack

Lemon Cranberry Cream Cheese Muffins

lemon cranberry cream cheese muffins-up closeYou like all of those words.  You like them individually.  You’ll also like them together.  You’ll want them to hang out more, maybe rent an apartment in New York together.  You’ll want them to have an insanely popular television show on TLC where you can follow along with their hopes, dreams, careers, personal relationships, good times and inevitable betrayals.  And you’ll cry at the reunion show, “Lemon Cranberry Cream Cheese Muffins: The Next Batch” because no one thought that Cranberry would show up, but she will.  She will.

(This is why you shouldn’t write blog posts when you’re tired.) Continue reading

Laur-a-balls

There’s a great joke in an even greater movie, a classic work by an utterly influential artiste. Anyway, in the joke, this guy is talking to a girl he likes at a party and he lists off all these fantastic foreign foods that are sitting on the buffet, including dates.  And he offers her a plate and says, “Would you like a date?”  “Sure,” she replies, reaching for it.  He pulls the plate away.  “How about next Thursday”  Hahahahahah.  That, my dear friends, is the genius work of Mel Brooks in his cinematic masterpiece Robin Hood:Men in Tights.

That joke is what I’m always reminded of when I think about dates, the fruit.  If you’ve never had a date, they are these delicious little elongated fruits that come from a tree called a date palm, indigenous to the Middle East.  You can usually find them dried, sometimes pitted and bagged in the grocery store.  They are delicious in savory and sweet dishes and are often the base for various healthy snackbars, like Lärabars or Youbars.  In fact, those very bars are the inspiration for these little snackables.  Continue reading

the Great Recipe Experiment: #3-Peppermint Patties

I bet Charlie Brown would like this

I bet Charlie Brown would like this

I always liked Peppermint Patty, maybe because she was a tomboy and I was a tomboy.  However, I never liked peppermint patties, because they were made of mint and I did not like the “curiously strong” flavor of mint.  This would later be amended to allow for the presence of mint in mojitos which is, I declare, the greatest of all mixed drinks.

I think some affinities–and aversions– for certain foods is genetic.  Like cilantro.  Some people love cilantro.  Some people may have a gene that makes them think that cilantro tastes like soap.  Apparently mint is not one of those foods, though.  My parents love chocolate mints.  I do not.  When I was a kid, we used to go to the dime store (it had a real name, but damned if I remember what it was.  I’m not sure I ever knew—we always just called it the “dime store”) or Krogers and my mom used to buy herself an occasional treat at the checkout counter and it was usually a York peppermint patty.  My dad did it, too.  They always offered me a bite and I always turned it down.  I don’t believe that mint should go into chocolate.  Mint should go into Cuban alcoholic beverages.  Or toothpaste.  Or you can chew fresh mint leaves like my grandmother does for a quick fresher-upper after dinner.  But not into chocolate.  You know what should go into chocolate?  Nothing.  It’s already perfect.  That was a trick question. Continue reading