I know what I'm eating for breakfast tomorrow.

Some people like cupcakes better. I for one care less for them! 

Frank Zappa, "Muffin Man"

A few weeks ago, I saw this recipe for blueberry crumb muffins at Evil Shenanigans which is a very cool cooking site. I first discovered the site from a YouTube clip where the author prepared a king cake that Sandra Lee made on Semi Homemade Meals, with very different results.

Anyway, while her photos look great, because she knows how to pose the food, my muffins might not look quite as attractive, since they were just photographed on a cooling rack using a cell phone camera. But they taste great:

In an attempt to play around with it, I did some work with the free Photoshop clone. The name of that clone is The GNU Image Manipulating Program (because the sort of people who put out free programs think it's hilarious to say "I played with The GIMP today." GNU is a recursive acronym, which means GNU's not Unix, by the way.)

I have Photoshop at work, but won't spend hundreds of dollars to use it at home. When I tried the GNU Image Manipulation Program a few years ago, it was almost unusable. Now, it's a lot better, and almost as usable as Photoshop. This would be higher praise if Photoshop wasn't such a pain.

I didn't do anything too fancy. I just cropped an individual muffin, and then played with the lighting and colors to make it look more attractive. Strangely enough, the blueberry muffins looked too blue. Adding a touch of yellow really makes a difference.

 

Here's a close-up of the second muffin from the bottom right. Below is the same muffin with adjusted colors.

Ceramics and couscous

Let's think of other things that starts with "C"! Uh... Uh... Who cares about da other things?!

Cookie Monster

So a couple of weeks ago, I bought this really nice looking ceramic dish at Art In The Park in Long Branch, made by Roz Potz (the first thing that came up when I Googled her was also her Facebook page, but it was in Welsh or something.)

I wanted to cook something in it, but it's summer, and ceramic dishes to me really cry out for stews or beans or other things that you simmer slowly in the over for a long period of time. Then I realized, I don't need to cook in it. I can just use it as a nice serving dish. Since it has a lid, I don't even need to put leftovers away in a different container. So I made couscous with summer vegetables.

Couscous with summer vegetables
Ingredients

• 1 Red Pepper
• 1 Summer Squash
• 1 Onion
• 3 Cloves of Garlic
• 2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
• Salt and Pepper
• 1 cup Israeli Couscous
• 1 1/4 cups vegetable broth
• Some grape tomatoes

Note: Israeli couscous is a very large grain cousous. It looks more like pearls or orzo than your traditional couscous. You can substitute just about any grain: regular couscous, rice, quinoa, etc. Just change the amount of broth.

Step 1) Arrange some of the ingredients artistically, so you can take a picture of them and put it in your blog, like this:

Step 2) Cut the onion, pepper and squash into fairly large chunks, about half an inch square.

Step 3) Heat a large saute pan over medium low heat for about two minutes. Add the olive oil. Add the cut up veggies and a pinch of salt, and cook for about 8-10 minutes, stirring occassionally, until the onion turns transluscent.

Step 4) Chop the garlic fairly fine (I just whacked it with the flat of the knife, then sliced that). Add to the veggies and cook about 30 seconds. Add broth and couscous.

Step 5) When the broth has come to a boil (which should be pretty quick), turn the heat down to a simmer and cover the pot. Cook for 7-8 more minutes.

Step 6) Transfer stuff to your pretty dish and add tomatoes as a garnish. It should look like this:rve

Serve warm, room tempertature, or chilled, depending how hot it is outside.

Sugar, honey, honey

I ate and ate and ate,/ no I did not miss a plate, well/ How much do these suppers cost?/ We'll take it out in hate.*

Leonard Cohen

I've been snacking since I came home from work. That's because there's nothing to eat in the house.

That's a gross simplification. Actually, there are no complex carbohydrates I want to eat. So I keep trying to fool my stomach, which isn't buying it.

For my non-Jewish, or non-observant readers, or people who are reading this post four months from now, as I write this, I'm observing Passover. That means there are a ton of restrictions on what I can eat: nothing made with grain (except matzo), nothing with legumes, nothing with corn, nothing with rice. Many people think it just means no bread, but it covers a surprisingly large array of foods. For example, did you know that peanuts are not actually a nut, but a legume? If I wanted a PBJ matzo I'd be out of luck.

Fortunately for me, I don't want one. I am not a fan of matzo, and try to have as little as possible. Unfortunately for me, that means there's not too many carbohydrates available. And I am not on the Atkins diet. One of the wonderful things about bread, rice, pasta, etc. is that they are filling. My stomach has adapted to assuming I'm full if it's got a good helping of carbs there. And without it, it keeps saying I haven't had enough, no matter how much I put in.

"Here's some trail mix," I'll tell my stomach. "Don't those nuts have the texture of whole grain bread? Don't those raisins supply you with the same sort of energy?"

"Ha!" laughs my stomach. "Nobody would think that an almond is the same as a nice chewy loaf of bread. And the sugar in those raisins will just give you a five-minute sugar rush. Then you'll crash and try another food that won't fool me."

I don't want to kvetch too much in this blog, so I'll point out the part of Passover food I do like: it has excellent candy and soda. Earlier, I mentioned corn is forbidden. Today, most sweets are made with high fructose corn syrup. (And plenty of other things. When I buy marinara sauce, I always look for a corn syrup free variety. Why would you put syrup in tomatoes? Why?)

For Passover, they have to be made with sugar. And sugar tastes better. Sodas don't have that slightly-off bitter taste they normally do. (The only decent lemon soda I've ever had I bought during Passover. It's a brand called Beer Mayim, and it not only uses sugar, but only half the normal amount put in most lemon sodas. So it's much, much less cloying and much more refreshing. Naturally, I haven't been able to find it for three years.) I think sugar also makes the chocolates and other sweets taste richer. And, since I'm snacking a lot, I have a lot of sweets.

That doesn't mean it's perfect. For one of the seders, I bought a chocolate sampler. Two different people at the table had the same reaction. The first piece they had was delicious. The next piece had some weird fruity filling they couldn't stand.

* I wonder if Leonard Cohen has a song about Passover. "Isaac" is a song about when Abraham attempted to sacrifice his son. "Who By Fire" is a play on a classic Yom Kippur prayer. "Hallelujah" is chock full of biblical references (and is a song I really dig, but never want to hear in another movie soundtrack). Plenty of others have a Jewish feel. But I don't know any specific Passover tunes from him.