Classic Apple Pie

Happy Tuesday! Today I have a fabulous apple pie recipe to share with you all! I never had to worry about cooking Thanksgiving dinner until a couple of years ago when we moved away from home. And this year was the very first time I'd attempted my own apple pie. My mom ALWAYS made apple pie for Thanksgiving, but last year I decided not to do it (again, because of that tricky crust recipe of hers!). It just wasn't Thanksgiving without apple pie. So a few weeks back, when I found that awesomely easy pie crust recipe, I decided to also try out the apple pie recipe in my cookbook. It. was. delish!!! I was going to just make this pie instead of pumpkin this year, but my kids all begged me to make both. So both it is!

Ingredients:
2 pounds McIntosh apples (4-6), peeled, cored, and sliced 1/4" thick
1.5 pounds Granny Smith apples (3-4), peeled, cored, and sliced 1/4" thick
3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 recipe double-crust pie dough, bottom crust fit into pie plate
1 egg white, lightly beaten

Adjust oven rack to the lowest position, place a rimmed baking sheet on the rack, and heat the oven to 500 degrees. Toss the apples with 3/4 cup of the sugar, flour, lemon juice, zest, salt, and spices, and set aside.

Roll out the top crust to a 12-inch circle. Spread the apples in the unbaked pie crust bottom, mounding them slightly in the middle. Lay the top crust over the apples, seal and crimp the edges, and cut four vent holes in the top. Brush the crust with the egg white and sprinkle with the remaining 1 tablespoon sugar.

Place the pie on the heated baking sheet and lower the oven temperature to 425 degrees. Bake until the top crust is golden, about 25 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet, reduce the oven temperature again to 375 degrees, and continue to bake until the juices are bubbling and the crust is deep golden brown, 30-35 minutes longer (**at this point, I suggest covering the edges of the pie crust with foil, but the recipe doesn't say that**). Transfer the pie to a wire rack and cool to room temperature before serving.

What's your favorite kind of pie?

Double-Crust Pie Dough

We're on the countdown to Thanksgiving now!! I've got 3 great posts lined up for you this week, and we'll be doing it a bit differently. Instead of the typical Monday, Wednesday, Friday line-up, I'm going to post Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday instead. :-)

For years, I've been trying to make pie crust. My mom has a fabulous pie crust, but whenever I try her recipe, it's been a total flop. Last Thanksgiving I was in tears (seriously...) because the pie crust was just horrendous. It was either too flaky and wouldn't roll out without crumbling or it was too tough. My sweet hubby suggested I look in our trusty America's Test Kitchen cookbook to see if they had a pie crust recipe instead. SCORE! This is SO easy, especially compared to my mom's recipe. Apparently my mom is the only one that can get her recipe to turn out perfectly. ;-)

Ingredients:
2.5 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling out the dough
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon salt
8 tablespoons Crisco, cut into 1/2" pieces and chilled
12 tablespoons (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1/4" pieces and chilled
6-8 tablespoons ice water

Process the flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor until combined. Scatter the shortening over the top and process until the mixture has the texture of coarse sand, about 10 seconds. Scatter the butter pieces over the top and, using short pulses, process the mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs, about 10 pulses. Transfer to a bowl. Sprinkle 6 tablespoons of the ice water over the mixture. Stir and press the dough together, using a stiff rubber spatula until the dough sticks together.

If the dough does not come together, stir in the remaining water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until it does.

Divide the dough into two even pieces and flatten each into a 4 inch disk. Wrap the disks tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour. Let the chilled dough soften slightly at room temperature before rolling it out and fitting it into a pie plate.

To make ahead: The dough can be refrigerated, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap, for up to 2 days or frozen for up to 2 months. Let the frozen dough thaw on the countertop until malleable before rolling.

Stay tuned for a fantastic apple pie recipe tomorrow!

Oatmeal Dinner Rolls

Last Thanksgiving, we went to a friend's house for dinner and had oatmeal dinner rolls for the first time. They were SO good, and I just had to ask for the recipe. I didn't get the exact recipe from the girl who brought the rolls because she didn't have it with her at the time, but she did tell me the secret was the oatmeal. So I did some searching on the Internet and found a recipe on Taste of Home's website. They are so soft and fluffy and yummy! The oatmeal really does make a huge difference!

Take a look at my tips for working with yeast before you begin!

Ingredients:
2 cups water
1 cup quick-cooking oats
3 tablespoons butter
1 package (1/4 ounce) active dry yeast
1/3 cup warm water
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 tablespoon sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
4-3/4 to 5-1/4 cups all-purpose flour

In a sauce pan, bring the 2 cups water to a boil. Add oats and butter, and cook and stir for 1 minute. Remove from the heat, and cool to lukewarm. Meanwhile, in the bowl of your mixer, dissolve the yeast in the 1/3 cup warm water. Add the oat mixture, sugars, salt, and 4 cups of flour. Beat with a dough hook until smooth. Add enough remaining flour to make a soft dough. Turn onto a lightly floured counter, and knead until smooth and elastic, about 6 minutes. Place in a greased bowl, and turn to grease top. Cover and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Punch down dough and allow to rest for 10 minutes. Then form into 18 balls. Place in 2 greased 9-inch round baking pans. Cover and allow to rise until doubled, about 45 minutes. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown.

What's your favorite dinner roll recipe?

Herbed Monkey Bread

This recipe came from my Taste of Home magazine. I've had it for probably 7-8 months or so but haven't ever tried it until recently. It sounded too scary to attempt, but it's really very easy and was super good!

This is a good one to make for holidays or when you've got company. It looks very impressive!

Ingredients:
3 to 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 package (1/4 ounce) active dry yeast
1 1/4 cups milk
2 tablespoons canola oil
4 tablespoons butter, melted
1 egg
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon each dried parsley flakes, thyme, and rosemary, crushed

In a large mixing bowl, combine 2 cups flour, sugar, salt, and yeast. In a small saucepan, heat the milk, oil, and 2 tablespoons butter to 120*-130*. Add to dry ingredients. Beat just until moistened. Add egg, and beat until smooth. Stir in enough remaining flour to form a soft dough. Turn onto a lightly floured surface, and knead until smooth and elastic, about 6-8 minutes. Place in a bowl coated with cooking spray, turning once to coat the top. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 1 hour.

In a small bowl, combine the cheese, sesame seeds, garlic salt, paprika, and herbs. Punch down dough. Divide into 32 pieces, and roll each into a ball. Drizzle 2 teaspoons butter into a 10 inch tube pan coated with cooking spray. Sprinkle with a third of the cheese mixture. Top with 16 balls. Repeat layers. Drizzle with remaining butter and sprinkle with remaining cheese mixture.

Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 30 minutes.

Bake at 350* for 30-35 minutes, or until golden brown.

Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack.


Slather with some extra butter, and enjoy!

Have you made something that impressed your family/guests?
Tell us about it!

Bagel Pizzas

Is summer going by crazy fast for anyone else? My hubby has summers off (he's a school psychologist), so we've been really busy almost every second. He goes back to work at the end of next week (BOO!), so things will start to settle down a bit after that. Come August, I'll have 2 of my 3 kids in school, so I'll have much more time for this little blog of mine!

So anyway, the other night we were late getting home from the pool and were starving. I had some bagels and pepperoni about ready to go bad and needed to use them up. Thus, this idea popped into my head. My kids scoffed at me ("Bagel pizzas? Are you sure, Mom?") at first, but then I reminded them that we always see those pre-made frozen ones at the store. They still were skeptical because we've never purchased the ones at the store before, but everyone loved these.

You could totally make them ahead of time and keep them in the freezer for quick meals. I plan on doing that and then popping them in the fridge to defrost to send with my kids to school that week. Pizza is so versatile (you can eat it hot or cold), so I think it'll be perfect for their lunches to change things up a bit.

Lastly, this is a perfect meal to let your kids prepare! My kids were fighting over who got to spread the sauce, and they loved spreading on the cheese and pepperoni. :)

Ingredients:
plain bagels
pizza sauce or spaghetti sauce
shredded mozzarella
pizza toppings

Break bagels in half, and lay them out on a foil-lined baking sheet. Top with a few spoonfuls of sauce, then cheese, then toppings. Sprinkle a little extra cheese on top before baking.

Bake at 375* for about 15 minutes, or until cheese is melted and pepperoni starts to get crispy around the edges.

I served ours with some fresh, sliced cantaloupe and a salad. It was a really yummy summer supper!

What meals do you throw together in a pinch?

Cream Cheese Carrot Muffins

This is another recipe that I got from Full Bellies, Happy Kids. My kids LOVED these! I think her recipe is actually missing an ingredient, because when I mixed up the ingredients as written on her site, the batter wasn't batter-y at all. It was totally crumbly, and there was no way it would have worked. So I just added a bit of milk, and it was perfect.

Another change I made was that I used fresh carrots instead of canned. I don't use canned carrots at all, so I just sliced and steamed my own. I ended up using 4 carrots, and I just used my steamer basket and steamed them for around 10-15 minutes until they were soft.

After I mixed up the batter and went to pour it into my muffin tin, I couldn't find my muffin tin. I have NO idea where it got off to, and my kids were all conveniently clueless as well. So I just poured it into a baking dish, topped it with the filling, and cooked it for an extra 20 minutes or so.

This could easily be served for breakfast, brunch, or even as dessert. It's super yummy!

Ingredients:
1 15-ounce can sliced carrots, drained
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups sugar
1/2 cup milk
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon allspice
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon cloves
2 eggs
1 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened

In a food processor, blend the carrots until they are smooth. After carrots are smooth, add in 1 egg, the oil, and the milk. Then, in a large bowl combine the flour, 1 cup of the sugar, salt, and spices. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix until combined.

Once batter is prepared, combine cream cheese, 1/4 cup of sugar, and 1 egg. Mix until smooth. Fill 12 greased muffin tins 1/3 of the way full with the batter. Then put a large spoonful of the cream cheese mixture into the center of each muffin. Top with remaining batter.

Like I said, I improvised. So here's what mine looked like this morning:

Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes (or if you did it like I did, then around 45 minutes), or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.

Where is the strangest place you've found something you've lost?

The Absolute BEST Sandwich Bread

Happy Monday! I hope you all had a fabulous weekend and are expriencing some great weather this time of year! As for us, I finally caved and turned on the a/c for the first time this year. In April. We're doomed! ;-)

We only need 5 more followers until we can start the giveaway!!! I see that we have 97 Facebook followers and only 95 blog followers, so those of you following us on Facebook need to make sure you follow the blog, too! :)

A year ago, I found a recipe for white bread. And that's the recipe I used for the last year. Until I got my new cookbook, that is. I was extremely excited to see a recipe for sandwich bread in my cookbook! Don't get me wrong, the old white bread recipe is still good, but it's just not good for slicing thinly for sandwiches because it's pretty crumbly. This sandwich bread recipe is AMAZING. And it has a million variations. You can do buttermilk instead of the whole milk. You can make cinnamon raisin bread. You can use whole wheat flour instead of white. You could turn it into all kinds of snazzy types of bread by adding cheese, herbs, etc. I've got several variations I'm going to try, so I'll make sure to post recipes!

This recipe only makes 1 loaf, so I always double it. If you do double it, make sure the bowl you let it rise in has enough room to accommodate a double batch once it's risen. You may want to divide the dough in half and put each half into a separate bowl to rise.

And if you're new here and/or new to bread-making, here are my tips for working with yeast. Making bread can be tricky at first. But I promise you that it gets easier! You just have to keep at it. My loaves when I first started turned out pretty goofy sometimes, but now I have no problem making fantastic bread.

Ingredients:
1 cup whole milk, warm
1/3 cup water, warm
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
3 tablespoons honey
3 3/4 cups bread flour, plus extra for kneading
2 1/4 teaspoons instant or rapid-rise yeast
2 teaspoons salt

Whisk the milk, water, 3 tablespoons of the butter and honey together in a large measuring cup. Mix 3 1/2 cups of the flour, yeast and salt together in a standing mixer fitted with a dough hook. With the mixer on low speed, add the milk mixture and mix until the dough comes together, about 1 minute.

Increase the speed to medium-low and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. If after 5 minutes more flour is needed, add the remaining 1/4 cup of flour, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the dough clears the side of the bowl but sticks to the bottom.

Turn the dough onto a clean counter and knead by hand to form a smooth, round ball, about 1 minute.

Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and wrap tightly with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Turn the dough onto a lightly floured counter and gently press it into a 9 inch square. Roll the dough into a tight cylinder and pinch the seam closed. Place the loaf seam-side down in a 9 inch loaf pan. Wrap tightly with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until it has nearly doubled in size and springs back slowly when indented with a finger, about 1 to 1/2 hours.

Adjust oven rack to the middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Bring a kettle of water to a boil. Brush the loaf with the remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Set the loaf pan on the oven rack and place an empty metal loaf pan next to it. Fill the empty loaf pan half full with boiling water. Bake until golden and the center of the bread registers 200 degrees, about 40 to 50 minutes. Flip the bread out onto a wire rack and let cool to room temperature before slicing, about 2 hours.

Perfect texture!!!

And just look at how thinly I was able to slice it!
It's not crumbly at all! Perfect, perfect sandwich bread!

How often do you make your own bread?

Cream Biscuits

Christmas is coming! I can't believe it's this Friday. Crazy how fast this year has gone! In honor of Christmas being this week, I thought I'd post recipes that will make your holiday entertaining easier. There's almost nothing worse than having a house full of guests and not knowing what to feed them that is quick, easy and cheap!

These cream biscuits are quick, easy AND cheap. They come together in a flash and are really tasty. I love biscuits but never thought I could make them. My mom always told me it's tricky to make biscuits, so now I'm wondering what recipe she uses because this is seriously easy!

There are only 2 things to remember when making biscuits. First, don't over-knead the dough. Knead it as little as possible, otherwise the biscuits will be tough. And secondly, if you use a biscuit cutter, DO NOT (I repeat DO NOT!) twist the cutter. Just push it straight down, then pull it straight up. If you twist it, your biscuits will rise all wonky and will look really lopsided.

If you want to make these ahead, you can. But they'll only be good in the fridge for up to 2 hours. Just prepare the dough, cut out the biscuits, put them on the parchment-lined baking sheet and then cover with plastic wrap before refrigerating.

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

**This recipe will make about 10 biscuits.**

Adjust an oven rack to the upper-middle position and preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together in a large bowl. Stir in the cream with a wooden spoon until the dough forms, about 30 seconds. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter and gather into a ball. Knead until the dough becomes smooth, about 30 seconds.

Roll the dough into a 3/4 inch circle. Cut the biscuits into rounds using a biscuit cutter or into wedges using a knife.

Place the biscuits on the parchment-lined baking sheet.

Then bake until golden brown, about 15 minutes.

Serve with butter, jam, honey butter or sausage gravy!

Do you have company coming for Christmas?
Any special holiday meals you like to make?

Eggs Benedict

The other morning, I decided to treat myself to a yummy breakfast. Eggs Benedict is something I very rarely get the pleasure of eating. I mean, it's almost the furthest thing from figure-friendly that you can possibly eat. All that butter. That yummy, yummy butter. Anywho, I deserved a treat, if I did say so myself, so I made up a batch. Just for me. And I ate almost the entire batch of hollandaise. By myself. Haven't stepped on a scale since. ;)

This meal really is pretty easy, if you follow the steps correctly. It comes together in minutes and is a really fun breakfast to change things up a bit from the everyday bowl of cereal. Yes, I just confessed that I rarely actually make breakfast. See, by serving such a gourmet breakfast (cereal) most mornings, it doesn't take much to actually impress the fam when I do want to make breakfast. Totally works in my favor! And when I do want to impress with a nice breakfast, I love meals like this that come together so fast but are still showing off more than a bowl of Corn Flakes would.

The sauce is going to be the tricky part. But it's really not that tricky. You have to use a double boiler to make this sauce. You'll need 2 pots (or one pot and a metal bowl). Fill the bottom pot with a couple inches of water, making sure that the water level DOES NOT TOUCH the upper pot. That is EXTREMELY important. If the water does touch the upper pot, your eggs will scramble, which will ruin your sauce. So just do 2-3 inches of water at the very most.

Then place your other pot (or metal bowl) on top to make sure the water level will not end up touching the bottom of the upper pot (or metal bowl). Then take it off the top BEFORE you turn your burner on to bring the water to a boil. That is the second VERY important part. You need to add the sauce ingredients to a COLD pot (or bowl), otherwise, again, the eggs will scramble.

Ready?? ;) On we go!


Hollandaise ingredients:
3 egg yolks
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon water
1/2 cup butter, brought to room temperature and cut into thirds
1 teaspoon salt**

Bring water to a boil. Meanwhile, crack eggs, discarding the whites (or save them for a more waistline-friendly breakfast later in the week, since you'll need it after this dish!). Place yolks into your COLD upper pot (or metal bowl). Then add lemon juice, water and salt.

**NOTE: If your butter is salted, OMIT the salt**

Now place on top of the other pot. Whisk CONSTANTLY. When eggs start to slightly thicken, add first 1/3 of the butter. Once that is melted, add the next 1/3. Repeat with the remaining 1/3. Whisk another minute or two, until sauce is very smooth and thickens slightly. Remove from heat IMMEDIATELY.

To assemble Eggs Benedict: Toast English muffins. Top each half with a slice of Canadian bacon (or thinly sliced deli ham works fine, too, if you have that on hand!), then a poached egg (I like my yolks to be runny still for this dish, so I only poach the eggs for about 3 minutes), then smother with sauce. Face it, you're gonna gain like 2 pounds just by looking at it, so be generous with the sauce!! Enjoy. Then go for a run. 10 miles should do it.

What's your favorite I-don't-care-if-I-gain-10-pounds breakfast?

Cheesy Pinwheel Rolls

This recipe was inspired by a friend of mine. Her blog is private, but she posted about how she'd taken her dinner roll recipe and made a loaf of garlic bread out of it. I always have tons of garlic on hand, and at that time I also had some leftover cheese I needed to use up, so that's how this recipe was born. I just used my regular dinner roll recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book (which I thought I'd already posted, but I guess not!), then added a couple extras to make it more spiffy.

If you're reading this, thanks for the inspiration, Jenn!

Ingredients:
4 1/2 - 4 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 package active dry yeast
1 cup milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter, plus extra for spreading on rolls
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, beaten
garlic, minced
mozzarella, shredded

In a medium mixing bowl, stir together 2 cups of the flour and the yeast. In a medium saucepan, heat and stir milk, sugar, butter and salt just until warm and butter almost melts (120-130 degrees). Add milk mixture to dry mixture along with eggs. Beat with an electric mixer on low to medium speed for 30 seconds, scraping sides of bowl constantly. Beat on high speed for 3 minutes. Stir in as much remaining flour as you can. Then knead dough on counter, adding remaining flour until you get a moderately stiff dough that is smooth and elastic. Shape into a ball, cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size (about 1 hour).

Roll out the dough into a large rectangle (or as close to one as you can get -- you're going to roll it up and then slice it, so it doesn't need to be perfect by any means), getting it as thin as you can. Spread a generous layer of butter all over the rolled out dough. Then sprinkle the minced garlic as evenly as you can. Then top with cheese. The more, the merrier! Face it, this is not diet friendly, and you will gain a few pounds. So you might as well go all out. ;) This picture I took the first time I made it, and I didn't put nearly enough cheese. So if yours looks like mine, add more cheese! Keep going. Little more. Titch more. There! That should do it.

Roll it up.

Slice it up. I just used my pizza cutter, but you could use a really sharp knife or even dental floss (I've never tried that, but I've heard it works great). I cut mine into 1.5-2 inch pieces. Place on a baking sheet a couple inches apart.

Cover and allow to rise for 30 minutes. Then bake at 375 for about 12 minutes, or until golden brown.

Uhhh, YUM?!

BBQ Chicken Pizza

I've been trying to post all day long, but blogger has been acting up -- it kept shutting down Firefox every time I uploaded a picture?!

This pizza is delish. I've been meaning to make it for a long time but kept forgetting to put it on the menu. Then when I was browsing one of my favorite recipe blogs about a week ago, I saw they'd put up a recipe for it, which reminded me I wanted to make it. We'd never had it before, and it was so yummy. Even if you're not a cilantro lover, try it with some cilantro sprinkled on -- it's not even close to as good without it!

Ingredients:
pizza sauce or spaghetti sauce
your favorite BBQ sauce
2-3 chicken breasts, diced
red onion, sliced
canned pineapple, chunks or crushed
mozzarella, shredded
fresh cilantro, finely chopped
pizza dough, store-bought or **homemade

Cook your chicken breasts in a large skillet with a little bit of BBQ sauce until done. Meanwhile, combine equal parts pizza/spaghetti sauce and BBQ sauce in a bowl; set aside. When chicken is done, assemble pizza -- sauce, cheese, chicken, onion, pineapple, more cheese. I used crushed pineapple because I'm not a huge fan of big chunks of pineapple.

When pizza is done, sprinkle with fresh cilantro. Then devour.


**If using homemade dough: I use this breadstick recipe for my pizza dough. Prepare it the same way up through the first rise. After the first rise, divide the dough in half, roll it out to whatever size pizza you want, then let it rise again for another 30 minutes. Then bake at 425 for about 10 minutes BEFORE topping with pizza ingredients. Then top with ingredients and bake another 10 minutes.

Blueberry Muffins

I got a pretty good deal for blueberries at the store last week, so we've been eating lots of them the past few days. After a few days of blueberry buttermilk pancakes, the fam was getting a bit tired of them, so I decided to make some into muffins. You know, to change things up a bit. I'm daring like that.

Making muffins is super easy! Okay, not quite as easy as opening a box of Jiffy, but it's definitely easy. And it tastes way better. And you can actually tell there are blueberries in these muffins, and not just some weird, tiny blue dots that are supposedly blueberries.

STEP AWAY FROM THE JIFFY BOXES!!!!!

I got this recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. There are all kinds of variations to this basic recipe listed in here. You can do banana muffins, cheese muffins, cranberry muffins, oatmeal muffins, poppy seed muffins......just to give you a few ideas. ;)

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 beaten egg
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup cooking oil
3/4 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Grease your muffin tins with butter or cooking spray, or line with baking cups. Set aside. In a medium mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Make a well in the center of the mixture. In another mixing bowl, combine egg, milk and oil. Add egg mixture all at once to the flour mixture. Stir just until moistened (batter should be lumpy and very thick).

Gently fold in blueberries.

Pour batter into muffin tins, filling each one about 2/3 of the way full (makes 10-12 muffins).

Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes, or until golden brown. Cool in muffin tin on a wire rack for 5 minutes. Remove from pan and serve. With honey butter is best.

Do you tend to use pre-measured box mixes, like Jiffy? Or are you a cook-it-from-scratch kind of person?