More Muffins, promise, potential, and mistakes

by Amy

 “The next morning dawned bright and fresh. There was some warmth in the sun again and Gamache soon took off his sweater as he walked around the village green before breakfast. A few children, up before parents and grandparents, did some last-minute frog hunting in the pond. They ignored him and he was happy to watch them from a distance then continue his solitary and peaceful stroll. He waved at Myrna, cresting the hill on her own solitary walk.

This was the last day of summer vacation, and while it had been decades since he’d gone to school, he still felt the tug. The mix of sadness at the end of summer, and excitement to see his chums again. The new clothes, bought after a summer’s growth. The new pencils, sharpened over and over, and the smell of the shavings. And the new notebooks. Always strangely thrilling. Unmarred. No mistakes yet. All they held was promise and potential.”

This paragraph from the Three Pines books is reminiscent of Anne of Green Gables and her conversation with her beloved teacher when they say that tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it – yet.

Do you feel it, too? The tug when it’s the time for a new school year? Or is it New Year’s Day that makes you feel like it’s time to start anew? Or spring? Or maybe it’s birthdays? Or Mondays? Or a new book? Are there other things that mark beginnings for you?

I love the idea of promise and potential. And the fact that there are no mistakes yet.

“A new murder investigation felt much the same. Had they marred their books yet? Made any mistakes?”

Isn’t that true for so many other things?

We begin – a year, a month, a class, an exercise program, a diet, a schedule, a course, a marriage, a family… - with the best of intentions. We have promise and potential. We aim for perfection. No mistakes have been made and we’re still looking at a blank page. Unmarred. No mistakes. Yet.

We make mistakes.

Many mistakes are catalysts for learning. Any good teacher will tell you that. It isn’t the kids who get all the answers right that learn the most. It’s usually the ones who know how to ask the right questions. It’s the ones who wonder at the mistakes and question the accuracy of any answer. (Sometimes, in an educational setting, that means they seem to be asking the “wrong” questions and not answering much of anything). Sometimes we need the mistakes to better grasp the process.

Promise and potential are wonderful things.

Accomplishment and achievement are even better.

Promise and potential are like blank new notebooks. I love new notebooks. They’re so pretty and clean and unscribbled on. They smell nice. They’re neat. A just bought a new one online – my cousin is an artist and some of her work is being marketed on T-shirts and sketchbooks. It’s gorgeous. 

Absolutely unneeded, but I succumbed to temptation.

I always have a notebook in my bag. I take notes, scribble information, add “to do” lists, copy out quotes, make more lists, and keep little summaries of important information. At least it seems important at the time. It isn’t always important later. By the time a couple of pages have been filled in, I’ve already forgotten to use my best handwriting (all first pages of notebooks merit best handwriting).

Old notebooks are evidence of accomplishment and achievement. They rarely look pretty once they’ve really been used. I’m sure some people manage to keep things neat all the way through, but my own notebooks – and planners – are usually full of doodles and little hearts and crossed out items on to do lists. I have sketches by my son (done in moments of boredom when we’re in places that lack entertainment), grocery lists (that seem to always have the same items on them), and reminders and phone numbers and one word reminders that make no sense a few weeks (or days) after being jotted down.

I will always love new notebooks. I recognize that used ones, while less pleasing to the eye, actually have better stories to tell.

Some mistakes should be fixed.

Some mistakes are opportunities.

Some mistakes are serendipity.

Some mistakes are charged with regret.

Some are inevitable.

Some are growing pains.

Some are relative – depending on who you ask, they’re not even mistakes at all.

 “As he slowly circled the village green, his hands clasped behind his back and his gaze far off, he thought about that. After a few leisurely circuits he went inside to breakfast.

Beauvoir and Lacoste were already down, with frothy café au lait in front of them. They stood up as he entered the room, and he motioned them down. The aroma of maple-cured back bacon and eggs and coffee came from the kitchen. He’d barely sat down when Gabri swept out of the kitchen with plates of eggs Benedict, fruit and muffins.”

Gabri once ate his sorrow in muffins (this post: eating my pain). Lacoste is contemplating the power of muffins to fill emotional gaps in this scene. I wonder if anyone else considers muffins to be a sort of comfort food.

“Muffin?”

“S’il vous plait,” said Isabelle Lacoste, taking one. They looked like nuclear explosions. Isabelle Lacoste missed her children and her husband. But it amazed her how this small village seemed able to heal even that hole. Of course, if you stuff in enough muffins even the largest hole is healed, for a while. She was willing to try.”

I rarely make muffins in my home. I love them. I like muffins that are fresh out of the oven and smoking hot. My favorite is a recipe of apple muffins that I first ate in Sweden. The Swedish friend who gave me that recipe called it “apple bread” (although that’s the translation, I don’t know what she called it in Swedish). Maybe it’s because muffins are kind of like bread. Right?

Maybe the only reason they’re my favorite is because it was such a fun and friendly meal. My friend and I talked and baked and then sat down and enjoyed an ENTIRE batch of muffins before going out sightseeing. I was in my late teens, on a “gap semester” and having some time alone, away from home and family and the boyfriend (who I eventually married) and listening to my own heart and mind for a couple of months. Apple muffins remind me of that time.

My son won’t touch them. The little slivers of apple are too gooey for him. My husband tolerates them. Or, I should say, he used to tolerate them. At this point in our lives he quite freely grimaces and says, “Isn’t there anything else to eat?”

I am no longer in my late teens, but I would happily eat an entire batch of apple muffins all by myself. So I don’t really make them. Why risk it?

Since the pistachio muffins were a hit when I made them for the earlier post, I decided to try some chocolate muffins and call them brownies to see if my son would eat them. It almost worked. He ate one. After that, he looked at the muffin plate and said, “Can I have an apple next?”. My husband ate half of one and started rummaging in the refrigerator. Yet another muffin recipe that was not approved by the males in the house.

Me? I ate the entire rest of the batch. I thought they were yummy. Sigh. I really shouldn’t make muffins. The good news is I had no emotional holes or homesickness or regretted mistakes to fill up with muffins, so I managed to make them last enough that I don’t feel guilty. They freeze really well and worked great as a snack to bake, freeze, and pull out one at a time to enjoy with coffee or cappuccino or tea. The best part (my son disagrees) was having hazelnuts in them.

Recipe:

Ingredients:

·         1 cup of sugar (I used white sugar, but since I was the only one who ate it anyway, I’ll use brown next time)

·         ½ cup of vegetable oil

·         3 eggs – I beat them slightly before adding them

Mix these three ingredients until you have a creamy blend.

·         1 ½ cups flour

·         1 teaspoon baking powder

·         1 teaspoon baking soda

·         1 pinch of salt

      Mix these in, but not too smooth. Unbaked muffin batter is supposed to be a bit lumpy, right? Just mix the dry and wet ingredients enough.

·         ½ cup of chopped hazelnuts

·         ½ cup of cacao powder or unsweetened chocolate powder

·         1 pinch of salt

·         100g of semi-sweet chocolate chips

Add those last ingredients, then spoon about two spoonfuls into each muffin tin. Bake for about 20 minutes.

All quotes – unless stated otherwise – are from The Brutal Telling: page 69 and 70 in the paperback edition.

Smells, Memories and Emotions -- Gabri's Muffin Platter Part 2

by Libby

'Muffins?’...‘... a special tribute to Jane called “Charles de Mills”.’ And with that Gabri disappeared and reappeared a moment later with a platter holding rings of muffins marvelously decorated with fruit and roses...‘You mentioned the Charles de Mills rose.’ ‘Jane’s favorite. He’s not just any rose, Chief Inspector. He’s considered by rosarians to be one of the finest in the world. An old garden rose...That’s why I made the muffins from rose water, as a homage to Jane. Then I ate them, as you saw. I always eat my pain.’ (Still Life, Kindle, p.84, 86)

Funny how we connect to people, events, times and emotions through our sense of smell. Gabri's memory of and love for Jane Neal will always be tied to those roses, their fragrance and rose-scented muffins.

While I could understand Gabri eating his pain over Jane's death, the connections made to the fragrant roses and scented muffins were stronger for me. Amy and I laughed about our different perceptions and interpretations here. I enthused over the sensory world of rose-scented muffins and the decorated platter, while Amy related to and then wrote insightfully about Gabri eating his pain (Sept 13, 2015 post). It's a reminder of how we can see the same things differently, based on our respective experiences and biases.

Lorraine Lee, a deeply fragrant Australian cultivar

Mention a rose and I think of fragrance, with pleasant memories evoked. For me, it is two roses (Lorraine Lee and Cécile Brünner) from my childhood that I grow in my garden today. Drinking in their fragrance, I am transported back to my parents' garden with feelings of comfort and the nostalgia of simpler, sweet times.

Cécile Brünner, an old/heritage fragrant French rose

Charles de Mills, old/heritage very fragrant bush rose

http://paulbardenroses.com/gallicas/demills.html

Some smells we just love and our spirits lift as we breathe them in. For me, the smell of drifts of autumn leaves, promising the compost that they will become, springs to mind. But some smells transport us to another time, remind us of a place, a person, something long forgotten or tucked away in the back of our mind.  And this can be accompanied by all sorts of feelings;  joy, comfort, calmness or disquiet, melancholy, distress. Emotional responses to scents are, of course, a very personal thing. Just as a scent can trigger pleasant physical and emotional responses in one person, so can it trigger negative responses in another. While someone else might have no response at all.

The associations between smells, memories and emotions has been pretty well established. Some behavioural studies suggest that our sense of smell is more strongly tied to bringing back memories, and associated emotions and feelings, than any of our other senses. These odour-evoked memories tend to be from earlier in life. On reflection, most of mine are from early childhood into my teens. The smell of fig leaves has travelled with me since the very young age of two when I first visited my maternal grandmother's home, on the other side of the country, with my mother. Inhaling the scent of those leaves always gives me vivid glimpses of being in my grandmother's garden, and my first sense of being in the company of women who cherished me.

There are writers who propel us into sensual worlds. Louise Penny is one. The sensory elements that she uses so richly in her writing, makes it very real. I love the way she engages our senses and draws us in.

The place felt like what it was. An old kitchen, in an old home, in a very old village. It smelled of bacon and baking. It smelled of rosemary and thyme and mandarin oranges. And coq au vin. (How the Light Gets In, Kindle, p.109)

The chapel smelled like every small church Clara had ever known. Pledge and pine and dusty old books. (Still Life, Kindle, p.52)

Inside, the room smelled of wood smoke and industrial coffee in wet cardboard with a slight undercurrent of varnish and that musky aroma of old books. Or timetables. This had once been the railway station. (Dead Cold/A Fatal Grace, Kindle, p.142)

This kind of sensory experience is deeply appealing to me. It adds so much to setting and place and our understanding of characters, or how we connect to them. The way the characters relate to scents, sights and sounds, as we all do constantly every day, makes them believable. We can identify with them and understand them more deeply through what they notice and how they respond. 

Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir looked round their new Situation Room and inhaled. He realized, with some surprise, how familiar and even thrilling the scent was. It smelled of excitement, it smelled of the hunt. It smelled of long hours over hot computers, piecing together a puzzle. It smelled of teamwork. It actually smelled of diesel fuel and woodsmoke, of polish and concrete. He was again in the old railway station of Three Pines, abandoned by the Canadian Pacific Railway decades ago and left to rot. (The Brutal Telling, Kindle, p.42) 

Now this is a familiar, work-focused Beauvoir on the case. But later we see another side of him with new and deepening sensibilities emerging. It's a surprising and wonderful contrast.

She’d leaned in and whispered into his ear, and he could smell her fragrance. It was slightly citrony. Clean and fresh. Not Enid’s clinging, full-bodied perfume. Annie smelled like a lemon grove in summer. (A Trick of the Light, Kindle, p.8)

I'm easily drawn into a work by these sensory experiences. It helps me to relate to characters and understand how they're feeling, see them in very real terms.

Closing his eyes he breathed deeply, smelling the musky scents of the library. Of age, of stability, of calm and peace. Of old-fashioned polish, of wood, of words bound in worn leather. He smelled his own slight fragrance of rosewater and sandalwood. And he thought of something good, something nice, some kind harbor. And he found it in Reine-Marie, as he remembered her voice on his cell phone earlier in the day. (Bury Your Dead, Kindle, p.14)

Louise Penny never fails to take us a little further, into our own emotional landscape. She understands how smell can be very powerful in unlocking forgotten memories. Who couldn't relate to these reminders of emotions and feelings experienced in another time and place? It makes us think and remember too.

The sounds were familiar, voices bouncing off metal and concrete, shoes screeching on hard floors, but it was the smells that had transported her (Isabelle Lacoste). Of books and cleaner, of lunches languishing and rotting behind hundreds of lockers. And fear. High school smelled of that more than anything else, even more than sweaty feet, cheap perfume and rotten bananas. (The Cruellest Month, Kindle, p.324)

It had been a long while since Inspector Langlois had been in a library. Not since his school days. A time filled with new experiences and the aromas that would be forever associated with them. Gym socks. Rotting bananas in lockers. Sweat. Old Spice cologne. Herbal Essence shampoo on the hair of girls he kissed, and more. A scent so sweet, so filled with longing his reaction was still physical whenever he smelt it. And libraries. Quiet. Calm. A harbor from the turmoil of teenage life. (Bury Your Dead, Kindle, p.58)

I felt like I was stepping back with Lacoste and Langlois. These experiences resonated; some of them fond, some cringeworthy or disturbing for the awkwardness, uncertainties and fears of those years. Not only that...I'd always shamefully thought it was just me with the grotty habit, of letting cheese and 'something' sandwiches, and bananas, go mouldy in my locker! What a relief!

The heady smell of oil paint and pure turpentine never fails to take me back many years to when I was first studying painting, starting the journey of mastering technique and struggling with ideas in a visual medium. And one day, after a long time of saying not very much at all in a way of ignoring me, the lecturer says, out of the blue, 'Your work is very expressive. And you have a wonderful sense of colour.' And from the shock of it, a feeling emerges that maybe there might be something there worth pursuing. A small nudge onto the pathway towards self-belief? 

 

Now, however, I am lost in the heady perfume of rose syrup as I delight in the preparation of a dessert of rose-scented muffins, inspired by Gabri, to share with two girlfriends coming to lunch.

Rose-scented muffins 

What better way to scent a muffin than drench it with a wonderfully fragrant rose syrup! There are certain scents and flavours that just go together. Rose water, honey, lemon and pistachios are made for each other, so they are the basis of this recipe. The way they come together (and it's really very simple) elevates these muffins into quite the dessert!

The trick is to generously add the rose syrup to the pistachio muffins as they emerge from the oven. The freshness and potency of the rose flavour is ensured if it is added after baking. And what could be easier, and quite simply beautiful, than decorating them with fresh rose buds. Served with more syrup and crème fraîche, they are seriously delicious. We made a bit of an event of lunch and I served a rose cocktail with our dessert. I muddled strawberries with  home-made rose petal liqueur and grenadine, vodka and cranberry juice, shook it all with ice and strained it into cocktail glasses. I floated a few small rose petals on the surface. We had a really good time!!

Muffins are a mix of wet and dry ingredients and it is best done gently by hand, for a light result. Make sure all the wet ingredients are at room temperature. The rose syrup can conveniently be made ahead of time.

Rose syrup

half a cup of honey
100g/half a cup of sugar
120ml/half a cup of water
1-2 teaspoons of rose water (a pure distillation of rose petals is best)
1-2 tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice

1.  Heat the honey, sugar and water gently in a saucepan, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and allow to reduce for one minute. Remove from heat and cool.
2.  Add one to two teaspoons of rose water and one to two tablespoons of lemon juice, tasting to get a balance between the two flavourings.

Pistachio muffins (makes 12)

Wet and dry ingredients

Dry ingredients:
200g/one and a half cups of plain/all purpose flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
half a cup of caster/superfine sugar
150g/5oz pistachio nuts (unsalted), chopped

Wet ingredients, at room temperature:
2 large eggs
113g/half a cup of melted, unsalted butter (cooled)
3/4 cup of whole/full cream milk

1.  Place a baking sheet on the shelf of the oven on which you will put the muffin tin at the time of baking. This keeps the base of the muffins from browning too much and drying out.

2.  Pre-heat the oven to 220C/425F. The muffins will be baked at this temperature for 5 mins only, to ensure a good rise. Then turn the oven down to 190C/375F for the rest of the time (13-15mins).
3.  Line muffin tins with patty pans or grease with butter.
4.  Sift flour, baking powder and sugar into a large bowl.
5.  Mix in the chopped pistachios, except for 3 tablespoons (reserve for sprinkling on the muffins).

Wet and dry ready to fold in together

6.  In a medium bowl whisk together the eggs, melted butter and milk by hand. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet. Gently fold in together with as few strokes as possible, for a light muffin.
7.  Spoon the batter into each patty pan to two thirds full. Sprinkle with the reserved pistachios.
8.  Bake for 5 mins at 220C/425F. Reduce the oven temperature to 190C/375F and bake for another 13-15 minutes.

9.  Remove from the oven and pierce all over the top of each muffin (about twelve times) with a skewer, so the muffins can soak up the rose syrup. Immediately spoon syrup onto the hot muffins, adding more as they absorb it. Be generous!

Spooning the syrup over the hot muffins

10.  When they are cool enough to handle, remove them from the tins and place on a rack. Continue to trickle more syrup onto the muffins but reserve some syrup for serving. I made the muffins a day ahead of serving.

Place the muffins on a platter, decorate with rose buds or rose petals. Serve with crème fraîche and rose syrup. And a cocktail?

Now, if the smell of roses has some adverse associations, these muffins are not for you!

Eating my Pain - Gabri's Muffin Platter

By Amy

I almost feel like I should apologize. I did write, in the short bio for the blog, that I’m not a writer or a cook by trade. I’m also not an artist – obviously. I could never compete with the master chefs in the books, but Gabri’s masterpiece of “a platter holding rings of muffins marvelously decorated with fruit and roses” was daunting to even attempt to make justice to.

I had originally intended to make many kinds of muffins, as Gabri had. He offered the agents a variety of carrot, date, banana, and a special “Carles de Mills” tribute muffin. I ended up making pistachio. I wasn’t cooking to drown out sorrow (Gabri was), nor did I have the excuse of a houseful of B&B guests to help me eat them.

So, in this interpretation of a book meal, I had only one muffin flavor, no roses (I did pick a leaf off my maracujá vine to add decorative vegetation), and only the single fruit I was actually going to eat for breakfast.

“Jane’s favorite. [Charles de Mills is] not just any rose, Chief Inspector. He’s considered by rosarians to be one of the finest in the world. An old garden rose. Only blooms once a season but with a show that’s spectacular. And then it’s gone. That’s why I made the muffins from rose water, as a homage to Jane. Then I ate them, as you saw. I always eat my pain.” Gabri smiled slightly. Looking at the size of the man, Gamache marveled at the amount of pain he must have. And fear perhaps. And anger? Who knows indeed.”

I confess that the first time I read this, I didn’t really pay attention to the bit about the muffins being on a decorated platter. I only noticed it after Libby mentioned being excited about this meal because the roses decorating the plate had enticed her imagination. I had no idea what she was talking about. Embarrassing, really. My brain registered “muffins” and moved on. I did pay attention to Gabri eating his pain. I could relate.

I ate my pain, too. I also ate insecurities, anxiety, unsuccessful quests for perfection, homesickness, frustrations, PMS and a typical adolescent search for identity. By the time I was 15 I had turned a genetic tendency for curviness into full-blown obesity. Not chubby cute. Actual obesity where there’s knee pain at 15 and doctors are telling you that you’d be okay if you just lost some weight. Then I started eating the feelings due to negative body image and the stress that comes from trying _not_ to eat. I knew exactly what Gabri meant about eating his pain.

It has been a couple of decades since I was compulsively eating my feelings and, in that time, I have made peace with my body, I have lost (regained and lost again) the excessive weight, discovered that I actually enjoy running, and have oscillated, for years,  within a healthy weight span. I will never be thin. The genetic tendency for curviness and a love of eating are unchangeable facts about me. I am healthy, though. Anyway, if given the choice, I think I'd always choose my own body over anyone else's (I'm used to it, it's part of who I am and what defines me) and I wouldn't want to lose pleasure in eating!

That said, my relationship with food is an ongoing learning process. I think anyone who has ever considered weight loss has gone through various attempts in dieting: restrictions, calorie counting, crazy diets, single-food-group diets, restriction of carbohydrates, vilifying of certain ingredients, binge-eating, manic avoidance of sugar – only to consume enormous quantities of it a few days (or hours) later… The list is long.

I remember laughing through Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me, when the character Min tries (unsuccessfully) to make Chicken Marsala. Since she is constantly dieting and has subjected herself to a fat-and-carb free diet (Ha!), she is trying to make it with no butter, no olive oil, and no carbs. It’s a disaster. The scene is hilarious. The message is not.

While I no longer eat feelings like I used to, that girl still lives inside of me. Every once in a while she takes over and it takes some effort to control her (and I’m not always successful). Frequently, unlike Gabri’s beautiful homage, the ingestion of negative feelings is associated with tasteless quantities. I have challenged myself, in the past years, to go beyond the boundaries of over-restrictiveness, and to explore tastes and "prohibited" ingredients (Ah, the joyful freedom of allowing myself butter and olive oil).

It is impossible to abstain from food in our lives (unless you can photosynthesize) – to do so, as my seven year old says (wide-eyed and with an exaggerated scary whisper), “If you don’t eat, you’ll DIE of hunger! For real. Literally.” Unlike other addictions where the solution for control is frequently sought in abstinence, unhealthy use of food must be resolved with some kind of equilibrium. I have proposed to seek indulgence in taste and flavor, instead of quantity. I have slowly come to an awareness that food is not the enemy (nor should it be a crutch), that overeating doesn’t make anything taste better, and that it is alright to treat oneself if there is balance.

When I first mentioned this project to some friends who are not readers of the books, I had varied responses. One friend thought I was trying to crack the cookbook market. Another, who's recently discovered a love of cooking in the past few years, thought I had caught the gourmet-bug. A reader friend (although she has yet to read Penny’s books) thought it was a kind of book review. As I heard their interpretations of what they thought I was trying to do, I tried to explain it to myself. The best I could come up with is that maybe it’s a form of therapy.

Part of the fun of this project was to ransom some of the flavor in food. Sometimes there is no substitute. Sometimes you NEED sugar in a recipe. Sometimes you NEED butter. How do you make croissants without butter?

I think most people have been there, trying to adapt recipes (or other parts of life) that aren't easily changed. Of course, sometimes change is necessary – or just plain fun. There may be healthier versions of recipes, just as there should be allowances made for personal tastes or local ingredients. Both Libby and I, while not vegan or restrictively vegetarian, aren’t big meat eaters. Libby doesn’t eat red meat at all, and I only do so rarely… We live on opposite sides of the globe and might not find the same kinds of ingredients in our local markets. Many of the meals we’re preparing for the blog have been adapted.

There’s a big difference, though, in adapting a recipe to suit your taste and adapting it to suit a calorie count.

The muffins were delicious. My husband came home mid-morning to get something he’d forgotten and grabbed a muffin (or five) as brunch. They ended up being a celebration of a breakthrough in one of his projects. (He and a student had been working on something for days and they couldn't find a solution to the problem. He was beaming because they had finally made things work!).

If we can eat pain and inadequacy, we can also learn to eat the joy of celebration, the happiness in good company, and the sensuality of amazing blends of flavors. Eating with joy might be less compulsive and may be both more pleasurable and more moderate.

I enjoyed fresh maracujá juice with my own muffin and contemplated the fact that while my mind may have rationally understood these concepts, I still have a long way to go in my relationship with food.

Pistachio Muffins

Ingredients:

1 + 1/3 cups of flour

2 teaspoons of baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon (I always put more)

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon lemon zest

½ cup pistachios, chopped (in theory they’re supposed to be finely chopped… but… my muffins weren’t green because I used brown sugar and a bit of whole flour, too)

½ cup butter

2/3 cup sugar (I used brown)

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon rum extract (I didn’t have any and didn’t add it)

½ cup milk

½ cup pistachios, coarsely chopped

How To:

Preheat the oven (the recipe called for 425 degrees, I just put it on the highest) and grease muffin tins (I use silicone ones so I didn’t need to grease them).

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Cream butter and sugar together. Beat the eggs, one at a time, into the creamed mixture until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and rum extracts.

Slowly add the dry mixture (about ¼ at a time) and milk, briefly mixing after each addition. It’s important not to overmix. Pour into tins. The original recipe (see link below) says to sprinkle the tops with the coarsely chopped pistachios. I didn’t have enough, so I left mine “unsprinkled”.

Bake for 15 in 375 degrees.

I adapted my recipe from: http://www.food.com/recipe/green-pistachio-muffins-239041

The quotes are from page 70 of the Paperback copy of Still Life.