Apple Muffins
It feels like a thousand lifetimes happened between the last newsletter and this one, but it’s apparently only been a month. It’s also fall! So I thought I’d kick things off with this apple muffin recipe, which I actually made on a particularly uneventful mid-to-late summer day. But who cares about such technicalities—or even the concept of time—at this point, right?
Read on for more.
RECIPE: Apple Muffins
Born out of the need to use up some leftover green apples, I found this recipe from The Girl Who Ate Everything and made some changes to suit my needs. The end result? These soft, moist delicious muffins that I can definitely see myself making again and again.
Ingredients
This yielded 16 muffins for me — your count may be slightly over or under that amount
1 1/4 cups sugar (you could probably reduce it to 1 cup to make it less sweet)
2 eggs
3/4 cup oil*
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 peeled, diced (and cored) green apples, which yielded about 2 1/4 cups of apple for me
1/4 to 1/3 cup brown sugar for the topping
Instructions
Line your muffin pans with paper liners, while preheating the oven to 350 degrees F.
In a stand mixer or using a hand mixer, cream together the sugar, eggs, oil, and vanilla extract. Sift the flour, baking soda, ground cinnamon and salt together into another medium-sized bowl, then add those dry ingredients to the creamed-together ingredients, and mix them all together until combined.
Then add the apples and mix everything together a little further.
Fill each muffin slot in the trays until they’re about three-fourth of the way full. Sprinkle some brown sugar on top.
Bake for about 20 to 24 minutes.
Notes
* Avocado oil is my go-to neutral oil these days - any such neutral oil made for high heat should work just fine.
Adapted from The Girl Who Ate Everything.
Food for Thought
One of my early recipes on Rad Dishes (the blog) was for homestyle tandoori chicken, as taught to me by my mom. I’ll probably re-up it here as a featured recipe in this newsletter sometime in the future because it is one of the best recipes I know. Back when I blogged it, someone at a fairly prominent publication reached out about including it in a roundup. I agreed and was happy to see it featured, but I was also a little dismayed to see it under a headline about “weird marinades.” You see, the chicken gets marinated in yogurt (and a ton of spices, as well as a bit of oil and lime juice). This is what makes it delicious — not weird! This all came back to me when I saw this recent piece about The Science of Yogurt Marinades (Nik Sharma, Serious Eats). I thought some of you may enjoy it.
On a practical note, my grand experiment this month was making an almond cream layer cake for my husband’s birthday. I've only made a layer cake once before and that was while visiting my cousin in California a few months ago. My cake ended up a little rustic, and I think I skipped about one-third of the frosting this recipe yields, but it was still delicious. Check out Best Ever Almond Cream Cake by The Busy Baker.
Bites of Culture
What I’m Reading:
I’ve been distracted by knitting projects again (though at least it means I’m using my supplies instead of hoarding them), but I completed On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, which had some beautifully written passages. That said, a couple of them felt a little overwritten, while others left me a bit cold.
I’ve started my reread of Rebecca, a book I first read when I was a lonely kid who had just started the seventh grade at a new school toward the tail end of the academic year and had discovered that my school library did not have limitations on how many books I could borrow. (This is also the period during which I read a ton of Stephen King.) I’ve reread it a couple of times since as an adult and decided it was time to revisit it again, especially with a new adaption hitting Netflix in October, and simply because I really enjoy the writings of Daphne du Maurier and could use a fix right now. It’s a near-perfect novel, in my opinion, and I’m going to give myself time to indulge in those words over these next couple of nights.
What I’m Listening to:
The new Doves album I was super excited about earlier this summer, The Universal Want, is a perfect return to form. And separately, perhaps due to a commercial that keeps popping up on Hulu, I’ve felt compelled to listen to The Man Who Sold the World and Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie. Then I revisited the Seu Jorge Bowie covers featured in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou soundtrack, and it has all been very good and fulfilling for the soul.
What I’m Watching:
My husband and I resumed our ER rewatch (well, rewatch for me, first watch for him), which started last year. We’re in the midst of season five, but it will probably take us years to get through this show. Spider-Man: Homecoming is next in the Marvel rewatch. Yes, I know — we rewatch too many things and will never finish anything.
Also, I was dismissive of my friend Matt’s recommendation to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender (which is available on Netflix), but I am now eating my words, because it is a beautiful show. The animation is a delight, it’s sweet and funny, but it is also poignant and dark and some of the characters really know how to drop wisdom that seem relevant in the world we live in today. If you haven’t watched it, please give it a shot.
Thanks for reading this edition of Rad Dishes! You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter. I’m shutting down the Facebook page this week, and while the original Rad Dishes is still live here for now, I do have some general plans for an overhaul of sorts, which means the complete archives will likely not be around for long.
Earlier Newsletters:
Mushroom Spinach Risotto (or Arugula If You’d Like)
Minor error: I've edited the post to reflect the apples for this recipe should also be peeled!