[Saturday] favorites 9/17
A delayed newsletter featuring lots of muffins, Chicago nostalgia, and snacking on pommes frites
Happy… Saturday! Friday Favorites went haywire this week due to a combination of an unexpected vacation day, baking mini muffins, impromptu visitors, and a craving for pommes frites.1 I usually have most of my roundup post written by the time Friday actually rolls around, but not this week. I was faced with the decision of throwing something together quickly or delaying until Saturday and writing something with intention, so here we are!
Check out my favorites of the week below!
We had a rainy start to the week in Madrid, along with a drop in temperature. This slight shift in weather was enough for my fall baking urge to kick into action. While I still have some sort of plum cake on my to-bake list (Natalie shares a recipe that I’ve been wanting to try in this post), this week has been all about muffins. I had a couple of bananas that were going bad, so round one was the Ultimate Banana Bread, but in muffin form, from Smitten Kitchen.
Ultimate Banana Bread muffin (and coffee, of course) I only had two bananas, which was a little short of the amount required for a half batch, so I subbed the amount I was missing with soy yogurt (I went by the weight measurement of the recipe instead of volume). I also sprinkled some chocolate chips on the tops of a few of the muffins because you can never go wrong with chocolate. I baked them for around 20 minutes (with convection, and note that our oven runs a little hot). If you make them my best suggestion is to use a toothpick to determine when they’re done (it should come out dry after being inserted into the muffin).
Round two? Deb’s Cinnamon Brown Butter Breakfast Puffs. This is probably my favorite muffin recipe (I’ve mentioned them before here), mostly due to the fact that they remind me of the Cinnamon Bomb muffins that I used to get at a cafe near my apartment when I was in grad school. We’ve made the recipe at home many times now, and it always turns out fantastic. The only change I make is related to the buttermilk: I either leave out the baking soda (keep the baking powder) and sub entirely for oat milk, or I keep the baking soda but sub the buttermilk with a dairy-free approximation (in this case, a 2:1 ratio of oat milk and soy yogurt).
Cinnamon Brown Butter Breakfast Puffs in mini form. Great for breakfast or any time of day. This time around we made them in our mini muffin tray (they only took 9 minutes for me, with convection—use the toothpick trick again!), which yielded 29 perfectly-sized cinnamon sugar treats. If you make them as mini muffins, two suggestions: use more butter than you think is necessary to grease the tins because they stick more than usual, and be careful when rolling them in the sugar mixture because they’re much more delicate.
Has anyone seen The Bear on Hulu? I’d been reading excellent reviews for months but just got around to starting it this week and I’m obsessed (we’ve almost finished the whole season and we only started watching two days ago). It stars Jeremy Allen White (from Shameless fame) and is about a chef who returns to Chicago to take over his family’s Italian beef shop.2
I couldn’t find a picture of Italian beef or cake shakes in my camera roll (probably because my hands were too messy with giardiniera and beef juice), so please enjoy this Chicago cityscape from back in 2015 instead. The only downside is that now I miss Chicago and crave Italian beef sandwiches. Plus after seeing Marcus’s chocolate cake in the show all I can think about is slurping a cake shake from Portillo’s. I think I sense a Chicago-themed food experiment in our future.
After our friends left yesterday, David and I were trying to decide what to do with ourselves. The weather was beautiful: around 24°C/75°F, sun peaking between the buildings, and the distinct crispness in the air hinting that fall is around the corner. It was all too perfect to sit at home, so we decided to meander the streets until we made a game plan. While walking around, we started talking about French fries (don’t ask me why), which immediately led to craving them. I remembered that our favorite French restaurant Le Petit Prince has fries on their menu, so we decided to stop by to tomar algo3 on their terrace.
The fries were, as expected, excepcionales4 and were served with three different sauces: a tartar sauce (think French-style tartar, not Long John Silver’s), one similar to alioli but with delicious chunks of garlic, and a truffle mayo. You can check out the deliciousness in the picture at the top of the post, and apologies for making you crave fries now, too.
A few notes:
Rachel’s One Pan Chicken with Masala and Figs is up on her blog! It made my Friday Favorites list a couple of weeks ago, so you know it’s excellent. If you like figs (and who doesn’t?!), you really have to make it!
The current Sunday Sobremesa is still open! We’re talking about our favorite fast food and take-out picks, so feel free to join in with yours!
Do you have a favorite muffin? Any suggestions for an Italian beef recipe? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
Apologies again for a delayed newsletter! We should be back to our regular schedule next week.
I hope your Friday was excellent and that your Saturday is off to a great start! See you Wednesday!
Ki
Pommes frites: French fries, in French. Autocorrect turned pommes into ponme, so the phrase actually first read “ponme frites” which would be some weird Spanish-French combo that loosely translates into “Give me fries” and that made me laugh because of how apropos it was to my state of mind.
On The Bear: It also has Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays his most hateable character since Desi on Girls. I can’t decide if his presence is good or bad since my annoyance goes through the roof every time he’s on screen, but I guess that’s the point.
Tomar algo: Literally to eat something, here it refers to having a small snack. A huge part of Spanish life, and a possible future newsletter topic.
Excepcional: Amazing, exceptional
First off...thank you sooo much for sharing my recipe. I had a delightful giggle at reading my own name in your post! Second, I've now added to my list those cinnamon puffs cause they look so good! I have to say, if I made mini ones I would be gorging on them all day! Half the size, half the calories right? ;) If you like muffins, you might like to try little French madeleines? They're little buttery cakes and with a bit of orange zest and dipped in chocolate, they're so delicious with a coffee.
Not sure if this is a thing in Spain or in the US, but triple cooked potato wedges? They're absolutely greasy and crunchy and so unhealthy but sometimes you need that.
Thanks so much again for your testing help with the chicken!