Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [30]
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup pumpkin puree
½ cup neutral vegetable oil
1 cup granulated sugar
⅓ cup light brown sugar, packed
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
⅔ cup semisweet chocolate chips
Neutral vegetable oil, for greasing (if not using paper liners)
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, all-spice, baking soda, and salt.
3. In another bowl, beat the pumpkin with the oil and sugars. Add the eggs, one at a time. Beat in the vanilla.
4. Stir in the dry ingredients, then the chocolate chips.
5. Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners, or lightly grease. Scoop in the batter.
6. Bake for 22 to 25 minutes. A toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin should come out clean. Serve warm, or cool and store at room temperature in an airtight container for up to 5 days.
Makes twelve 2½-ounce muffins
SPICES
Because the supermarket spice business is a racket, one of the best investments you can make in your kitchen is to buy a small electric spice grinder. Then you need to find an ethnic market—Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Mexican—and buy your spices whole. To begin with, whole spices will last a year or more, while ground spices lose their potency after six months. (Do people really throw them away after six months? I know I’m supposed to, but don’t.) A container of McCormick’s ground allspice at Safeway costs $6.59. An equivalent amount of allspice berries from Haig’s, a great Middle Eastern market in San Francisco: $0.56. Almost all spices, from black pepper to nutmeg to cumin, are significantly cheaper bought whole from ethnic markets. This is not to say that ethnic markets are across-the-board cheaper. Just as you might expect, they offer deals on the foods that sell quickly with their clientele. At the Chinese supermarket where I can buy red pepper flakes for a seventh of what I pay at Safeway, butter costs $7.00 per pound.
BISCUITS
One chilly fall morning I found myself in an apron, before dawn, making biscuits for breakfast. The hard drive on the computer had just crashed and I couldn’t find a clean mug, so I was drinking coffee out of a quart canning jar. I stood there patting out the clammy dough on the kitchen counter, listening to rain pelt the windows as I glumly contemplated the chores ahead, like scraping bits of wet dough off the counter and slogging off to the Apple Store. I had bought a tube of Pillsbury buttermilk bake-and-serve biscuits to compare with the homemade. I peeled back the label on the canister, which sprang open with a cheerful pop. Good morning! cried the flabby biscuits, practically leaping from the tube onto the cookie sheet. I was momentarily enchanted.
Biscuits were once a morning (and noontime and evening) staple in America. Having made my share of biscuits over the years, I can see why women of a previous generation turned to refrigerated dough with such alacrity. If I were expected to produce biscuits once, twice, or three times a day, I might become very resentful and very grateful for the tube.
Today, though, biscuits are not a staple. I am not expected to make biscuits, and when I do, I am applauded. It is my choice to make them. Or not. They are also a treat, and treats are worth taking pains over. The Pillsbury biscuits were satisfactory, but as Owen put it, they tasted “kind of dull.” Also, they contain both trans fat and sugar, neither of which makes a nutritionally empty biscuit any more defensible.
These biscuits—from a recipe by the chef Scott Peacock—are cream of tartar biscuits, the kind Jeff Bridges uses to woo Maggie Gyllenhaal in the movie Crazy Heart, at least when he’s not falling down drunk.
Assemble all your ingredients and cooking implements before you begin—buttermilk, cutter, baking pan. Once you get your hands covered with biscuit dough, you don’t want to be fishing around in the fridge for the buttermilk