Strawberry Rhubarb Muffins

Last week we took a trip to visit Giz in Toronto.  I spent a couple of days cooking and baking to fill up her freezer.  I made a vegetarian version of taco soup, chicken soup, a ground chicken bolognese and banana oatmeal muffins.  I also wanted to use up some of the rhubarb I had pulled from my garden and transported with me.  R found this delicious recipe!

Strawberry Rhubarb Muffins

The Vintage Mom

2 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup granulated sugar

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk

1 tsp vanilla

1 large egg

1/4 cup applesauce

1 cup chopped fresh strawberries

1/2 cup chopped fresh rhubarb

Topping

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup light brown sugar

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, melted

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Make crumb topping by combining all topping ingredients and stirring with a fork. Set aside.

3. Whisk together buttermilk, egg, vanilla, and applesauce in a large bowl. Set aside.

4. Mix together flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.

5. Combine wet and dry ingredients and stir until just combined.

6. Fold in strawberries and rhubarb.

7. Put into muffin tin.

8. Top with a light layer of crumb topping.

9. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or until lightly browned on the top

Verdict - These muffins were a hit!  I'd make them again without a doubt.  In fact, I'm hoping to get enough rhubarb out of my garden to make them for my freezer back at home.  I was quite generous with the fruit quantities.  Next time, I'll be more conservative since it made the middle of the muffin slightly mushier than I'd like.  I'd also definitely recommend halving the streusel quantities.  I put a generous amount on top of the muffins and was still left with a lot left over (see picture, below). 

Tomato Sauce

I am so glad I had stocked my freezer before E arrived (with Giz's help and the help of a friend).  I try to be productive during the day, but between our outings (necessary for maintaining my sanity), nursing and E's strong preference for being held (read: tendency to cry her head off when she isn't being held), it can be challenging to get much done.  Particularly chores that can't be dropped part way through.

(I can never get enough of these "ugly cry" pictures)

Thankfully, my cousin has been in town for the past week and a half.  I told her that, aside from the whole "husband-sharing" thing, I thinking having a sister-wife would be great.  With her love of babies, she happily entertained E while I made tomato sauce using up the tomatoes from our garden.

I blanched the plum tomatoes to get skin off.   

Then I diced the tomatoes, along with garlic and shallots.  I brought the tomatoes to a boil and let it boil down for about 45 minutes.

Since I didn't have enough tomatoes to make it worth canning, I went ahead and prepared sauce with other ingredients like roasted red pepper (finally finishing off the 1.5L jar that Giz felt we needed in our fridge), artichokes, herbs and chilli peppers.  This is the base of many of our pasta sauces.  

I then froze the sauce ( I just need to remember to add a bit of sugar when I warm up the sauce because it's a bit on the acidic side).

There's something so satisfying about growing the food yourself and making it from scratch.  Here's what we started with:

Part way through the season:

The Neverending Lawn Saga

I love the anticipation (and appearance) of fresh fruits and vegetables that comes with this time of year. But having a whole other part of the house to take care of (the yard) sure adds to the chore list.  It wouldn't normally mind, but my yard has been a major thorn in my side.   Let me show you why... Advice is welcome!

The Province of Ontario banned the use of many pesticides about three years ago. In theory, I like the idea of not putting chemicals on my lawn or having to endure neighbour's chemicals. In practice, it makes lawn maintenance more challenging.

Here's my lawn shortly after the snow melted (some time in March):

By "lawn", I mean, weed graveyard.

Ugh.

I don't know what happened -- it was fine in July of last year:

Either we killed it with a lack of water...or the city's arch nemesis, grubs, got to our lawn. Grubs have been a growing problem around here since our winters aren't really cold enough to kill them off and nematodes (the non-chemical solution to grubs) requires a lot of water to be effective and are still not 100% effective when applied correctly. All you have to do is walk around various neighbourhoods in Ottawa and you'll see large patches of lawn missing or in various states of (dis)repair.

In around April of this year, here's what our weeded lawn looked like:

Not exactly the perfect spot for a picnic.  So depressing!

I asked around (local nurseries, Master Gardener's of Ottawa, neighbours, etc.) and got advice ranging from adding 2 inches of top soil and reseeding to resodding.

In the end, we decided to till the entire yard, add some compost, roll and reseed.  Kudos goes to R for doing all of the work.

See that pile of sticks in the corner?  Those are roots coming out of the ground.  There must have been a tree planted in our yard at some point.

See that crazy branch in the picture below?  Also, dug out of the ground...

Here it is up close:

Dealing with the portions of the lawn with existing grass was actually the most difficult since we wanted to level the soil.

After tilling the lawn, R spread compost lightly throughout:

After getting rid of the remaining grass, raking the lawn flat and spreading compost, we rented a lawn roller from Home Depot.

Hoping to be proactive, we opted to seed with a fescues mix.  Fescues is a variety of grass seed that tends to be more drought resistant and less attractive to grubs.  The trouble with fescues it that it germinates more slowly and seems to take longer to create an established lawn.  We went with Eco-Lawn

After about three weeks of watering regularly (early in the morning, if there wasn't any rain forecasted for the day), here's what our lawn looked like:

I wish I had a great after-picture to share with you...but it's still a work in progress.  It's looking greener, but a lot of what's there is weeds.  FML! 

I think it's going to be a multi-year project to get our lawn back.  Worst comes to worst, we'll just give up and re-sod (R also likes the option of paving it...but I don't see that happening).  But, I took the above picture into Green Thumb Nursery, where we bought the seed, asking whether it looks okay and she said it looks normal and to just keep watering.  

The clover is particularly aggressive:

R's new plan is to weed daily, add more seed and water twice a day. 

On the bright side, the garden is planted.  

The soil looks a bit strange at the moment, after the torrential rain we had yesterday...But I think all of the plants are in tact.  We planted 4 tomato varieties, cucumbers, 3 lettuces and 4 herbs.  I'm aiming for something low maintenance because I don't think we'll have much time for gardening later on in the summer.

R even suited up in his "impenetrable superhero suit" to remove a couple of wasp's nests that we found.  

Oven-Roasted Tomatoes

This was my second year of gardening. Although it's still a learning process (which I intend to post about in the near future), it was definitely more productive than my first year. Here are just some of the tomatoes I pulled from the garden:

As the tomatoes kept coming, I knew that there would be no way for me to eat all of them before they went bad. So, I decided to oven roast and freeze some of the small and medium tomatoes.

Oven-Roasted Tomatoes

olive oil
tomatoes, sliced in half
garlic, crushed
salt and pepper


Preheat oven to 200F.

Place tomatoes, slice side up on cookie sheet. Drizzle with olive oil. Spread garlic over top and add salt (sparingly) and pepper. You can, of course, experiment with whatever other herb flavours you'd like.

The tomatoes will slow-roast. I kept mine in for about 2.5 hours. But, take a look at them every once in a while and remove them when they're done to your liking.

Lesson learned: used parchment paper.

Gardening Notes:

Although I was thrilled to have a better crop of tomatoes this year, 95% of the yield came from 2 plants that had prime property in the sun and the remaining 8 plants were lackluster.

Next year, I'm going to make sure the tomatoes have a better spot in the sun, keep on top of the plants that are growing like weeds and pinch off plants to keep my green tomatoes a fighting chance of ripening as it gets later in the season; I ended up with a lot of green tomatoes at the end of the season.

Chive Pesto

I think I need to plant more perennials.  I loved having chives growing without having to expend any energy.  Not to mention that they grew better than the plants that I worked hard to grow!

The thing is, I don't tend to use chives in many of my dishes.  So, I decided to expand my pesto collection and make some chive pesto.

I started out by separating the flowers from the rest of the chives.  

I like using the flowers (they're edible) as a garnish or in a vase, for decoration.

I found a recipe for chive pesto at this link 

Chive Pesto Recipe

2 cups roughly chopped chives

1/4 cup olive oil

1/3 cup toasted nuts: almonds, pine nuts, walnuts, etc.

1-3 ounces or 1/3 cup more or less parmesan cheese

1 clove or less of garlic

Blend it in a food processor until fairly chopped up but still smallish chunks.  Note: I blended it until pretty close to smooth.  

I ended up having enough ingredients for a double recipe, which filled up two ice cube trays.

Here's my pesto collection: 3 bags of scape pesto, 1 bag of chive pesto and 1/2 bag of basil pesto.  Each pesto has its own distinct flavour and I'm looking forward to try them in the months to come. 

Banana Oat Muffins

R claims that he's not a foodie. In fact, he tries to convince me that he's just as happy with kraft dinner as a gourmet supper. I think it's all just a big front to avoid doing the dishes or encourage the use of fewer dishes (note to self: never buy a house without a dishwasher ever again).

What non-foodie goes to La Bottega or Nicastro's on a weekly basis to buy ingredients for his lunch? He meticulously crafts these sandwiches as part of his night time ritual. First, slice the bread in half (either rosemary buns or small baguettes...I think they're called saroli).


Then, a layer of genoa salami...next capocollo. The meat is topped with havarti cheese with caraway seeds. All of this is topped by pickled eggplant and mustard.

Here is R's sandwich mid-way through:


Sounds pretty extravagant? Personally, I think he's trying to recreate Dirienzo's sandwiches. For those you who aren't from the Ottawa area, Dirienzo's is the name of an Italian corner store that serves amazing sandwiches (think lineups outside of the door at lunch time) for a very reasonable price. Here are some pictures from Dirienzo's:





It doesn't stop there. What "I'm not a foodie" lunch is complete without its very own homemade baked good? Yes. That's right. We have a stash of home baked good for R to choose from for lunch. When the supply of muffins (frozen after being baked) gets low, R scours the internet for recipes.


Last time the freezer stash was low, we had a bunch of carrots to use up after my friend the rabbit found a way to eat through the fencing around my garden (next year, metal fencing).


So, he went with Martha Stewart's Carrot Cupcakes (minus the icing). Sorry -- no pictures of the finished product. They were good, though I'd cut back on the sugar next time.


This time, we have an abundance of overripe bananas (I regularly throw overripe bananas straight into the freezer -- good tip to avoid fruit flies). R spent a good 30 minutes comparing recipes for banana, oatmeal and raisin muffins, and decided to go with this one.

Banana Oat Muffins


1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup mashed bananas
Directions

Combine flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, soda, and salt.
In a large bowl, beat the egg lightly. Stir in the milk, oil, and vanilla. Add the mashed banana, and combine thoroughly. Stir the flour mixture into the banana mixture until just combined. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper bake cups, and divide the batter among them.

Bake at 400 degrees F (205 degrees C) for 18 to 20 minutes.

Verdict: Easy to make, but just okay in the flavour department.