Our book club starts a week from Wednesday and I am really excited about it! Our first book is The Secret Keeper and it is a mystery. In fact, the front cover says “An intriguing mystery with characters harboring deep secrets — People”. I love mysteries but it is not good for me to read mysteries when Donny is out of town!
I started the book yesterday morning and I was fine. I decided to read some more before I went to bed and well, bad idea. I know better than that! It isn’t super scary or anything right now, but when I read at night when I’m alone I get really freaked out. I start hearing noises and think someone is in the house…. totally unjustified, but that is just how I am!
Luckily I have my vicious guard dog, Doug, to protect me (notice the sarcasm…..). He will either a) sleep through an intruder entering or b) lick the intruder to death.
I read the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy before Donny & I were even dating and I was living alone. I would freak myself out so bad that I’d have to stop reading. I was also paranoid and would walk Doug and think that everyone that passed was going to kidnap me or murder me. Yeah….. this crazy brain should not be encouraged by mystery novels.
Regardless, I love them and just need to avoid reading when it is dark out and my husband is in another country. With that being said, I’m going to try to read again tonight, but this time in the living room. Maybe that will help… I will never learn, will I?
I was really craving cornbread the other day and I don’t think I’ve made cornbread or cornbread muffins since I worked at the bakery. Which was over five years ago. It was time.
Before I experiment with a recipe I like to browse Pinterest for a while in case there is any good baking suggestions. Pinterest is actually how I started following food blogs to begin with. I’d pin a recipe and then go look at the website and it was almost always attached to a food blog. I started browsing their other recipes and I started following a few. I now actually have an entire Pinterest board dedicated to the food blogs that I like. I don’t religiously read all of them anymore, but still go read them every once in a while to catch up and see their new posts.
When I was browsing Cornbread Muffin recipes I came across Crunchy Creamy Sweet: A Dessert Baking blog. She had a recipe on Pinterest called Perfect Cornbread Muffins. I decided to use her recipe, but make substitutions using clean-eating ingredients. Her recipe is not super unhealthy by any means, but uses buttermilk and blanched white flour. No biggie, I just made a few substitutions and they turned out great! One of these days I might make her recipe exactly and see how they turn out… I’m guessing they are amazing!
I enjoyed these cornbread muffins with a nice big bowl of White Chicken Chili that I made last week in a slow cooker. Look out for that recipe – it was fantastic! I used cornmeal in the muffins AND Gaylon-Edson-sweet-corn. Boom. I am now down two out of 33 bags of sweet corn for the year.
The buttermilk in the recipe is replaced by the mixture of milk and vinegar. Any type of milk will work and also white vinegar can be used instead of the apple cider vinegar. Make sure the mixture sits for 5 minutes before adding.
- 1 cup cornmeal (I used Bob's Red Mill Fine Ground Cornmeal)
- 1 cup whole wheat flour
- 1 cup sweet corn
- 1 4oz can of diced green chiles
- 1 egg
- 1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
- 1 cup unsweetened almond milk
- 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp ground cumin
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- Grease 12 regular-sized muffin cups.
- In a small mixing bowl combine almond milk with apple cider vinegar. Stir and let sit for five minutes.
- In a medium mixing bowl, combine the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cumin. Once the milk-vinegar mixture has set for five minutes then add the egg and oil. Stir to combine.
- Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Do not overmix. Gently fold in the green chiles.
- Divide batter evenly among the 12 muffin cups. Bake for 15-17 minutes or until the muffins are golden brown and a toothpick inserted in a muffin comes out clean.
- Cool for five minutes before removing muffins from pan and transferring to a wire rack. Serve warm.
- Store extra muffins in an airtight container for 4-5 days or freeze for up to 6 months.
- Any milk can be substituted and white vinegar can replace the apple cider vinegar.
