All posts by Laurie Graves

I write about nature, food, the environment, home, family, community, and people.
Food, Recipes

Cocoa Muffins in New Silicone Muffin Cups

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The day before yesterday, our friend Diane surprised us with a gift of twelve silicone muffin cups. Thanks so much, Diane!

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Naturally I had to immediately try them out, and at Clif’s insistence, I made cocoa muffins, which are really a dessert but with less fat and sugar than a cupcake. To guild the lily, I added three-quarters of a cup of chocolate chip, placed half a pecan on each muffin, and sprinkled the tops with a bit of sugar.

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The results? “Pretty darned good,” Clif said.

And best of all, there was hardly any sticking. I let the muffins cool and peeled away the silicone cups. Voilà!  Perfect little muffins with no bottoms left behind.

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Cocoa Muffins with Chocolate Chips

Ingredients

  • 1 egg
  • 1/4 cup of vegetable oil
  • 1 cup of milk
  • 1/2 cup of sugar
  • 2 cups of flour
  • 3 teaspoons of baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon of salt
  • 3 tablespoons of cocoa
  • 3/4 cup of chocolate chips
  • 12 pecan halves (optional)
  • Sugar for sprinkling on top of the muffins

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 400°.
  2. Combine dry ingredients in medium-size bowl and set aside.
  3. In a large bowl, lightly beat the egg.
  4. Beat the vegetable oil and milk into the egg.
  5. Stir in the sugar.
  6. Sift dry ingredients into the wet mixture.
  7. Stir just until the ingredients are mixed. Do not overstir or muffins will be tough.
  8. Fold in the chocolate chips.
  9. Put the batter in either a greased muffin tin or ungreased silicone cups. (Makes twelve medium-size muffins.)
  10. Place pecan half on top.
  11. Sprinkle the tops with sugar.
  12. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.
  13. If using a traditional muffin tin, let cool for five minutes before removing muffins. If using the silicone cups, let the muffins cool completely before removing from the cups.
  14. Butter, of course, goes with any kind of muffin, but berry jam tastes pretty darned good with these muffins, too.

 

 

Flowers, Nature

A Curve of White Through Yellow, a Leg Full of Pollen

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Summer is winding down, and so are the gardens at the little house in the big woods, which are at their best in June and July. Still, despite their raggedness, there are still things to admire and find in the garden.

This curve of white through yellow.

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This leg full of pollen.

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The crickets sing, the grasshoppers buzz, and the yellow jackets, out in force this year, pester us when we eat on the patio. (Not everything is sublime at the little house in the big woods.)

Such a sweet, sad time of year, when the dark comes earlier and earlier.  I love fall and the crisp energy it brings, but I am always sorry to say farewell, for another year, to the flowers and the hummingbirds and the loons.

 

Food for Thought, Movies

Beautiful Diversity

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Startrek

One of the things—along with the food and the art—that I love about New York City is the incredible diversity of people.  One time when I was visiting my daughter Dee, we were sitting at a café, and I was positively dazzled by the variety of passersby—short, tall, thin, fat, Asian, white, black, brown, men with women, women with women, men with men. There were no disapproving stares, and everyone looked as though they felt completely comfortable with themselves and with others.

“This is good,” I said to myself. “This is very good.”

I was reminded of this last week when I went to see the latest Star Trek movie. Along with the humorous bantering between Spock and Bones, the heroic deeds of Captain Kirk, and the many, many explosions, there was a scene at a space station that was an interstellar version of what I saw at that café in New York city. But along with the brown and black, there were red, green, blue, and other creatures that walked on two legs but did not resemble humans in any way. There they were, all together, serenely and joyfully going about their business, and it made me smile just to watch that scene.

Naturally, in the course of the story, the space station comes under grave danger. Readers, I am not going to give any spoilers, except to note that Kirk and company go to great lengths trying to save that station.

From its inception, Star Trek celebrated diversity, and the original show with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner featured a cast that resembled a mini-United Nations. The main crew included a black woman, a Japanese man, a Russian man,  a Vulcan, and the inimitable Scotty. In the early 1960s, this inclusiveness was nothing short of astonishing.

And of course that was the whole point. Gene Roddenberry, the original show’s creator, felt very strongly that as a species, we needed to look beyond the surface to acknowledge the dignity and worth of every person. He was a man ahead of his time, showing us the direction in which we should be headed.

In the natural world, we celebrate diversity and curse those invasive species that can overcome the natural system. Having too much of one plant or animal is usually not a good thing. The same is true for monocropping, with the potato famine in Ireland being a horrible example of what can go wrong when too much reliance is put on one vegetable. Even genetically, diversity is a very good thing, and too much interbreeding, whether with dogs or with humans, leads to all sorts of problems.

So we have plenty of examples of the value of diversity, but we seem to have trouble applying this knowledge to the various types and colors of people who live on this planet.

Nature shows us the way. So does Star Trek and other science fiction stories. New York City does, too.  Slowly, many of us are absorbing these lessons. Unfortunately, others are not. But it is my hope that a time will come, sooner rather than later, when racial and cultural diversity is, well, normal, not at all unusual, simply the way things are.

Art, Food, People

Along Came a Spider…

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The meal on Jill's deck
The meal on Jill’s deck

 

The week with our daughter Dee was bookended by two outdoor meals with friends. The first was with Jill on her deck in the trees. (The back of her house sits high on a slope, and on the deck it really does feel as though you are in the trees. ) We had an absolutely fabulous appetizer meal. As we ate and talked, I watched the tree tops sway in the wind. I also watched the birds that came to the many feeders Jill has in her yard. All in all, a magical meal.

Then, this past Sunday, after Dee left, we had another absolutely fabulous meal—salads and salmon and grilled bread—with our friends Cheryl and Denny. (Alas, I did not think to bring my camera. The hot and humid day must have clouded my mind.) Their deck is low and overlooks a sweep of lawn with flowers and a bird bath. Another magical place.

In between, we went to two movies—Star Trek and Captain Fantastic—and two plays—The Illusion and Henry V.  In central Maine, which has a low population, we are extremely lucky to have the Theater at Monmouth, which calls itself the Shakespearean theatre of Maine. Each summer, equity and nonequity actors perform four or five plays in repertory, and two of them are usually Shakespeare’s plays. While I love all the arts, theater is at the top of my list, right up there with books. In short, I can never go to too many plays, especially if the actors are good.

This year, the troupe at the Theater at Monmouth is very good indeed. So good, in fact, that when, in The Illusion, a huge spider decided to descend from the heights and join the fun, the actors—bless them—never skipped a beat, never once indicated that a giant arachnid was hovering nearby. Up the spider went, and then down again it came, nearly running into one of the actresses as she was in mid-speech. An audible ripple of dismay  spread through the audience, and I covered my eyes with my hands.

But the actress never flinched, and on went the show. That darned spider finally dropped to the stage, and we didn’t see it again. Thank goodness!

This unpredictability is one of the reasons I love theater so much. Who knows what will happen in any given performance? As the house lights go down, I always get a little shiver of anticipation, and sometimes, just sometimes, there is even alchemy in the theater.

Our week with our daughter is over, and back to our normal routines we must go. However, thanks to Dee, who for Christmas bought us season passes to the Theater at Monmouth, we have two more plays to see next weekend.

I wonder if there will be any more unexpected visitors.

Books, People

An August Visit

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Tomorrow, my daughter Dee will coming from New York to spend a week with us. Is there any better time to visit Maine than August? Some would say September or October, but nothing can beat August for time spent on the patio, where we can drink wine, eat grilled food, listen to the crickets, and watch the birds. Dee looks forward to this, and when she came in July for the Maine International Film Festival, she was sorry that she didn’t get any patio time.

Dee’s visit will be filled with all sorts of simple but fun activities—an appetizer night at a friend’s house; a pizza and movie night here; plays at the Theater at Monmouth, just down the road from us; a couple of movies at the cinema; and most likely a trip to an art museum or two. It will be a lovely interlude from our usual routine. No matter how satisfying a life might be, it is always good to take a break from time to time.

Readers will be happy to know that last night I made my decision about which book to read. The choice was between Barkskins by Annie Proulx and White Trash by Nancy Isenberg. (For more of a description of these two books, see yesterday’s post. ) Jason, from the blog Garden in a City, suggested I go with Barkskins, and I independently came to the same conclusion. I read some of Barkskins last night, and at 12:45 a.m., I reluctantly put the book down so that I could turn off my reading light and go to sleep. Now comes the challenge of finishing the book before it is due in two weeks. At 736 pages, Barkskins certainly qualifies as a tome, but I do feel I am up to the challenge.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be blogging next week. I might post a picture or two, but I expect I won’t be writing much.

I hope all of you have a wonderful week.

 

Books

Under Book Pressure

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No, the title of this post does not refer to my upcoming book, Maya and the Book of Everything. I am right on schedule for that. Instead,  I am referring to two other books, which I recently checked out from our town’s library.

The first is White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg. This title pretty much explains the premise of the book, and as someone who has come from an underclass—I am Franco-American—I am always interested in how class plays out in our supposedly classless society. (Such a foolish premise. Where there are humans, there is always a class hierarchy. )

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I’ve begun reading White Trash, and it looks as though it’s going to be a very good book. I’ve already begun peppering it with little sticky notes when I find passages that are especially engaging.

The second book is Barkskins by Annie Proulx, and it’s a novel of two Frenchmen who come to New France in the late seventeenth century. Steven, my Franco book buddy,  put this on our must-read list, and knowing there were a lot of holds on Barkskins, I told him I’d see what I could do about getting the book from the library. As luck would have it, Barkskins came far sooner than I expected it would, and now it sits, along with White Trash, on my night stand, two hefty books waiting to be read.

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And here we come to the crux of the problem. White Trash is 480-pages long, and Barkskins clocks in at a whooping 736 pages. Both are due in two weeks, and for one of those weeks—next week, in fact—my daughter Dee will be visiting from New York.

Now, I am a fast reader, but to read over a thousand pages in two weeks is a bit much, even for me. Amazingly enough, White Trash has lots of holds, over fifty I was told by our library’s director. I guess I’m not the only Maine reader who is interested in class in America. Barkskins also has a lot of holds on it. No surprise there.

This means that renewing either book is out of the question, and.  most likely, I will be able to finish one but not the other. Yesterday, I dipped into White Trash. Today, I will dip into Barkskins. Then, I will have to make a choice.

I wasn’t kidding when I chose this post’s title. Under book pressure, indeed.

Flowers

Flip the Calender and Raise a Glass

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Flip the calendar to August. Say goodbye to July and to the evening primroses, whose bright yellow made the gardens positively glow. But hello to the black-eyed Susans and daylilies. For the gardens at the little house in the big woods, this will be the last burst before fall. After that, the plants have a tattered, tired look. They have given their all, and by the end of the month they are exhausted, bloomed out and chewed by slugs, snails, and beetles.

But oh, the first of August, when my favorite daylily blooms. Such a red beauty.

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However, the other daylilies are lovely, too.

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Less showy but much appreciated are the black-eyed Susans,  and sometimes I even catch a little inhabitant of the garden.

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Another little inhabitant.

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The crickets have begun their song of late summer and fall. Such a lovely but sad chorus, a harbinger of dark, cold days when the flowers are gone and there are no more patio days.

But enough of that! We have at least one more month of summer, where we can spend much of the time on the patio. Last weekend, our friends Dawna and Jim cane over. She brought her delectable margaritas, and we raised our glasses high as we said farewell to July and toasted August, one of the most beautiful months in Maine.

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Too bad we couldn’t trade the tiresome, irksome month of March for another month of August. How would that work? It wouldn’t, of course.

Only in my dreams.