Pumpkin Muffins with Walnuts, in our new place!

      Hello hello again! It was so hard to be away from the blog for so long, especially since there's so much I've been exploring and wanting to share. Long story short, I occasionally have the worst luck in the world, which I like to think of as a bad luck waterfall downward spiral up a creek without a paddle sort of event. I'm not always this unlucky, but when it hits, the luck is BAD. This time my bad luck manifested in my ability to be in touch with the world. Between my cell phone and connecting to the internet, I've experienced enough "Well it should be working, wonder why it's not..." moments in the last six weeks to last me...a long time.

      I've done so much exploring, reading, watching Gilmore Girls, and frugally shopping for dishes, kitchen utensils, and furniture in the last few weeks. At first it was really fun, like living the best version of life, but after a few weeks it's gotten hard to handle! Starting anything anew is always exciting at first, but the excitement has faded a bit as I've started to get accustomed to our new home and this big city, and realized...I need something to do with my time!

      Taking a break from job hunting, I decided I'd work on a few blog posts today. And of course, I've started with the most delicious one! It's turned to fall here so quickly! These cold, cloudy days are just begging for all the fall comforts, including everything pumpkin.

      I have a long history of a tumultuous relationship with breakfast. For most of the past five years or so, I've struggled to want to eat breakfast. Don't get me wrong, I love breakfast food! I just seem to prefer it, well, mostly for dinner, ha! My stomach seems to strongly dislike waking up. This has been problematic, specifically for functioning at work, eating before running events I'd signed up for (pretty much ruined a 10 mile race for me), visiting people and going out to eat for breakfast, and generally it's just never a good thing. Over the years, with my gastroenterologist, we've figured out a routine that helps and a few of the reasons why, which maybe I'll get into another time, but one of the strategies I use to entice my stomach in the mornings is by baking whatever I'm craving in muffin form.

      This brings us to pumpkin muffins! With the stress of moving, even when I haven't felt stressed about it, my gut has reverted to it's old ways and I've just not been into breakfast here. It's meant I get late starts to the day and feel like I'm missing out on time I should be using more productively. So, since I'm craving all things fall, I made these wonderfully simple pumpkin muffins from a German blog called "Esspirationen" which translates, essentially, into "eat-spiration" and which I think is beyond adorable. I'll leave a translated version below, but feel free to use your web browser to translate the page from Germany.

      I had to make these little darlings in my new toaster convection oven, because this is my life now.  My kitchen situation, as compared to previous living arrangements, is quite sparse, and I've just got the basics. For example, aside from only having a small convection oven, I mixed everything by hand because I don't yet have a mixer! And I don't have great counters for baking prep, so until we get a table I'm confined to tiny counter spaces which I promptly make a huge mess. At least they are delicious!

Thanks for tuning in, and look for more posts soon, I've so much to share from my "offline" time! 

Pumpkin Muffins with Walnuts and White Chocolate
Translated from Esspirationen
*I omitted chocolate from mine- I KNOW crazy- but that's the way it was! I encourage you to follow the original recipe for yours :)

Ingredients for 12 muffins
200 g Hokkaido pumpkin
150 g spelled flour Type 630
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs
100g sugar
1 packet Bourbon vanilla sugar
75 g butter or margarine
1 pinch of salt
50 g walnuts
100 g white chocolate
1 pinch of gingerbread spices

Preparation 
Cook the Hokkaido pumpkin throughout for 15 minutes in a large pot in plenty of water. Then remove and let cool slightly. Roast the walnuts in a dry frying pan and chop. Chop chocolate (up to 2 ribs) coarsely too. Cut out 200 g of pumpkin flesh and puree. Preheat the oven to 200 ° C (top / bottom heat). Beat butter and sugar until creamy, then add eggs and a pinch of salt and beat for 2 minutes. Mix flour with spices and baking powder and stir. Add to butter and sugar mix and stir, then add the pumpkin puree. Stir in chopped nuts and chocolate. Prep a muffin tin and spread the batter evenly in it. Bake 20 minutes. In the meantime, the remaining chocolate ribs melt in a small bowl in a water bath. Leave the finished baked muffins to cool slightly in the mold, then release them from the mold and decorate with the melted chocolate and powdered sugar.

Feeling Springy

     The weather has finally gotten less "abominable snowman" and more "typical spring." We have had so much rain...thank goodness the temperature warmed up or we'd be in school until August! Living in a place where there is no plan for snow days and no good way to make roads safe when it does snow has been frustrating. I'm used to living in a place where it's not a state of emergency when you get a couple inches of snow, and I do love a good snow day. However, the last two years of "HOLYCOWTHERE'SSNOWLETSALLFREAKOUT" has been a little tiring.

I think that this image defines "Meh."
This is my beautiful curtain that looks
so blah in the low light. 

     Meh. I'm feeling meh. It's just that time of the school year where we teachers start wondering if we've really done all we needed to do, and figuring out our priorities for the last 9 weeks of the year. I've felt a little inadequate in the teacher realm lately due to being completely overwhelmed with paperwork. So I tried to do something this week that would make me feel like I made a positive impact. Which, of course, meant heading to the kitchen. My baking challenge this week was "fillings." Fillings? Fillings. The suggestions were all sweets, which I LOVE and I had so many ideas for all kinds of delicious, provocative, and sinful looking treats that I could make (most involved chocolate), but I challenged myself to go a different direction.

"One day, all of this will be yours." "What, the curtains?"

      See, I am not a breakfast fan. Don't get me wrong, I love breakfast foods. Brunch foods as well! There's so many delicious options! But in the morning, my body would rather be asleep than getting up, and for some reason my stomach wakes up dead last. It takes a while before I really want to eat something! I have learned in the last 2 years that going in to work before 8 and having to be professional while interacting with middle-schoolers takes two things: COFFEE, and breakfast. I usually stick with something like a half a bagel, or a banana, or granola bar...something small and really not that great for breakfast.

     So I made what I will call "biscuitmuffins," because they look like a muffin and taste like a biscuit. And I stuffed them with scrambled eggs, bacon, and some cheddar cheese. It's a sneaky way to add protein (and CHEESE omg) to an otherwise carb-based breakfast. I thought it might be a way to start changing my breakfast habits. Plus, it's just the size of a muffin (some were smaller than this one, even) so they were perfectly sized for my lacking morning appetite. Not only that, but they taste great. Like, really really great. Like the kind of great that makes your same sex coworkers ask how your marriage is, because they want you to get divorced and then they can marry you and you can cook for them all the time.

Cheesy bacon biscuitmuffin deliciousness.
Also, next up...photo editing software. 

     I followed the dough recipe from this site, and the process, and it made exactly 8 biscuitmuffins.  Looking back I could have made a few of these a little smaller and made 10, but that's really just me being picky. Happy eating!!