Weekend Report (Let's Get Ready to Mmmmmake Mmmmmuffins!!!!)

ADDENDA:
I've made this recipe for lemon muffins three times, each to great success. I modified the recipe by replacing the flour with whole wheat pastry flour, and used brown sugar with extra lemon zest on top for a slightly crunchy caramelized bite. But this time I tried what I did for the pizza dough: measure the ingredients by weight instead of volume. (This is the most accurate way to measure flour, which tends to be dense or airy or "foofy," making volume-measurement inaccurate.) Two cups is 16oz, a full pound. My pastry flour, kept in the back of the freezer, was pushed down and really clumpy and dense, but by weighing, it didn't matter....

Instead of a batter, it became a dough when I folded in the wet with the dry (you fold instead of mix to prevent creating gluten, which will make the muffins tough). Surprisingly, the muffins DID rise in the oven, but were extremely dense and dry. Failure. Being that this recipe worked before, my only guess is that the recipe-author not measured by weight, and ended up using a lot less flour.

SATURDAY
AM SNACK: 3am, homemade powerbar, .25 bowl, hunger 3/5
Woke up at 2am after 5 hours sleep, just psyched to be up, take apart and clean my bicycle, then bake muffins. I'm sure I look totally bonkers from the outside.

BREAKFAST: 5:45am, 3 leaden lemon muffins, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 11:30pm, spinach salad with homemade vinaigrette, 2 pancakes, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
All the salad from the farmers market, except the carrots. Pancakes out of the freezer. Mmmm, buttermilk....

PM SNACK: 2pm, vegan chocolate chip cookie, 1/4 pint of vegan chocolate hazelnut gelato, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
A movie afternoon with the HVS. The weird cashew-cream gelato was shockingly good, like what Tofutti should taste like if it wasn't mainly flavored by emulsifiers and chemicals.

DINNER: 6:45pm, pheasant sausage in mushroom demi-glace over fresh pasta, 2.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Sausage was pre-cooked, too mild a flavor, and the fat in it tasted a bit too chunky - will not make that mistake again. Cut time on the pasta by letting the dough hook knead it in the mixer, made the final product a bit tougher than I like. I made an espagnole sauce before the movie, burned my mirepoix once and started over. Didn't have tomato paste, gotta get one of those fancy tubes so I can have small amounts on hand. After the movie, simmered it with an equal amount of veal/beef stock and reduced by half, threw in mushrooms and shallots. The stock was out of a carton, ok but nothing like the good stock we made in class. Got the sauce to nappe consistency, hit it with sea salt, but the flavor was just ok. Definitely would not serve this in a restaurant (or let Chef sample it,) but hey, it's my first mother and derivative sauce at home!

Ate more than usual, need that carbo-load for the 100 mile bike ride tomorrow...

SUNDAY
Today was a blur. I woke at 3am, had a half a dense lemon muffin, pedalled over to Penn Station and hopped a train with all the other people in spandex to Babylon, and road 100 miles to Montauk. It was a great day, and got to ride with a friend.

At the rest stops, kind of mindless shovelled in the food. At Penn Station, had a monstrous (easily 5x the size of my muffins) baked good and a slice of cake. At the first rest stop 20 miles in, snarfed some good food, including spinach pie with hummus, corn chips, baklava, a tiny piece of cheese cake and cookies. 50 miles in, people had already eaten all the good food and was left with fruit and cake. 70 miles in was a free ice cream truck, so had a cone and a few chocolates, but wasn't very hungry. At the end of the ride, had to rush to make the train and skipped the dinner on offer. On the sleepy train ride home, stuffed in half a bagel and a banana nut Odwalla bar, kinda gross. Back at Penn, had a couple of slices of pizza, definitely hit the spot.