This weekend

This weekend I started a new sewing project, baked some muffins, and made potato-kale gratin. Well, I did some other stuff, too, but these are the only three I'm going to talk about right now. Oh! And! New blog masthead! Looks a little bit less like it was made by schoolchildren!

So, sewing project! I'm making Adam a shirt! It is a lot harder to find non-ugly patterns for boy clothes than for girl clothes, but I'm going to try Simplicity 5366. And I found a really soft red and gray flannel that we both like. This is my first foray into sewing clothes for anyone but myself, so wish me luck!

Now for the muffins. I really wanted to make these pumpkin muffins, but our grocery was all out of canned pumpkin. But I felt like muffins, so I found another recipe to try. These are the Coffee Cake Muffins from The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book.



They taste good, but they fall apart. The instructions say to let them cool in the muffin tin for 5 minutes before turning them out onto a wire rack. The book also recommends greasing your muffin tin and eschewing the muffin papers. For these, I would definitely use the muffin papers next time. And I think you need to let them cool in the pan for more than 5 minutes. The streusel layer in the middle needs to firm up more before you can turn them out.



I had this recipe for a potato and kale gratin saved from a while ago and, since we had potatoes and some extra kale sitting around, I decided to try it. But I forgot to pick up Parmesan at the grocery, so I tried it with cheddar. Not too difficult. Smelled good in the oven. And I thought it tasted fine, but I'm not hard to please on the potato front. I like potatoes. And I like kale. I don't really require any magic. It's not very "gratin" though. The cheese was barely noticeable and it didn't really brown on top, even though I left it in the oven an extra ten minutes. It was more just kale and potatoes thrown together with some garlicky, salty oil for seasoning.