This morning (and last night), I made our "Overnight French Toast" recipe for a group of neighbors here at Muir Commons. We added fresh fruit and good whipped cream. Gabriel helped me by putting down the chairs, but he declined my offer for him to take out the compost. I suppose the fact that it's about 100 degrees here now may have had something to do with his reticence.

Sometimes cooking for twenty or more can be exhausting, but I've gotta say that this was an easy meal to make.

Friday Afternoon Activities

My sons and I pondered what to do on this hot afternoon in the Central Valley. Why not make apple muffins? The heat is one reason not to do anything, but since we live in cohousing, we were able to use the common house kitchen instead of heating up our own house. An additional plus is that solar energy powers the common house. And there is plenty of sun today.

My father had brought us lots of little green apples from his tree. I'm not sure of the variety. Maybe Granny Smith?

Joe (my three-year old) added some dry ingredients to the batter and then he made a tinker toy sculpture. I think it looks nice in this photo.

The observant reader may notice that our own apple muffin recipe does not call for milk. "So what's it doing in the photo?" you may wonder.

Well, since we wanted to use the apples in our muffins, I looked to our very own tried and true "Astral Apple Muffins" recipe. But alas, we did not have any lemon juice! So we tried a different recipe. But that recipe called for buttermilk, and we didn't have any buttermilk either. However, I knew that we could use a secret ingredient.

You can use sour milk in place of buttermilk. To make sour milk, you add a tablespoon of vinegar (or lemon juice) to a cup of milk and wait five minutes.

When the muffins were done, Gabriel said "these are the best things ever!" But after Joe ate off the cinnamon topping, he threw his away.