Breakfast, it keeps happening, every day

That can't be right, can it?

I, like some of you, am working from home several days a week lately. This is great, most of the time. I get to spend a lot of time with my LARGE dog, and my small cat, and I can lie on the floor whenever I want to. I can talk to Noah when he isn’t on calls.

All of these things, I love. What I do not love is the fact that, for whatever reason, my psychological response to working from home is just…. forgetting to eat. I’ve seen a lot of people say “you’re not working from home, you’re living at work” and for me, at least, this is super untrue. I am not great at a lot of things, but I am terrific at ignoring my work when I am not being paid to not ignore my work. (Don’t tell my boss, but I’m terrific at not working, period.)

This would all line up, to my mind, to be “I eat great lunches AND breakfast AND dinner every day” but in fact I predominately seem to eat a dollar slice from the place downstairs at like, 3pm, all the while wondering “why do I feel like trash?”

I wrote about this last time, but it’s true this time too, I’m mostly sick of cooking. I have to eat breakfast, or something, because I live in a human body that demands sustenance, but I’m so…. bored. More cooking means more dishes, and nobody wants to do dishes, so there are ever MORE dishes, and all that sucks shit.

Anyway, I’ve been getting buckets of apples from the CSA, but I can’t actually eat that many apples anymore, because I have IBS, and decided to wean myself off my meds in January, because I thought I might get a new job (lol), and therefore was at risk of paying for my 1,600$ a month medication out of pocket or something. Whatever, the point is, my body rejects apples without my boutique anti-diarreal that’s made of the boring parts of heroin. I also can’t eat beans or lentils or mushrooms, and there go my former hopes of becoming a vegetarian.

So we keep getting apples, and we keep not USING apples, because BODIES, and anyway the point is I need breakfast, and I want breakfast that will sustain me until my inevitable 3pm dollar slice, that uses SOME apples but not too many apples, because otherwise I’ll spend all morning with my toilet, which I do not want to do.

Can you tell I’m in a bad mood? It’s because I only ate a single cookie today, and it is almost noon.

I spent all morning looking at recipes that would be what I wanted, which was like healthy but not abstentious (I can’t spell this word and refuse to look it up), and also that used apples but didn’t use applesauce, because the last thing I need is more apples in my life. Ultimately, I came back to a smitten kitchen recipe for uh, chocolate pear hazelnut muffins, which I had helpfully tagged CSA in my recipe index, because I would never purchase pears of my own volition, and I consequently changed the format and the primary fruit, and a few other things, but here it is, a recipe for breakfast. I took pictures, but iCloud isn’t working and I refuse to figure out why, so I decided to just change the name of my newsletter from Bad Food Pics Weekly, and just go all in on the Kitchen Maledictions Brand (TM).

Breakfast quick bread ft. apples, oats, nuts

Adapted from smitten kitchen’s pear hazelnut muffins

Yield: 1 loaf (or muffins, but turn up all the temperatures by 25 degrees)

• 2 small-medium apples

• 85 g hazelnut or pistachio oil (or other oil, or butter, but I hate melting butter for breakfast items, idk, seems like too much work, you don’t have to use the bougie oils, we just have them around)

• 2/3 cup (120 g?) natural cane sugar, such as Turbinado, light brown or granulated sugar

• 1 cup (240 ml) buttermilk or milk + 2 tsp white vinegar (we have a ton of milk, so I did it this way)

• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten

• 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

• Zest of one small orange (honestly? more orange zest would slap here)

• 3/4 cup (75 grams) rolled oats

• ½ (60ish g) cup all-purpose flour

• ½ (60ish g) cup almond flour (or all all purpose, which is what the recipe originally said, but I HAVE almond flour and I wanted to feel HEALTHY)

• 1/2 cup (60 grams) whole wheat flour

• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda

• 2 teaspoons baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (you could do cinnamon and nutmeg but I didn’t FEEL like grating nutmeg, I might also bump it up to 3/4 tsp of cinnamon)

• 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt

• 1 1/4 cup (160? grams) toasted hazelnuts/walnuts/almonds

Heat oven to 400°F. Grease or parchment a 9x5 loaf pan.

Grate apples on the large holes of a boxed grater into a large bowl. You should have about 1 cup grated (I didn’t measure at all). (NB: apples are wetter than pears, which is what this recipe was for, so I put the grated apple into a little strainer above a bowl and just got some juice out so that it wouldn’t be tooooo wet). Stir in melted butter, sugar, buttermilk, eggs and vanilla until combined.

In a separate bowl, stir together the oats, flours, baking soda, baking powder, spices, salt, all but 1/4 cup coarsely chopped hazelnuts (I did it with a half cup and it was too much, I think it slowed down the baking a bit). Gently fold this dry ingredient mixture into the wet batter until just combined; do not overmix.

Pour into loaf pan, and top with the remaining 1/4 cup hazelnuts. I also put some cinnamon sugar on it, because we had some from noah making snickerdoodles yesterday. Place in oven **on a sheet tray** and immediately reduce the heat to 350F. Bake for 40 to 60 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out batter-free. (I checked after 40 minutes, wicked not done, this probably cooked for closer to 60 minutes.)

Cool. Muffins will keep for 2 days at room temperature in an airtight container. (I will for sure be eating this until Friday, so I hope it keeps for three and a half days at room temperature.)

Note: almond/apple/orange would probably be a great combination, but I did hazelnuts, because I had a costco bag of toasted hazelnuts. imo hazelnuts aren’t worth it if you have to skin them yourself.

NB: the sheet tray is very important, my dude overflowed by quite a bit, and the overflow parts were very tasty when I removed them after 40 minutes of cooking.

Overall the texture is fairly springy like a zucchini bread, but the large amount of hazelnuts and the addition of almond meal give it a nice texture and some variety. I liked it! It was a bit too big for my 9x5 loaf pan, but still easier than making muffins, because washing the muffin tin is a real chore.