Personal growth in the kitchen

Note: This is a 'pat yourself on the back moment', brought to you by Christie. 

I am definitely getting more comfortable in the kitchen. (And just a shade over four decades, alright!) 

For example, this morning I went to the kitchen intending to make blueberry muffins for breakfast. I'm using Smitten Kitchen's recipe. 

The first hurtle I had to overcome* was the lack of plain yogurt or sour cream in my fridge. No problem, I'll just use vanilla yogurt. We normally have that on hand and the addition of vanilla can't hurt. 

Nuts. There is no vanilla yogurt. But we do have blueberry. We'll give that a try. 

Nuts. The recipe calls for 3/4 cup and I have about a 1/2 cup. But we do have buttermilk. We'll give that a try. 

Once all the ingredients were sorted out and substitutions made, I continued with the muffin baking experience. I totally winged it on the amount of buttermilk, pouring it in until I received what I hoped was the correct consistency, which S.K. says is "quite thick". I also adjusted my baking time down to 17 minutes from her original 25 to 30 minutes. My muffin tin is smaller than the standard size so I'm going to get around 15 muffins.

I'm typing all of this up as my first batch is baking. 

Approx. 7 minutes later…

Success! Hen says the muffins are "the best" and that I "would win if I made these muffins on MasterChef". 

*In the olden days this initial setback would have been enough to derail the project.