Tales of A Postdoc Muffin

[I've been waiting two months to use this subject line.]

If you're like me, you're likely to find yourself cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen this Thanksgiving. You may be at your great aunt Ruth's house dusting off a canister of ground cloves that looks like it was last opened during the Eisenhower administration. You may be scouring your bachelor friend Ethan's cabinets for something basic like olive oil or a can opener. You will probably bang things, drop things, spill and break things, look like a fool and curse and stomp and pitch a minor fit. The owner of this foreign kitchen, should they be nearby and conscious and sober, may regret ever having invited you to Thanksgiving dinner and resolve that from now on they will make everything their own damn self. But this year's holiday is already underway, and there you are, with your good intentions and fair-to-middling culinary skills, and all of you are just going to have to muddle through.

So, for everyone planning to cook in someone else's kitchen in the next few weeks, allow me to offer three lessons that I have already learned this holiday season, all of which came to me while attempting to make some pumpkin muffins in my father's kitchen today.

1) Buttermilk is no longer a commonly stocked item in American kitchens. Whatever may have been the case during, say, the Great Depression, most American refrigerators do not have a carton of fresh buttermilk sitting around ready for you to use in your baked goods. Your great grandmother may have regularly kept some buttermilk on hand, and you may have internalized this fact and simply assumed that buttermilk was one of those things - like mustard - that is always there but normally overlooked until needed. Wrong. Halfway through preparing your muffin batter only to realize that the buttermilk you need is several minutes away at the local ice cream store? Tough luck, Chuck - hop in the car and go buy you some, while the batter slowly congeals.

2) Flour and confectioner's sugar look a lot alike. When in doubt - when, say, the canisters you're working from are not helpfully labeled - it is very important that you taste the item you are about to use. Otherwise, you are likely to realize your mistake much too late - for example, after you have made the batter, painstakingly distributed the batter evenly into the muffin pan, baked the batter for the required 20 minutes, and taken the muffin pan out of the oven. Are your muffins suspiciously concave in shape? Do they jiggle when you shake the pan? Well, maybe that's because you used sugar instead of flour. Time to scrape the pan out and start again.

3) [This warning is not specific to those cooking in someone else's kitchen, but it's useful information nonetheless.] Pumpkin seeds, when purchased at a Mexican market, may be covered in some evil spicy pepper powder. If this is not a taste you desire in the items you're baking - pumpkin muffins, say - it's best not to put them in the items, even for a little while. Take it from me: having messed up the first batch of muffins today, I decided that I would go ahead and add the shelled pumpkin seeds that the recipe called for and that I hadn't included in the first, flourless batch. This required driving down to the more, um, culturally diverse part of town and buying a bag of pepitas, which jumped out at me right as I walked in the door. I raced home, whipped up a second batch of batter like I'd been doing it my whole life (by this point, I practically had), and confidently sprinkled a tablespoon of these little fiery diablitas into the bowl. Then, moved perhaps by some force greater than myself, I decided to pop a handful of them into my mouth. As my eyes slowly filled with tears and sweat beaded on my forehead, I frantically began plucking the seeds, already beginning to sink out of sight, from the batter, carelessly abandoning all dignity and decorum. And then, hands dripping with pumpkin seeds and spicy pumpkin batter, I slid the muffins into the oven and prayed that the residual pepper powder wouldn't make the muffins completely inedible.

20 minutes later I took the muffins out and they were... fine. No, better than fine. They were: okay.

Perfectly, wonderfully, okay.

Happy cooking!