After I came back from class today I thought it would be fun to try out a new recipe. Logan seemed excited about some bacon muffins he saw online a few days ago so I thought I’d take a crack at my own version of a savory muffin. Because the butter and eggs are whipped before mixing in the dry ingredients, these muffins are light and fluffy and they fall apart in your mouth with the slightest hint of curry flavor.

Ingredients

• 1 cup yellow cornmeal
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon curry powder
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• 1 teaspoon organic cane sugar
• 6 tablespoons butter, softened to room temperature
• 1 egg
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 cup frozen chopped spinach – thawed, drained and squeezed dry
• 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, prepare 12 muffin cups.
2. Mix cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and curry powder.
3. With a whisk whip the butter by hand until fluffy (about 2 minutes), then add the egg, sea salt, and sugar and whip four another 3 minutes until you have a fluffy yellow cloud.
4. Mix whipped mixture into dry mixture and then add cheese, buttermilk, and spinach.
5. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of batter into each muffin cup and bake for 35 minutes or until a toothpick tester comes out clean.

If anyone tries this, tweet at me how it turns out. Happy baking!

Have you ever seen a train that can lay its own track? This is an incredible piece of engineering, it makes me wish we had a better train system in Cincinnati. At least we’ll have some sweet streetcars soon. Here is some fascinating information about the track this train is laying (via a comment from reddit.com)

The train you see in one of the last sections, the one with the part that can stand still, is brilliant. It’s an amazingly strong machine, and it’s laser guided. It picks up the rails. Then vibrates the stones underneath the track, so that they fall into eachothers gaps. The stones have sharp corners, and if they are that tightly organised, the bed of stones is stronger than concrete, plus you can still adjust it at any time. If the stone bed is good to go, the machine placed the rails in the stonebed. It does this very precisely, with a less than a millimeter accuracy.

In the dutch and belgian railway system, there are no gaps in the rails anymore between stations. The rails they use are welded together to beams of tens of kilometers long. With this machinery, they can layout the tracks so tightly, that the rails won’t even move when it extends or contracts on warm days and cold nights. The rails simply cannot go anywhere. This is why they spend so much effort on getting the stones right.

I love stop motion animation.

You should go watch the trailer for the new movie by Sofia Coppola, the director of Lost in Translation. I loved Lost in Translation, I’m sure I’ll love this. To top it off, the soundtrack is by the ever so talented French band Phoenix, whose song Lisztomania (and its many remixes) has hogged up my iPod listening time quite a bit.