A friend decided to travel from Sewanee to celebrate her birthday in Nashville. Her car did slide sideways down my still icy driveway - an unfortunate birthday surprise, but after that we had a ton of fun cooking a birthday dinner at my house. Everyone else parked on the street!
Do you remember the story about Little Bear and his birthday soup? That’s kind of what we made, except without the rock. We started with a basic potato soup.
There were lots of cooks present and everyone managed to wander into the kitchen, stir the soup, taste, and throw something in the pot. I’m thinking we had dark ale, bacon, cheese, onion, and potato soup, but who knows. After an hour or two of simmering, it was delicious. I had made a scrumptious three-layer birthday cake and together we invented a great salad with arugula and mint, couscous and lentils. It was all coming together when suddenly I thought – where’s the bread? Quick bread isn’t really a problem, biscuits are always a hit, but something a little more special seemed in order, so I pulled out my fancy Popover pan- then remembered why we rarely use it. It only makes six – that’s not a lot of Popover. When I worked at Paulette’s in Memphis – famous not just for crepes but also fantastic Popovers, I could eat at least three without blinking an eye. Actually, a real Popover pan is something to see; nice deep double- muffin sized cups all separated by metal bars allowing air to flow around the individual popovers. It just wasn’t going to work, so I made my very easy batter and poured it in my favorite regular muffin pan. Thirty-five minutes later we had beautiful Popovers and no special equipment was required.
The Popovers disappeared with the salad and I wished I had made two pans worth! I’m going to bet you have everything in your house to whip up a batch tonight without even taking a trip to the store! We’re not saving Popovers for special occasions anymore! Or even snow days. In fact – I’m hoping for a snow break to get to cook on Talk of the Town next Monday. So far it looks good – fingers crossed!
Enjoy Popovers soon.
Ingredients
4 Tbsp butter, melted
2 eggs
1 cup milk (2% up to whole or a mix)
1 cup flour
1 tsp salt
½ tsp sugar (optional)
Directions
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Brush muffin cups generously with melted butter making sure to save about half of the butter for the batter.
Let the buttered muffin tin warm in the oven for about 5 minutes while you make the batter.
In a blender combine eggs and mix until light yellow, about a minute.
Heat milk in microwave for about 30 seconds – until barely lukewarm.
Add milk to blender; add flour, salt, sugar, and remaining butter and blend till smooth.
Pour in warm muffin pan – fill each cup about half way.
Bake for 35 minutes – absolutely no peeking!
Serve warm with butter and jelly.
