Reruns: July Posts Worth Revisiting

This round-up wraps up this nostalgic tour I've been on for the last 12 months, re-reading old blog posts and choosing which ones to bring back via these lists. I've laughed at some of the antics of our family's four children (and have sent a few links their way to remind them of just how vastly entertaining they were as kids, tweens, and teens). I've remembered bike rides taken, moments along the way, people who have helped make me who I am. It's been a heck of a ride, with many more miles yet to roll if I'm lucky.

Rewinding the Reruns
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Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe: Best Bran Muffins Ever

I grew up with my mom's bran muffin recipe that was perfect for a big family: Make a batch of the batter, keep it in the fridge, and bake a dozen when the mood strikes. The batter keeps for at least six weeks, although not forever, and they're tasty enough that you likely wouldn't have it in there too long anyway.

These muffins are really the best. Soft and delicious, filling and satisfying. Good just dripping with butter, or topped with some homemade jam, honey, maple syrup, peanut butter, whatever you like on your muffins. They're not overly sweet and cupcake-like; if I'm going to eat a cupcake I want frosting, dang it.

One day out of curiosity I went searching for the recipe online. Mind you, I've made it so often over the years that I have it memorized. Since it involves copious quantities of All-Bran and Bran Buds I figured the website of the cereal manufacturer who gets my money every time I make these would have the recipe. But no! They have a couple of recipes including one they call the "original" but neither is the one I grew up with. My family recipe isn't even a combination of their Bran Buds Muffins and Original All-Bran Muffins recipes.

The world clearly needs this recipe captured for posterity. Sharing it now, with an * to mark where I adjusted something in the original Mom-approved recipe. Those are explained in the notes below the recipe.

This is a lot of batter. I use my Kitchen-Aid to mix. Don't overmix or you'll toughen the batter, but if you have a stand mixer of some kind feel free to let it help you. 

Yield: I'm not sure of the precise yield since that partly depends on whether you fill the cup to heaping to get a tall dome, whether you make some mini-muffins along the way because they're just so darned cute, and other factors. I'd guesstimate around 4 dozen or so regular muffins.

Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe

2 cups boiling water

2 cups Bran Buds

4 eggs

1 cup granulated sugar*

1 cup brown sugar* 

1 cup vegetable oil*

4 cups buttermilk

5 cups whole wheat pastry flour*

5 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon sea salt

4 cups All-Bran cereal (sticks)*

Put the Bran Buds in a bowl and pour the boiling water over top. Stir together and set aside to soften, stirring again after a couple of minutes; they'll turn into a bran mass within about 5 minutes.

In a large bowl, beat the oil and sugar together until well combined. (If you're using butter you get to cream the butter and sugar together; I don't have a tasty verb for what happens when you're using oil.) 

Add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each one. (Yes, yes, you can dump them in all at once. But here's why you want to slow down and add eggs one at a time.)

Add the 4 cups of buttermilk and mix in.

Add the Bran Buds mixture in small spoonfuls, beating/whisking to distribute through the batter.

In another bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt. (Or, to be honest, if you're like me you dump in the flour and sprinkle the other things across the top of the batter and you know what? That totally works. I do it one cup plus one teaspoon at a time for the flour/baking soda; just don't accidentally put in 5 teaspoons of salt.)

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix gently until combined. 

Fold in the All-Bran.

Cover or transfer the mixture to a sealed container and refrigerate the mixture for at least 8 hours. 24 hours to two days is best.* 

Bake in the center of a pre-heated 400°F oven for 16-18 minutes until the tops are no longer wet and when you touch the muffin top it feels done, not soggy. You can also test with a toothpick the way you would a cake. I've never made these in the giant muffin tins; adjust baking time based on your experience with other recipes if you use one of those.

These work in a mini-muffin tin too, for a cute snack size. Set the timer for 15 minutes and check since the little ones bake faster.

Notes

*Sugars: Original recipe called for 3 cups granulated sugar; I reduced by 1 cup and made it half brown, half white. Do not reduce sugar further; I can attest that the batter will sour quickly.

*Oil: The original recipe called for butter here. I use canola. I've also tried using coconut oil and it worked. (If you haven't baked with it before, refined coconut oil doesn't add a coconutty flavor; it acts like shortening.)

*Flour: Original recipe called for regular all-purpose flour and it's fine to use that. When I've been out of whole wheat pastry flour and too committed to the idea of muffins to wait for a grocery run I've used half white, half regular whole wheat, and it worked fine.

*All-Bran: I've successfully substituted Fiber One cereal. Basically you want bran-based sticks here.

*Letting the batter sit before baking: You can bake right away and they'll taste great. The extra time is to enable the moisture in the batter to break down the All-Bran a bit. I've tried using the buttermilk to soak the All-Bran the way the boiling water soaks the Bran Buds, but realized that meant the flour wasn't getting really hydrated the way it should.

Mix-ins and flavors: If you like muffins with cinnamon, you can add it to the batter or make a cinnamon/white sugar mix and sprinkle that on top before baking (1 teaspoon cinnamon to 1/3 cup white sugar is about right). Other spices would work too. Use your favorite muffin recipe's seasoning and adjust for the larger amount of batter in this.

Vegan option: Use flaxseed or chia seed eggs in place of the eggs. Use vegan buttermilk (make your own with help from Minimalist Baker). I've made it this way and they turned out fine, although I think I get a bit more rise with real eggs holding everything together.

Other recipes I reviewed but didn't bake, so I won't attest to their flavors

Other recipes I've shared


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A Year of Poems: July

No poems about the Fourth of July in this collection. As I've noted in previous posts in this series, I hunt for poems that say something about the month itself: its place in the cycles of the seasons, the sights and sounds and smells of the Earth's rotation at this particular point in its trip around the sun. 

The designation of a month's beginning and end is a human artifice imposed on rotations too big for us to feel, except if and as we tune into those messages from our senses. Some of these are less about July than about something else happening in the poem but they have those lines that capture the rising heat, the baking, the ripening. Some have that sense of the calendar I still feel from my schooldays: June brings the energy of new freedom but with some uncertain weather, back to school looms in August, but July is solidly summer. And it is fire season, as Forrest Gander reminds us in his poem.

"July" by Michael Field

Learn more about the collaboration of two women writing under the pseudonym "Michael Field."

There is a month between the swath and sheaf
When grass is gone
And corn still grassy;
When limes are massy
With hanging leaf,
And pollen-coloured blooms whereon
Bees are voices we can hear,

"July Day" by Babette Deutsch

The afternoon sways like an elephant, wears
His smooth grey hide, displays his somnolent grace,
        weighing
The majesty of his ponderous pace against
The slyness twinkling in an innocent eye.

"Morningside Heights, July" by William Matthews

Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.

"Breathing Space, July" by Tomas Tranströmer

The one who’s lying on his back under the tall trees
is also up there within them. He’s flowing out into thousands of twigs,
swaying to and fro,
sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.

"Moment in July" by Elise Asher

And in my drowsing ears resounds
Time's tick through fleshless spaces
And now slack energies within me faintly stir,
Still, budge budge I cannot budge—

"Answer July" by Emily Dickinson

Answer July—
Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—

"A Warm Summer in San Francisco" by Carolyn Miller

It was sometime after that, when

the plants had absorbed all that sun, had taken it into themselves

for food and swelled to the height of fullness. It was in July,
in a dizzy blaze of heat and fog, when on some nights
it was too hot to sleep, 

"The Ubiquitous Day Lily of July" by David Budbill

There is an orange day lily that blooms in July and is
everywhere around these parts right now. Common.
Ordinary. It grows in everybody's dooryard—abandoned
or lived in—along the side of the road, in front of stone walls,
at gas stations and garages, at the entrance to driveways,
anywhere it takes a mind to sprout.

"July" by George Meredith

Blue July, bright July,
Month of storms and gorgeous blue;
Violet lightnings o'er thy sky,
Heavy falls of drenching dew;

"July Rain" by Tere Sievers

The sudden storm
flashes and rumbles
the ozone air a tonic
for the humid afternoon.

"A Calendar of Sonnets: July" by Helen Hunt Jackson

Some flowers are withered and some joys have died;
The garden reeks with an East Indian scent
From beds where gillyflowers stand weak and spent;
The white heat pales the skies from side to side;

"A July Night" by John Todhunter

The dreamy, long, delicious afternoon
That filled the flowers with honey, and made well
With earliest nectar many a secret cell
Of pulping peaches, with a murmurous tune
Lulled all the woods and leas;


When the scarlet cardinal tells
Her dream to the dragon fly,
And the lazy breeze makes a nest in the trees,
And murmurs a lullaby,
It is July.

"July" by Madison Cawein

Now ’tis the time when, tall,
The long blue torches of the bellflower gleam
Among the trees; and, by the wooded stream,
In many a fragrant ball,
Blooms of the button-bush fall.

Green spring grass on
                    the hills had cured
                              by June and by July

                                                                          gone wooly and
                                                                brown, it crackled
                                            underfoot, desiccated while

"The Last Things I'll Remember" by Joyce Sutphen

The partly open hay barn door, white frame around the darkness,
the broken board, small enough for a child
to slip through.

Walking in the cornfields in late July, green tassels overhead,
the slap of flat leaves as we pass, silent
and invisible from any road.

A Year of Poems

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