A New PB Choc Chip Muffin Recipe, My Favorite Salad, and a Quickie Manicure!

My previous PB Choc Chip recipe is wonderful, if you eat them on the same day you bake them. They tend to dry out after the first two days, but the domed top is priceless & they scream "eat me"!

So, the following recipe, though not as beautiful coming out of the oven, is more moist.

 Sorry to leave you hanging without notes on baking, but the recipe (found below, at the end of the post) is pretty self-explanatory. :o) And I am recovering from a migraine.

See how these come out with some dark peaks? You can avoid that by placing a baking sheet on a rack above the muffins in the last 5 minutes of baking. Clearly, I failed to take my own advice. Twice.

Now for the salad!

This is my favorite lately, and I've been craving it consistently for more than a month! My husband has been loving it right along with me (as well as the swiss mushroom burgers, homemade greek salad, pickles on cheeseburgers, and....). They call it Sympathy Food Cravings for men, but he doesn't look sympathetic. He looks downright wild like a hungry coyote! LOL.

Anyways, this salad is directly from a magazine, and I'm not ashamed to say I didn't create it myself. Although, I DO add a few items to compliment the flavors. Try adding thinly sliced pears or apples. They seem to complete the flavors in the salad! DELISH!!!

 The dressing isn't hard to make, and you can subsitute nearly any lemon product for the lemon flavored olive oil, although (fresh) lemon peel does make it *pop* so much more than just adding lemon juice to the olive oil.

I've had this salad with candied or glazed pecans as well. Your personal taste is really what determines which is appropriate. Do you have a sweet tooth? Then use the candied or glazed pecans. Our family prefers just plain toasted pecans (my four year old will eat them only raw. She says the baking makes them bitter lol).

I had originally planned a ZOYA manicure touchup, but the colors never worked together, so I started over with new colors. And they're not Zoya. Tee hee.

There was a particular [maternity] outfit that I had in mind to wear on the weekend, and reverting to my late teen years, I wanted to coordinate my polish with it. That was the intent of the original ZOYA plan, but my brown (Faye) and bronze (Ivy) were too similar to show contrast, and my polish caboodle doesn't boast the wonderful array that many of [your] blogs do! *wink* To top off the bad manicure idea, the Essie Set In Stones (diamond-dipped look) looked terrible on top of them (this was to be the touch-up idea). I suppose I need a GOLD glitter top coat after all, for my browns. *frowns at the idea of spending more money on polish*

So, as shown above, I painted PURE ICE "Best Friend" on all my nails first. (I own a LOT of Pure Ice. It seems to be my favorite drug store brand. Is it silly that one of my favorite features- besides price point- is the size and shape of the bottle, because it's easy to handle between knuckles as I paint? For some reason, I hear my sister saying that in one of her posts. Ha ha!)

Next, I swept across half my nail in a diagonal fashion,  PURE ICE "Hot Tamale" (I like that name, but it reeks of  Mary Murphy's outbursts on SYTYCD... Sheesh, I miss that show! Is it time for the season premiere yet???)

My third coat was, again "Best Friend" over the whole of the nail, in order to tone down the orange. My oufit was a rusty orange, not a halloween orange. :o)

The end result was a little more bland than I desired. You pretty nearly couldn't see any contrast unless you were staring closely at it. But the touch up stage glammed it up a bit. Enough for the rest of the week, anyway. *wink*

...and the touch-up idea was to dip my whole nail in ESSIE's LuxEffects "Set In Stones". I'm addicted to that little bottle of glamour. I don't even care that it takes 10 minutes to remove.

WHATCHA THINK?

Later this week, a Farfalle Asparagus salad, some fun(?), new manicure with the new colors Michelle sent me in the mail, and maybe a new muffin recipe (coffeecake), IF it turns out well. In a moment, I'm going to test a recipe for coffeecake in the form of muffins. :o) So excited to offer a new idea for sale locally if it tastes awesome!

PEANUT BUTTER & CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFINS

Ingredients

1 1/2 C flour

1 C chocolate chips

1/3 C sugar

1 T baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

3/4 C milk

1/2 C peanut butter

1/3 C vegetable oil

1 egg

Preheat oven to 400F. In large bowl, combine flour, chocolate, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In small bowl, combine oil, peanut butter, egg and milk. Stir into flour mixture until just moistened. Spoon into lined or greased cups, filling 3/4 full. Bake 20 minutes (or longer for jumbo) or until toothpick comes out clean when inserted into center. Cool in tins for five minutes. Remove to rack. Serve warm or cool completely. *check on your muffins about 15 minutes into the baking time. If they are browning too quickly, place a cookie sheet on a rack above the muffins.