The Virtuous, and the not so much...

So, I made fruit salad....

and then I made chocolate muffins...

I guess I cancelled out any good eating for the day... but the plus is I did get to use ingredients in the fridge again. Really powering through.

The salad, obviously, is a variation of Nigella's Antioxidant Fruit Salad. Hers has pomegranate seeds, mango cubes and blueberries with a spritz of lime. I have made it in the past, when it was on the At My Table column, and it was marvelous!! I mean really, really good. And I'm not a fruit eater -- which explains why I have fruit in the fridge days after buying it. Since certain things aren't in season now, my fruit salad has the pomegranate seeds with oranges, granny smith apples, blackberries and spritz of orange and lime juice. Equally fab, but later, I was in the mood for chocolate.

Unsurprisingly, my muffins are also a variation of Nigella's recipe for Chocolate Chocolate-Chip Muffins. I find it funny that even though I have a fridge loaded with ingredients, I can't ever get the exact combination for any recipe. It's like I'm forced to go a different way. Well my variation is actually quite a funny story.

Two summers ago (yes, I know, that was a long time ago!), I bought chocolate chips that had a peanut butter swirl in them. At that time, they were a new product from Nestle and I bought two packages on sale. I believe I must have walked home that day, because I discovered that the chips completed melted in their packages. Their chip-ness qualities were completely gone. They were just blocks of melted chocolate and peanut butter. So in the fridge they stayed, for almost two years!!

I wasn't going to transport these to the new place, so I figured I needed to use them up. The chocolate was still good, because months ago I opened up one of the packages, and since then have gnawed at the block whenever I needed a chocolate fix.

So, I thought for the muffins, I'd chip-ify them again. Bring them back to their original glory. Um, that didn't work. I hacked at the block with the mezzaluna, and instead, I got part rubble/part chunky shards. I was halfway through the recipe so there was no point in turning back now. So, I added the chocolate display to the dry ingredients and proceeded with the rest of the recipe. I didn't bother to save any for sprinkling on top, because they were so pulverized, they would melt into the muffins anyway.

Well, as you could see above, the muffins turned out just fine. Better than fine, delicious! The sponge itself had hints of peanut-butteriness, and there were still visible chips within. Really lovely muffins.

I'm not sure what I accomplished by making these muffins, because even though I did use up the next to last egg, milk, flour, etc., I now have 10 muffins in the freezer. I thought I was supposed to be clearing out the freezer and fridge. Hmmmmn. Well, that was the most delicious exercise in futility I have ever partaken (partook) in. Lovely.