Happy Hour Hack: A muffin recipe, a podcast on kids and food, and a cocktail for spring break
The Christine Han edition
Welcome to the Happy Hour Hack, a weekly Friday post of tips and inspiration to take you into the weekend. I always share one thing from my interviewee of the week, along with any ideas I receive from readers, plus some things that are piquing my own interest.
The Forum
I’m so thrilled to share that The Creators Forum was one of Substack’s Featured Publications this week. A warm welcome to all of our new readers! I love to see how our community is growing (we’re now read in 34 states and 42 countries!). This is what to expect: On Mondays, you’ll receive my interview with a fascinating mom creative. On Fridays, you’ll get this email, the Happy Hour Hack, full of tips and inspiration.
As always, I love feedback. Share your tips! And let me know if there are women you want to see featured in TCF.
Hack
Our tip of the week comes from the food and lifestyle photographer Christine Han. I was so excited when she gave us a muffin recipe. Muffins tend to be my go-to secret weapon for any trip. Traffic? Delayed flight? Scraped knee? Eat a muffin! And Christine’s muffin recipe is definitely one that both pleases the kids and assuages any mom guilt. From Christine:
It’s a chocolate muffin that I make for my toddler that’s the longest-running thing she’ll eat, and it’s actually healthy adjacent. It’s got a cup of spinach and carrots and no sugar. She eats them pretty consistently. That’s what my life is about: How do I feed her?!
Healthy Chocolate Muffins
Ingredients
2 large eggs can sub 2 “flax eggs”
1 cup mashed overripe banana can sub with 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup grated carrots
1 cup loosely packed spinach or kale
¼ cup oil I use melted coconut oil or avocado
¼ cup maple syrup or honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
1 cup white whole wheat flour can sub 1:1 gluten free flour mix, if needed
1 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoons baking powder
¼ cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ cup chocolate chips or to taste. If you omit, add a couple tablespoons of granulated sugar to help bring up the sweetness.
Instructions
Preheat your oven to 350 ℉ and line a 12-hole muffin tin with liners. Set aside.
In your blender, combine eggs, banana / applesauce, carrots, spinach/kale, maple syrup/ honey, oil, vinegar, and vanilla.
Blend until mixture is smooth.
Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cocoa powder and cinnamon. Process until just mixed.
If you do not have a high speed blender, combine everything in a bowl and mix by hand.
Finally, fold in chocolate chips (if using).
Portion batter into prepared muffin tin and top with extra chocolate chips if desired.
Bake for 20-22 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.
Let cool in pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack. Enjoy and let cool completely before storing leftovers in an air-tight container in fridge or freezer.
Podcast
When Christine brought up the chocolate muffin recipe, she voiced the feeling about her child that so many parents have: “How do I feed her?!” It’s a confounding sentiment considering that biological instinct should ensure that our children will eat enough to survive. And yet, it doesn’t always feel that way. And we fret.
This podcast, Pressure Cooker by José Andrés Media, addresses this issue head-on. The hosts, Jane Black and Liz Dunn, delve into such topics as “Can you teach a kid to eat vegetables?” and “How Picky Eating Took Over America” and “The Twisted History of School Lunch.” It’s all fascinating stuff with a very supportive, nonjudgmental vibe.
My guilt of the moment is that I’ve mostly stopped cooking with my kids because it’s just SO MUCH EASIER to do it myself. But I know that’s a really bad habit to get into. Our family is food obsessed, and I want my children to be interested in the process, and I, of course, want them to be competent adults who know how to feed themselves healthily. So I recently listened to the episode “The Truth about Cooking with Kids,” and it was very inspiring. Christine’s muffin recipe would make the perfect adult-kid cooking project.
Rest
This is some bonus material from Christine. At one point our talk veered into our country’s obsessive work habits, and she introduced me to the Nap Bishop, who promotes the idea that rest is resistance, that it’s liberation.
From Christine:
Capitalism in America comes from slavery. And now, everyone is kind of enslaved to working and producing. We’re all participating in it. I realized I’m just brainwashed along with everyone else. Work, work, work, produce, produce, produce. It’s really American. You know that’s true when you go elsewhere, and it’s not like that.
I like that this is not about “wellness.” It’s not a Goopy fix to systemic issues. (Side note: One of my favorite magazine articles of all time is a piece on Goop by the great Taffy Brodesser-Akner.) Instead, it’s a form of passive resistance.
Christine feels that she has been succeeding in shifting her perspective so that work is now coming in second to family.
So, I’m curious, how do you find your rest? And has having kids helped you become less of a producer?
Cocktail
I could tell I don’t hit the bars as much as I used to when two far-apart places I went to recently (one in Manhattan and one in Nashville) both had a cocktail, considered a modern classic, that was new to me: Naked and Famous.
It was created by Joaquín Simó at Death & Co. He described it as “the bastard love child of a classic Last Word and [Sam Ross’s] Paper Plane, conceived in the mountains of Oaxaca.” Well, those are two of my favorite citrusy cocktails, so I knew I’d be in love. If you like citrus, herbaceousness, and a little smoke to your drink, then you’ll probably love this too. (In case you had to go out and buy yellow Chartreuse just for this drink, I’ll be sure to include some more cocktails in the future that use it. Although, it might get increasingly hard to find Chartreuse. Apparently our drinking habits are cramping the monks’ lifestyle, and they’re cutting back production.)
The drink feels and looks like the perfect thing to kick off my spring break week…
Naked and Famous
3/4 ounce mezcal
3/4 ounce yellow Chartreuse
3/4 ounce Aperol
3/4 ounce lime juice
Add all ingredients to a tin filled with ice, shake, and strain into a cocktail glass. No garnish necessary. Cheers!
Wishing you a good, creative, and restful weekend!
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Congratulations on the feature! First - so excited to to make those muffins, yum! Second - I totally relate to the piece about cooking with kids in the kitchen. It doesn’t work for me right now (mostly because of my kids ages) and I’m ok with it. I try my best not to feel guilty about it. Thank you for this issue!
We were homeschooling and I read the book Thomas Jefferson education which changed my life. It is basically about fixing and working on YOU and your children taking lessons from that more than you focusing your time/energy on the act of teaching down to them. So doing, not telling. If you read, they will read, if you follow your interests, they will learn to do the same. This means less about producing to me and more about learning what intrinsically motivates you. Not revolving your life around working for someone else – because that is how it is now a days – but working for yourself and making your life more purposefully driven. I like the idea of "laying down" (or focusing on what matters to you) because it is exactly the opposite of being productive in a capitalist society and other people start to notice when you start doing it. They ask themselves - well why am I doing this if they figured out how not to? But if we all follow along, there is no fighting the power. Power to the people to lay down and do their own thing.