Pesto Pine Nut Parmesan Muffins #MuffinMonday

Savory mini muffins with pesto, pine nuts and Parmesan make the perfect snack at cocktail time or really, anytime.

A little #MuffinMonday history
Food Lust People Love was almost one year old before I joined my first baking group in June of 2012. Muffin Monday was run by a talented blogger named Anuradha from Baker Street. We became friends over the next year and a half that we baked muffins together. Even though she worked full time, her blog was filled with lovely baked goods and she was very active on social media. The first year or so, Muffin Monday had a steady stream of participants but then they dwindled until it was just the two of us baking each week, for more than six months. I offered to help with sending out the emails or adding folks to the group but she would assure me that a work project was about to finish and then she’d have more time.

And then she stopped updating her blog and seemed to drop completely out of the social media circus that is blogging. I can’t tell you how sad I was but I completely understood how sometimes life can get in the way of all the things we want to do and something’s gotta give. I will be forever grateful to Anuradha for starting me on this path. Maybe someday, if she gets back to blogging, we can bake together again. I’d really like that.

As for me, I wasn’t done with muffin baking. I love the ease of the muffin baking method, the flexibility for adding ingredients to a sweet or savory batter, the short baking time and the portability of the muffins themselves. It seemed that the hashtag #MuffinMonday was widely in use on the internet, so I went solo and continued Muffin Mondays on my own for another 73 editions. For anyone who is keeping count, that means 153 muffin recipes on my blog. It’s quite the collection.

The future of #MuffinMonday
This summer I took a few weeks off, as I was traveling anyway, but also because I wanted to think about Muffin Monday and what the future might hold. I decided that if I really wanted to spread the love of muffins, I should open it up. So I have invited a small group of like-minded recipe creators to join me here for Muffin Monday. And since a weekly post is a large commitment – and I wanted them to say yes to the invitation – we will be posting only once a month, on the last Monday of every month.

I hope you all enjoy our creative muffin recipes. Make sure to scroll down to see what my Muffin Monday baking friends have for you today!

I’m kicking this one off with mini muffins that are great to serve at cocktail time. And, bonus, they freeze beautifully so make them ahead for your next party. What better way to celebrate baking muffins with a group again?

Pesto Pine Nut Parmesan Muffins

Ingredients for 18 mini muffins
1 cup or 125g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/3 cup or 80ml milk
1/4 cup or 60ml olive oil
1/4 cup or 60g classic pesto
1 egg
3 oz or 85g Parmesan
1/4 cup or 40g pine nuts

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C and grease your mini muffin pans with a little olive oil or non-stick spray.

Grate your Parmesan and set aside a good handful for sprinkling on the muffin tops before baking.

In one big mixing bowl, add your dry ingredients, that is, the flour and baking powder. Add in the larger pile of grated Parmesan and stir well.

In small mixing bowl, whisk the milk, olive oil and pesto with your egg.

Fold the liquids to the dry mixture, stopping when they are just mixed.

Set aside a small handful of pine nuts for topping and fold the rest into your batter.

Divide the batter between your prepared muffins cups,  then top each one with a few pine nuts and a sprinkle of Parmesan.

Bake in your preheated oven for 12-15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes.

Remove from the muffin pans and finish cooling on a rack.

Enjoy!

The new Muffin Monday won't have a theme or a necessary ingredient so members are free to create muffins with whatever inspires them, wherever they may live. I look forward to seeing what they'll come up with each month! A drumroll, please, for the inaugural line up:

• Apricot, Almond, and Toasted Coconut Muffins from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Caramel Apple Buttermilk Muffins from Making Miracles
• Carrot Oat Banana Chunk Muffins from Passion Kneaded
• Ground Cherry Muffins from A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Pesto Pine Nut Parmesan Muffins from Food Lust People Love
• Sour Cream Peach Muffins with Pecan Streusel from The Spiced Life

Many thanks to my daughter, Cecilie, for creating our badge. 

#MuffinMonday is a group of muffin loving bakers who get together once a month to bake muffins. You can see all our of lovely muffins by following our Pinterest board.

Updated links for all of our past events and more information about Muffin Monday, can be found on our home page.

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Brown Sugar Nectarine Tart #FridayPieDay

Sprinkling fresh nectarines with brown sugar and a little sea salt enhances their summery sweetness in this baked tart that is easy enough to make any day of the week.

Sometimes fresh nectarines can be a disappointment. They smell all nectarine-y in the stores so you take them home with great anticipation of that first juicy bite and the inevitably sweetness dripping down your chin. And then the sadness hits. The nectarines are juicy enough, even somewhat sweet, but they just don’t taste as strongly of nectarine as their aroma promised. That, my friends, is when I figure I have a couple of choices: make jam or tarts. Either will use sugar and heat to concentrate the flavors of the fruit and restore your good temper with deliciousness to share.

This is my contribution for this month's Friday Pie Day! Scroll down to the bottom to see what my fellow baker, Heather, is sharing today.

Ingredients
1 frozen puff pastry sheet, 8 3/4 oz or 250g, thawed – preferably all butter
2 teaspoons cornstarch
2 nectarines (about 10 1/2 oz or 300g, whole)
3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
Generous pinch fine sea salt
2 teaspoons butter
2 tablespoons apricot (or peach or nectarine) jam

To serve: thick cream or vanilla ice cream - optional

Method
Preheat oven to 425°F or 218°C and line your baking tray with parchment or a silicone baking mat.

Unroll your puff pastry onto the prepared baking sheet. Sprinkle a circle in the middle with the cornstarch.

Cut your nectarines in half and remove the pits. Slice the halves thinly.

Starting in the middle of the circle, lay your nectarines slices out, overlapping them slightly. Keep going until the entire circle of cornstarch is covered, using all of the nectarine slices.

Fold the sides of the pastry in about 1/2 an inch or 1cm and sprinkle the tops of the nectarines with brown sugar and the generous pinch of salt.

Now fold the pastry over again to cover about one quarter of the fruit, all the way around.

Dot the top with butter.

Bake in your preheated oven for about minutes or until the pastry is puffed up and golden all over.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Loosen the jam by adding a little water to it and warming it gently in the microwave or in a small pot on the stove.

Brush it on the top of the nectarines when the tart has cooled. I used some homemade caramel apricot lime jam but you can use whatever jam you have open in the refrigerator.

Cut into four equal pieces and serve with thick pouring cream or a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Or perhaps a complementary slice of buttermilk pie. (See Heather's link below!)

Enjoy!

FridayPieDay is the brilliant invention of Heather from girlichef and I am pleased to join her on the last Friday of each month for pie and crust recipes, techniques, tools of the trade, and other inspiration.

This month Heather went traditional southern with a creamy buttermilk pie, and it looks delicious!

For more information and recipes, please check out her #FridayPieDay page!

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Passion Fruit Vinaigrette

Passion fruit vinaigrette is tangy and light, with just a hint of fruity sweetness, the perfect dressing for salad or to spoon over pan-fried fish. We especially love it on salmon.

Most of the year I tend to have a jar of homemade vinaigrette lurking somewhere in the refrigerator, nestled amongst the myriad jars on my over-packed top shelf.  It invariably contains some combination of lemon juice or vinegar, olive oil, garlic, mustard, salt and black pepper and perhaps some honey or pomegranate molasses. I fish the jar out and let it rest for about 10 minutes at room temperature until the olive oil turns liquid again and then I give it a shake. If there’s not enough dressing left in the jar for that night’s salad, I add more of this, a little of that, until there is, once again, enough. Measurements are not really necessary but a general rule of thumb is one part acid (vinegar or citrus juice) to three parts oil.

Early this summer I was making up a fresh jar of vinaigrette when I spied a few passion fruit languishing in the fruit bowl. With passion fruit, there’s a narrow window where the fruit is wrinkled and ripe and wrinkled and dried out inside and mine were approaching the other side. So I scraped the black speckled pulp out of four of those little orbs of tartness and added them to the dressing I was creating. We ate it over everything for the next couple of days! And then I made some more. It keeps for a week or more in the refrigerator, if it lasts that long.

Ingredients
Pulp of 4 small passion fruit – 1/4 cup or 65g
1 small purple onion
4 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar
1/2 teaspoon flakey sea salt (I use Maldon’s.)
Several generous grinds of fresh black pepper
1/2 cup or 120ml extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard

Method
Peel and mince your onion. Add it to a small bowl with two tablespoons of the vinegar. Add in the sea salt and a few good grinds of the black pepper and set aside. Marinating the onion in the vinegar mellows some of the sharpness and bite.

Put your passion fruit pulp in a clean jam jar and mix it around with a knife or fork to loosen it up and separate the seeds.

Add in the olive oil, the onion/vinegar mixture and the last two tablespoons of vinegar. Give the jar a really good shake.

Now add in the dry mustard and shake again until very well combined.

Store in the refrigerator until ready to use, shaking well again before lightly dressing salad or spooning it over cooked fish.

Here are a couple of photos to give you an idea of uses for the dressing. The first is a simple salad with butter lettuce, ripe tomatoes, cheese and shoestring carrots. The passion fruit seeds add color and crunch!

The second is pan-fried salmon the flavor of which far exceeds its accompaniments of fresh corn on the cob and peas. As much as I love sweet corn it still would have been a rather bland meal without the passion fruit vinaigrette!

Enjoy! Go ahead and make a jar! I’d love to hear what you’ve tried it on.