Bruschetta and blueberry muffins

It has been a very warm day here in Kansas City, low 90s.  As I write this about 7:00 PM (early for me since I usually do these blog posts after 9:00 PM in the evenings), it's dipped down into the 80s.  At least we have a low tonight that will drop below 70.  But during the day, the heat has made the entire neighborhood very quiet as few people are out and about.  Tom, our resident feline here, spent much of the day enjoying the coolness of the house on a spot on top of a couch, just lazing the day away.

the last of my brother's bruschetta - toasted a bit dark by me
and tastes excellent

I, on the other hand, got quite few things done early and then relaxed through the afternoon.  I grazed a lot all morning long as there was food leftover from yesterday when my brother came to visit and we made some great food and then played Strat-o-matic Baseball for much of the day, replaying that incredible 1957 World Series between Milwaukee and New York.  My brother made great bruschetta for us and we had cookies and scones from me, and a smattering of other things as well.  So today I enjoyed the leftovers while I was working on another tweak in the long process of creating a blueberry muffin with very specific qualities.

I've been working on this particular blueberry muffin off and on for a while.  They come out close, but never exactly what I'm looking for in terms of appearance, texture, and balance of flavors, etc.  They are a slightly different blueberry muffin from what most people are used to, heavy on vanilla, a moderate amount of fresh blueberries (sometimes wild, sometimes not, as I go from tweak to tweak), a layer of blueberry reduction, and a final flourish of lemon sugar heavily sprinkled on top.  As I said, I've been working on tweaking this for a while.  I do one tweak in the mixing process, then another in the portion sizing, then another in the amount of time the blueberry reduction is on the stove before it goes on top of the muffin batter, and so on and so on.  It's a long process (*chuckling here*) but when I eventually get it just right I hope to have a specific texture and flavor balance that makes me happy, and hopefully it will look good, too.  However, to be honest, the appearance isn't nearly so important to me as the other elements.  Some of my tweaks have resulted in very interesting, even messy, looking muffins, and sometimes even hard to pick up without getting too sticky.  So I keep tweaking, I keep going through more containers of blueberries, and every so often I pause for a while and return to the effort after some time has passed.  Sometimes those pauses result in an exciting idea for my next tweak.  Sometimes they just give me a reason to temporarily stop buying blueberries.

No matter the result of each tweak, I continue on -- adjusting, re-balancing, changing the recipe ever so slightly.  Some things come quickly, others take time.

Well, I'm going to finish this post and eat the last bit of bruschetta from yesterday's leftovers, and then read up on some baseball statistics as I think ahead to another round of baseball simulation soon.