Popover

For the last two weeks, Baleen has awoken between 6.30 to 7am, wide awake as usual the moment she opens her eyes, and gone to the kitchen for a mini-breakfast. It's always something small, like a bowl of cereal, grapefruit or toast with butter and vegemite. She'll eat that mid-morning snack, see my off to work, then go back to sleep for an hour. On Sunday morning, when she woke at 7am, we were out of anything she wanted. Panic was near.

But the night before, in the Williams-Sonoma cookbook that gave us a Saturday night dinner of Chicken with Chiles and Limes, I saw a recipe for popovers. The ingredients were basic enough, butter, flour, milk and salt. What it also showed me, unknown up until that moment, was that I had the most important ingredient, the popover tin. Six or seven years ago, when Amanda and Nate lived in the Uncle's house up on the hill, they brought over the muffin pan for some cornbread I intended to make. It wasn't really a muffin tin, they said, it was very deep and there were only six tins with a good bit of space between each one, but it would have to work as it's all they had. 

That muffin tin made the moves with me over six years, four without Baleen and then two with her, until, yesterday morning, it finally found it's true use. Baleen covered her popovers with a little bit of strawberry jam and thick slices of butter while I used apple butter for mine. Fresh bread from your own oven at 8am on a Sunday morning? Nothing beats it. Nate and Amanda, we're holding the popover tin hostage until you find us a job and a house in that city of yours, at which point, we'll return your tin, complete with six right out of the oven popovers. We might even carpool to hockey practice if the timing works.