Thursday I forgot about the mug of coffee I brought to work until about 3 in the afternoon and instead of my usual desperation for bedtime this is what happened...

Scarlett started talking about how much she likes muffins with "granola" on top. I told her in the muffin world that's called "streusel." Then they all asked if we could make muffins with streusel (remember the coffee) I said "Yes! how about right now?"

Stella was ecstatic to show us her new dictionary skills (if you know Stella, you know these things really do make her ecstatic) and she looked up the words "muffin" and "streusel" in several baking books until she read a recipe that sounded good to all of us.  Sensing a chance to pass this off as dinner I subbed a pureed apple for 1/2 the butter, wheat germ for 1/2 cup of the flour, yogurt for the buttermilk, cut the sugar and tripled the oats in the topping. Everyone was stirring and the flour was flying. They all especially liked making little hills of flour in their palms shaped by the measuring spoons. (Yes, Stella is for real in that hat)

Finally it was time to get it in the oven, but I hated to put an end to their textural exploration so I found a bag of cheap-ass, generic, bleached flour I bought for making playdough and gave them each a new mixing bowl full of flour and spoons. Stella had the idea to add food coloring and after many drops and lots of rubbing we discovered food coloring needs a liquid to carry it. So everyone added water to their bowls. A while later I decided to dump cornstarch into each bowl to see if the texture would change-not really. Eventually Zeke was done with his gloppy mess and announced "I want to put mines out in da sun." I didn't see any sun, but his went out on the porch. I decided to dump the other 3 concoctions into a soup pot and see if I could rescue it all into a ball of playdough. I added about 1/4 cup oil and all the cream of tartar we had (about 2.5 T) and stirred and cooked over low heat and amazingly it came together into a purplish-gray glop that was fabulous to knead.

As the muffins cooled there was a chorus of "cut up all the fruit you have!" So dinner was apples and oranges and glasses of Silk with the streuseliest muffins ever! First time I got tops so nice and crunchy, the tops lift off like tasty little lids! Perfect.

While I finished the kitchen clean up the kids took a roll of painters tape and made the "basketball court" seen above.

All that and in bed with Reader's Digest (that's another story) by 8:30.