Detroit (Michigan) Muffins Food $ Hack by Ruth Paget
One of the reasons I wanted to live in downtown Detroit, Michigan in high school was the city’s proximity to Windsor (Ontario), Canada.
I loved Detroit for being able to take a half hour bus ride through the tunnel under the Detroit River to Windsor, a small English town with river front gardens and many French restaurants and tearooms.
All along Oulette Street, Windsor’s main thoroughfare, you can find china shops selling Spode and Wedgewood, Baccarat crystal stores, and Christofle silverware shops. You can also find made-to-order fur coat stores reflecting Detroit and Canada’s rugged winters.
Bucolic English culture has many lovers in industrial Detroit. I was one of them. My family heritage is mostly English and Scottish, and I wanted to be a trim English woman with everyday tea dinners complete with tea biscuits and Red Rose tea, which I brought home as souvenirs.
I knew from grocery shopping with my mother that tea cakes and muffins do not cost much to make and went through a cookbook (Joy of Cooking) for recipes. I made English tea suppers to save money, so my mother and I could go out to Detroit’s Greektown, Lelli’s Italian Restaurant, Carl’s Chop House, and/or Syros around the corner from our apartment building on Gratiot Avenue on the weekend.
I would make two dozen muffins on the weekend using eggs and sour cream for protein and calcium I reasoned. I used cayenne pepper to flavor them one week and dill on the other. I ate 4 or 5 muffins each day along with slices of cheddar cheese. I also made fresh fruit salad with bananas, oranges, apples, kiwis, tea-soaked raisins, and orange juice to go with plain yogurt. I felt vitamins coursing through my veins eating this meal and ready to do calculus homework after an hour of skating at Hartt Plaza on the icy riverfront.
I tried to maintain a 2,000 to 2,500 calorie diet in high school, so I could be thin like Vogue models. I walked a mile each way to school and was rarely sick. The muffins fed me and kept me strong.
I think muffins are inexpensive to make still and might help stretch food budgets.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
