I've had two brief stints with musical instruments. The first was a year or two of the piano in elementary school. The piano fizzled out after awhile because we didn't have actually
have a piano. I'm pretty sure my teacher could tell my "practicing" on our borrowed keyboard wasn't doing me any favors.
A few years later, as a freshman in high school, I signed up for a guitar class to be held in the three weeks over our Winterim session. This time around, my parents realized that the toy ukelele they'd brought back from Hawaii wasn't going to cut it. Christmas morning I opened a giant box holding my very own guitar. I diligently strummed my guitar every day for three weeks, plucking out the notes to a few random songs. Within a few weeks of the class ending, the guitar began collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom. It still sits at my parents house in some closet, just waiting for me to pick it up again someday. Third time's a charm?!

Playing a musical instrument was one hobby I couldn't keep up with. Cooking has proven to be quite different! I've come a long way in three years. My various baking sheets and muffin tins and kitchen tools are far from gathering dust (streaks of flour and sugar are another story though!). What's kept me interesting in cooking and baking is the fact that I feel like I'll never run out of recipes to try. I've already made nearly twenty different kinds of
muffins and yet I'm nowhere near running out of new types to try.
These dried berry wheat germ muffins turned out fantastic. Ryan told me several times how much he liked them. The original Cooking Light recipe called for dried cherries, but I picked up a bag of mixed dried fruit that included cherries, blueberries, plums, and cranberries. These weren't a super sweet muffin, making them a good option for breakfast with a piece of fruit. The wheat germ in them gives them an extra dose of fiber!
Readers, tell me about one of hobbies you didn't follow through on? Surely I'm not the only one to ditch a musical instrument...!
One Year Ago: Cake Batter Ice Cream
Two Years Ago: Coconut Chicken Chili