Sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
In another bowl, combine sugar, milk and vegetable oil. Beat the egg and stir it in. Add the vanilla.
Fold the flour mixture into the wet mixture and stir just until everything is combined.
Cover the bowl and let the batter rest in the refrigerator for at least an hour or as long as overnight.
When you're ready to bake the muffins, place an oven rack in the top third of the oven and preheat to 425 F.
While the oven is heating, oil a muffin tin, remove the batter from the fridge, stir in the chocolate chips and fill the muffin cups to the top. Add some water to any empty cups. Put the muffins in the oven and bake for 9 minutes before turning the oven down to 350 F. Continue baking for another ten minutes or so – don't open the oven door for at least that much time. The muffins are done when you can insert a toothpick in the center and it comes out clean. Note: these times are for a tin of 12 muffins.
What a week. What a day. I lost my cool with a store manager today who said he couldn’t require his employees to keep their masks on. “What if they also took their shoes off, hung them from their ears, and walked around the store barefoot? Would you ignore that also?” I wanted to say but just walked out instead as the mouth breathing MAGAs in line looked at me like I was being hysterical – Guess what, I was! – and I felt bad for losing my cool with someone who was probably doing his best just showing up when even grocery shopping has become a partisan theater of sneers. Memo to all who continue to support or remain silent about our impeached president and his bigoted politics of division and death: It’s working.
On Wednesday, excerpts from an upcoming collection of oral histories, Don’t Get Me Started on Starter, were leaked revealing he was the last person in quarantine to make banana bread.
I said oh, you’ll know him when you see one of his prints. His stuff was everywhere in the eighties. I image searched him then went to his Wikipedia page. Standing at the sink, still in our pajamas and the pairs of magenta and powder blue latex gloves we wear while washing dishes together, we learned the artist died of a heart attack while doing aerobics in 1984, the same year I took up the sport.
