20 breakfast and brunch recipes

Make an elegant and delicious breakfast or brunch to start the weekend off right.

Cranberry orange muffins

nestMeg
Cranberry orange muffins.

By Meghan Prichard, nestMeg 

2 teaspoons grated orange rind

3/4 cup orange juice

1/4 cup canola oil

1 large egg, lightly beaten

2 cups all-purpose flour (about 9 ounces)

1 cup sugar (set aside one tablespoon for topping)

1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

2 cups coarsely chopped cranberries

1/3 cup chopped walnuts, toasted

1. Preheat oven to 500 degrees F. (Lower to 400 right before placing the muffins in the oven.)

2. Combine orange rind, orange juice, canolia oil and egg in a bowl. Add flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda. Stir until just combine.

3. Fold in cranberries and walnuts.

4. Coat muffin tin with oil and pour in batter. (I filled the cups to the very top to make 12 big muffins.) Sprinkle sugar on top. Lower oven heat to 400 degrees. Bake for about 17 minutes, or until the muffin top springs back when touched.

5. Run a knife around outer edge of each muffin cup. Carefully remove each muffin.

18 of 20

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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