recipe! carrot-pistachio muffins

Plus a reader survey. Send me your thoughts. But be nice.

You may have noticed I’ve switched things up over here lately. The early-in-the-week paywalled posts have met their end, mostly because I wasn’t sure they were serving anyone well.

Going forward, I’m going to have a lot more time and energy (!!!) to dedicate to Grazing, and I’m planning to spend the next few weeks thinking in a good amount of detail about the best way to structure this space and make it a place people want to visit. I have big goals for Grazing in 2024, and I’d love to find a way to sustainably grow the subscriber base beyond the point where it’s plateaued in recent months. Tell your friends to subscribe! Tell your enemies! Tell strangers!

Even better: if you have input, please take the time to fill out this reader survey. Let me know if you love recipes, if you love essays, if there are things I’m not doing that you think I should do — or things I’m doing that I should stop immediately.

As I figure things out, I’m going to scale back to one newsletter per week for the next month or two. With that schedule, the first newsletter of every month will be a recipe, and it will be behind the paywall.

carrot-pistachio muffins

active time: 15 minutes

total time: 40 minutes

servings: 12 muffins

Believe your eyes! It is, for the second week in a row, a recipe. I’ve been baking up a storm over here and churning through so many pistachios that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear there’s a widespread shortage in Mid-Atlantic grocery stores.

I remember the first time I tried one of these wizened little greenish nuts: I was in seventh or eighth grade, and my mom bought a big bag of them, unshelled, and told me they constituted a healthy snack. I was at an age where I desperately wanted to eat food other people labeled as healthy, but I also had a phobia for most vegetables, fruit and anything else with vitamins. A humble pistachio may have been the first bite of green I ever enjoyed.