I've been rather obsessed lately with English Muffins made from scratch. I've always enjoyed bread making, and this is about as easy as it gets. Why pay $3 bucks for processed muffins made from white flour, when you can have these whole wheat beauties? When Stacy and Renee were visiting recently, we wandered over to Williams Sonoma and I bought a box of "egg rings" that were just crying out to be used to make perfect sized English Muffins. If you don't want to pay for those (they were around $15 for four rings), you can easily get muffin rings for around $6 at Amazon.com or you can use wide mouth jar rings (I hear) or even tuna cans if you can find the kind that you can cut the top and bottom off. Here we go with the recipe:
English Muffins (makes a dozen in my rings--your results may vary)
1/2 cup nonfat powdered milk
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon olive oil (you could use shortening)
1 cup hot water
1 Tablespoon yeast (or a packet, if you don't have a pound bag of yeast in your fridge)
1/8 teaspoon sugar
1/3 cup warm water
2 cups King Arthur Whole Wheat White flour
Combine the powdered milk, 1 T. of sugar, 1/2 t. salt, oil and hot water and stir until sugar and salt are dissolved. Let cool.
In a separate bowl, combine the yeast and 1/8 t. sugar with the warm water and set aside until the yeast has dissolved (about 10 minutes--it should be foamy). Add this to the powdered milk mixture. Add the flour and beat thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Cover the bowl and let it rest in a warm spot for 30 minutes.
Preheat your griddle to 300 degrees (if you haven't got a griddle, a cast iron skillet will work). Add the remaining 1/2 t salt to your batter as you stir it down. Place your rings on the griddle and spray well. Fill each ring about 1/2 full with batter, then cover with a piece of foil (it's going to get oogey, so you might want to spray it so you can scrape batter off of it back into the bowl). Put a cookie sheet on top of the foil (this not only steams the muffins but keeps them flat on each side). Cook for about 5 minutes, then flip and cook the other side for five minutes or so.
Recipe adapted from Alton Brown's section of Food Network Favorites, Meredith Books, 2005.
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The June basket was chock full: I know it is Cinco de Mayo, which means that we're having Bayless' roadside chicken with grilled knob onions, corn, black beans and green salsa for dinner, but lunch was these plump pea dumplings. I pan fried them on the griddle, and we thought they were lovely, especially if you squirt them with fresh lemon juice and sprinkle with sea salt when they come off the griddle. I was in the mood for crepes the other day, and as luck would have it, chicken breast and mushrooms were on sale! Starting with Cooking Light's recipe as my base, I made some changes. My crepe batter is whole wheat. To make it, I throw a cup of water and a 1/3 cup nonfat milk powder in the blender with 1 Tbls. of melted butter, one cup of white whole wheat flour, a pinch of salt, and three eggs. Puree until smooth and let sit in the fridge for an hour at least. Stir the batter and then cook about 2 Tbls. of the batter (spin the pan to spread the batter out thin) until golden on one side, flip and cook for about 30 seconds on the second side. Stack them up. You'll get roughly 16 crepes out of one batch of batter. While I was cooking crepes, I had two skin-on, bone-in chicken breast halves cooking in a covered skillet (just seasoned with salt and pepper). Once those were done, I skinned and boned them, shredding the cooked meat with my fingers. Sautee the onion and sliced mushrooms. The original recipe does not call for garlic, but you know there's some in my pan. Prepare the white sauce. Note that I used milk powder because unless I just got a BAM basket, I normally only have vanilla soymilk around. This is seasoned with salt, plenty of black pepper and some thyme. Toss the cooled bechamel/white sauce with the chicken, mushrooms, onions, and add a 16 ounce bag of chopped spinach (frozen, thawed, with the liquid squeezed out of) in a large bowl. Be sure to taste the mixture before you stuff those crepes! Time to wrap! Roll them up and nestle them into your casserole dish. Mine made 16 crepes. I think this pan is a 13X17, or some such. Grate some of your favorite cheese on top and run under the broiler until bubbly. I used raw milk cheddar and it was good! Tonight's dinner? Fresh oven-fried catfish with hush puppy cacti and sauteed Cedar Rock Acres Farm Russian Kale from the farmer's market. The other thing you see here is pickled veg that D made a week or so ago. Still not convinced you need to be a BAM member? Here's what we got in our basket today: I was being so prepared yesterday--I had bread dough in the freezer and I hot soaked and cooked a bag of chickpeas in preparation for Spicy Chickpea Samosas (I've made it with the dough listed here, but I tend to use my own whole wheat bread dough these days). This is one of our favorite pizzas lately. If you like babaga noush, you'll probably like this. It can easily be adapted for those of you who don't eat meat or those who don't eat olives. I was really wanting something for dessert, and came across Cooking Light's Double Ginger Cupcakes with Lemon Glaze. I'm currently obsessed with greens and low-fat ricotta cheese. They don't always have to be together, but they certainly are good that way! I had made spinach manicotti in the past, and I had a big bag of mustard greens, so I thought, why not? One of the first things to do is to get the mustard greens prepped. We always tend to saute ours in a Tablespoon of olive oil that has been infused with garlic and crushed red pepper and some sea salt. That looks like this. Let it get good and fragrant and then put in your greens. Pile in the greens, stirring them until they wilt. Take those off the heat and run a knife through them so the garlic pieces and the greens are chopped fairly finely (you just don't want long strings of greens). Here, the greens just went in the skillet--they shrink down a great deal (by 1/2 or more). While that cools, get your dough rolled out. If you aren't making your own pasta, this would be a good time to go ahead and cook the dried shells for stuffing. If you have a pasta maker, I suggest rolling your own dough--then you can wrap the dough around the filling without having to fight the dried tubes that tend to split. Another great alternative? Giant stuffing shells. For two servings, I threw the cooked greens in a bowl with about half a chopped bell pepper and some sliced mushrooms. Throw in some oregano and half a 15 ounce carton of low fat ricotta, along with 2 T. grated parmesan cheese. I also made a basic marinara sauce, but you could either use left over or jarred sauce. The picture to the right is my starter for my sauce--onions and shrooms (there was probably more garlic in that round, too). Saute that for a bit with oregano and fennel seed and then throw in some whizzed up tomatoes (drain the juice off a 28 ounce can, pulse the tomatoes in a food processor to slightly chunky). Pour in the tomatoes and some wine and simmer until it's ready to go--30 minutes is probably good. Pour just a thin film of the marinara in the bottom of your chosen dish for baking. Put in your filled manicotti, top with sauce and cheese (see the first pic) and bake until bubbly and just beginning to brown on top. When I was a kid, I ate my Post Toasties (if you've never had those, they were/are the Post version of corn flakes) without milk. I'm not sure where this habit started, but I still tend to like my cereal dry. |
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