Feed Your Passion!
After my manic run to the grocery store in town to pick up fly strips yesterday and hanging five of them up in strategic and not-so-strategic places, the thus-far triumphant tally looks like this:
Rebecca: 37
Flies: 5 (including one really irritating specimen that keeps buzzing my head.)
Holy cow. *Ohmygoodness. I had that many flies? That’s disgusting.
I have now officially declared war on the burgeoning fly population in my home. I had all I could take when a flock of fruit flies and whatever-you-call-normal-house-flies (can fruit flies flock?) decided to repeatedly dive-bomb my slice of cheesecake that I snuck out of the freezer. Oh NO you DON’T mess with this lady’s cheesecake!
I ran into town (not literally- because I am morally opposed to actually running. I’m more into meandering and the odd brisk walk) and bought 2 packages of 4 fly strips. I’m going to open a can of whup-*ss and put a world of hurt on those nasty little beasties. (Insert Braveheart-esque battle cry and claymore waving here.)
…And since I’m drawing indiscriminitely from violent movies I’ll end this post with a bit of Pacino for you.
“Say goodbye to the bad guy!” Buh-bye bad fly.
Without straining the gray matter too much, you might’ve guessed that I don’t haul five kids out to eat breakfast in restaurants very often. Leaving aside the expense of the endeavour, can you even imagine me getting them all ready to go BEFORE I’ve been sufficiently caffeinated? Or before they’ve actually eaten? Because my kids don’t budge out that door until they’ve consumed a few dozen eggs, half a pig and the amount of juice it takes an entire orchard to produce. And I’ve mentioned here before that cold cereal just doesn’t cut it around here. When we have it, we tear through an entire box at breakfast. On my continuing quest to provide home-cooked breakfasts for my kids we entered homemade English muffin territory a week or so ago. They were so delicious and so stinkin’ easy to make that we’ve been playing variations on the English muffin theme most days since.
The current favorite variation is one that bears a striking resemblance to a breakfast sandwich available at a restaurant chain that employs a clown to hawk its wares. My kids love these sandwiches; English muffin topped with fried eggs, Canadian bacon or smoked bacon, and sliced cheese. I eat mine with a superhuman quantity of hot sauce: My husband eats his plain. **This is extreme roll reversal and I can only explain it by saying that eggs belong with hot sauce. That is how it is and always shall be. He is missing out.
Not only do my kids love this breakfast, it seems to make them behave better. Perhaps its the uber-dose of protein with breakfast that keeps ‘em calm. Perhaps it’s the fact that they’re so full that chills them out. I don’t know what does it. I only know that I like it because it keeps them happy and comes together in a flash.
My father-in-law, a charming man, has a not-so-appetizing name for these sandwiches (having apparently produced more than his fair share of these for my husband and siblings while they were young): Tub-stoppers. Thus named, says my husband, “because they look like tub-stoppers.” Oh yes. That would be logical. I was hoping for something more obtuse. I have a call into Pappy right now hoping he’ll give me a more outlandish story to reprint here about how they procured their name.
In the meantime, I’ll pass along the recipe for Tub-Stoppers.
Scale this down if you need to do so. Once again, I’m writing for large families, but this recipe is easily and infinitely scalable.
Ingredients:
Heat a large griddle over medium-high heat. Lay Canadian bacon slices on hot surface and cook until underside is lightly browned. Flip over and heat through, removing when second side is also lightly browned. Transfer to a piece of foil and cover until the rest of the sandwich components are done.
Butter the griddle and toast all English muffin halves, split side down. Remove to a plate and lightly cover with a paper towel.
Lower griddle heat to low-medium. If you want perfectly round eggs, butter the muffin rings and lay them on the griddle to preheat. Crack an egg into each ring (or directly on the griddle) and cover. Cook about 5 minutes or until cooked to desired doneness. If using a ring, shake the ring gently and remove.
To assemble the sandwiches, stack an egg, a piece of Canadian bacon and a slice of cheese on the toasted side of an English muffin half. Pour half a bottle of hot sauce on top (if desired) and top with another English muffin half. Serve hot, warm, or room temperature.
You could do worse than to serve this with a thick slice each of garden fresh tomato and red onion. Mmmmm.
This gets a solid 14 thumbs up out of 14 after one child removes the cheese from his sandwich, another removes his eggs, and a third removes everything but the Canadian bacon and adds blueberry jam. English muffin, blueberry jam and Canadian bacon? There’s no accounting for kids’ tastes.
So. Apparently when the authors of ‘Artisan Bread in Five Minutes’ caution you against putting the lid on your dough bucket tightly they mean it. I kind of ignored that because I’m having a current battle royale against the fruit flies that are threatening my sanity. Those nasty little buggies fly around all my food at all stages of preparation and I figured if I packed that lid on tight it would keep the creepies out. It would appear now that it was a less than well thought out idea.
I would take a picture of what happened, but the only concrete result was temporary ringing in the ears and mild hearing loss when the lid EXPLODED off the top of the bucket. When I say it exploded, I mean it. Kind of like this…
BANG went the lid. Rattle went my eyeballs. Crash went the glass. And the dough? It just stayed put.
My kids came flying into the kitchen from outdoors yelling, “MOM! WHAT was THAT?”
The percussive power of that bang was enough to knock over a glass sitting near it. This glass, mercifully, did not break. I am hoping that means there will be no more glass breakage around here for a while. It was really funny, because no one was hurt and nothing was broken, but it was clear that it actually could’ve done damage to someone or something if the circumstances had been different. So PLEASE do not put the lid tightly on your dough buckets, people!
…Now, aside from the sheer excitement of things literally exploding in my kitchen, there was something else really interesting in all this. When the explosion occured, the only thing flying out of the bucket was gas. The dough sank back into the bucket like you fall into bed after a long day. It was crazy. Logical, upon reflection, but at the time it seemed counterintuitive. Don’t get me wrong. I was happy not to be cleaning slack dough from all my kitchen surfaces. Queen Nerd (that’d be me) just found it fascinating. Can my nerd peeps back me up on this?
“Hey! You should make English muffins with this dough. I bet it’d be perfect,” quoth he. I have said before that my hubby is an Evil Genius, but it bears repeating. His mind works unlike others and he has had brilliant ideas before, but this one was BRILLIANT! (So brilliant that it requires all-caps and italics.)
Mix water, yeast and salt together in the bowl of a large stand mixer or in a 10 quart food-safe container. Add flour and stir until the mixture is uniform. You don’t have to knead, but you want everything uniformly moist, without dry patches. The dough will be wet and will conform to the shape of its container.
Cover with a lid that fits well, but is not airtight and allow to rise at room temperature for about 2 hours or until the dough collapses back in on itself. You can now refrigerate the dough for up to two weeks, using the dough whenever you need it or you may use it immediately.
This is what the dough looks like midway through the process of making muffins. It ain’t perty, but it sure makes gorgeous bread.
And here’s what the muffins do inside the rings while cooking on the griddle. I tell you- don’t worry if it doesn’t fit perfectly, it’ll fill in the rings!
Speed of Light English Muffins
*For this recipe you will need English muffin or egg rings. If you do not have either of these, you can cut the bottom and top off of tuna cans and wash them thoroughly or use round, metal cookie or biscuit cutters. I did make a couple free-form, and they’re still good, but not as tall. In a pinch, though, it can be done. These are best prepared a couple hours or a day in advance so they can cool and the crumb can set up.
To make these you need:
Oil as many muffin rings as you plan on using. Preheat a griddle or frying pan to approximately 325F. Place rings on hot surface and sprinkle about a teaspoon of semolina flour in the bottom of each ring. Pull of scant ½ cup pieces of the dough with wet hands. If you’re having trouble determining what ½ a cup of wet dough is, use water to rinse a ½ cup measure and put the dough in the still wet measuring cup. It will slide right out! Gently stretch the dough to approximately the size and shape of your ring and carefully put it down on the semolina. Don’t fret if it’s not the exact size or shape. As it cooks, it will expand.
Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with another teaspoon of semolina flour and allow to cook until the bottom crust is a lovely brown color and is crisp. Remove rings using an oven mitt or tongs and flip the muffins over. Continue cooking until second side is also golden brown and delicious and crisp. Remove to a rack to cool.
When muffins are cool, use a fork to split them. If you’ve never split a muffin with a fork, don’t be afraid. It’s not tough. Just hold the muffin flat in the palm of your hand and slide the tines of a fork in parallel to the edge but halfway down on the side of the muffin. Remove tines, turn muffin partway and repeat until you’ve poked a line of holes around the center of the muffin. Use your fingers to gently pry apart the muffins. Opening them this way ensures the lovely butter trapping holes that we all want in our English muffins…
Splitting the muffins with a fork is the only way to get those ‘nooks and crannies’. If you use a knife it just won’t be the same!
This muffin is just screaming for cold butter and blueberry jam.
An enthusiastic 14 thumbs up out of 14. Saying anything else would be superfluous. Make these. You can thank me with small gifts of cash.
I’d like us all to observe a moment of silence for the baking ignitor in my oven. (Silence from me, but not the children.)
Yes, that means my oven isn’t working. We’ve had the most glorious stretch of fall-like summer weather in my memory and I can’t bake a loaf of bread in the oven. But I’m not bitter.
Well, alright, maybe I am a little bitter. But I’m also creative and stubborn. I wanted fresh bread, dang it, and I was going to make it happen. My husband, the Evil Genius, recently added a toaster oven and a large electric griddle to our kitchen. I’ve not yet ‘connected’ with the toaster oven. I have some sort of bias against it. Maybe some day I’ll grow to love it. But the griddle? Where has it been all my life? I can cook enough pancakes for everyone, a full pound of bacon, make French toast for a crowd, or make sausage and eggs for the whole family at the same time! I decided, after a suggestion from the Evil Genius, that I could make English Muffins on the griddle. (**This will be the subject of tomorrow’s post! Please come back for the skinny.) The English muffins were so good, so great, that I thought I just might give griddle cornbread- NOT griddle johnnycakes- a whirl.
**I now interrupt my already rambling programme with a couple brief observations on cornbread. It should be moist, and not at all sweet. It should only be fit for stuffing after one day. If there is any left after one day. And most importantly? My Grandma’s cornbread is the best cornbread in the whole world. There is no discussion on that point. It is so good that it could possibly save the world somehow.
Since I’m obviously partial to my Grandma’s cornbread recipe, I naturally turned to it in order to try out these griddle mini corn breads. And unsurprisingly, they were delicious! The griddle and my English muffin rings tag-teamed to make the most gorgeous, golden-brown crusty, moist, individual sized cornbreads. With a little sliced cheese and some homemade pickles on the side it made a lunch fit for 5 kings and 2 queens (referring to my baby sister and myself.) And since my Grandma is a kind, generous, recipe sharing individual (don’t take my word for it- see for yourself), I know she won’t mind if I share the recipe with you all. After all, when your cornbread can improve humanity it’d be a crime to keep it secret.
There is a chance I might receive a Nobel Prize for passing this cornbread recipe along to you. I won’t let it go to my head.
Despite having eaten several of these within the past two hours I am getting hungry again looking at the picture. These were so tasty.
The crust on the bottoms of these turned out so perfectly it was almost, just almost a shame to eat them. I got over that feeling pretty quickly.
If I tell you that I was holding 7 people back, including me-self, from eating these long enough to take a picture would you be impressed?
You may remember my recurring glass breakage problem this summer. It strikes again. Sunday, after making a beautiful batch of cheese from fresh raw goat milk (obtained as a gift from a friend who keeps goats) I was walking back to the countertop with my bowl of cheese in my slippery hands. To condense the story, I tripped, the bowl fell and shattered into millions of microscopic pieces all around my feet. My feet that were clad in hole-dotted Crocs. I had to stay put while one son yelled out the window to his Dad who was on a two-story, fully-extended ladder. Hubby arrived to save the day, the glass cleanup took over an hour and I spent about another 30 minutes throughout the day removing bits of glass from my feet. ‘Cause who knew broken glass might make it’s way in through holes in your shoes?
Stylish, no? Rainbow bright tie-dye socks and black orthopaedic Crocs? I am on the cutting edge I tell you.
At least I wasn’t wearing these!when the bowl shattered into a billion smithereens. And those feet belong to my devastatingly cute almost 16 year old competitive gymnast sister. Let’s just say you should be thankful she’s in the flip flops and I’m in the hiking sock/Croc ensemble.
…And we come to today. More glass, more shattering, more sweeping and gingerly gathering shards- some big and some tiny- to carefully remove from the area where it can harm feet. I had an epiphany that I thought I could share. And be patient with me. This is some pretty deep thinkng for someone who prides herself on being able to see the shallow side of every important conundrum…
Everyone gets the occasional scraped knee…
Sometimes things just break. And sometimes it’s not a big deal, but sometimes you feel like you’re teetering on a really sharp edge.
But it’s not the end of the world. We clean the wounds, carefully remove the glass and let things heal. This is not news to any of us. But what struck me was that the shattered glass was truly beautiful. And here’s where my deep thought came in to play.
The glass is still usable. Maybe not in the form it took before. Maybe not in the way the glass maker intended it to be used. But it’s still salvagable, and maybe it’ll even be better than it was before it broke. You can melt it down and remake it a million different ways. It could take on almost as many forms as the number of shards that were scattered around the floor or ground. Even something that was broken to the point that it caused harm can still be a wonderful and lovely thing. Isn’t that comforting?
The secret is this: Almost everything is improved by the presence of Nutella. You know the stuff, right?
I was first introduced to the creamy, hazelnutty, chocolately heaven-in-a-bottle way back in the day when I was an exchange student in La Belle France. There was a bakery where you could actually bring your bread and have them spread it with Nutella for the equivalent of about fifty cents. I loved France.
My kids, for better or for worse, are growing up with the omnipresent monster-sized jar of Nutella in the house. Thankfully, our local(ish) warehouse store carries cranium sized jars of my favorite fix-it-all ingredient.
I think Nutella really can fix it all. Got a cake or bowl of ice cream that needs pizzazz? Warm a little Nutella up and drizzle over the top. Oh my yes! Out of butter, jam or marmalade for your toast? Do I even need to say it? Are you going somewhere last minute or having an impromptu play group at your house or having last minute company?
Try this quick frozen dessert that I make around here. It’s not fancy. It’s not polished. But all that taken into account, I have never had someone refuse one of these. I’ve also never had someone fail to nicely ask for seconds and/or eyeball the one their kid was eating and ask several times whether they really wanted to finish it. Please try these. I think you might even thank me.
Okie dokie. The recipe below is for the Nutella Peanut Butter Graham Cracker Sandwiches, but you can see that I used vanilla wafer cookies for some of them. I’m crazy like that. Use whatever cookies you have on hand and it’ll still be delicious.
Ingredients:
This couldn’t be simpler. Spread Nutella on one whole graham cracker. Spread peanut butter on another cracker. The thickness is up to you. Just remember you’ll be attempting to put your teeth through the frozen version of this and plan accordingly! Gently sandwich together and set in a freezer safe container with a lid. Continue on until you’ve run out of crackers, Nutella or peanut butter.
Now comes the hard part. Do not eat them immediately. Put the lid on it and stick it in the freezer for at least an hour. Longer is fine, not necessary, but fine.
An emphatic 14 thumbs up out of a possible 14. If the dogs had opposable thumbs they’d hike them for this, too. They’re snuck more than their share out of the hands of kids who were momentarily distracted. Danged dogs. I’ll just say one more thing about this dessert. We NEVER have any leftovers. No matter how many I make. You’ve been forewarned.
