English Muffin Challenge Day

Since Robyn beat me to the punch of making homemade bagels we decided to challenge each other to make something else on our baked breakfast list and yesterday was the day for English Muffins. Robyn even managed to make English Muffins and blog about them on the same day. I didn't even have time to make them and clean up afterwards on the same day.

I was pleased to discover that English Muffins actually do have English origins (at least, according to Wikipedia). I had sort of assumed that they were something akin to French Fries. In England, of course, they don't call them English Muffins and it sounds like this type of baked good was sort of on the decline until Americans started eating them like crazy but at least I can feel that I've made something marginally authentic. My recipe came from The Tassajara Bread Book which is one of my favorite cookbooks. It automatically falls open to the recipe for cream scones but almost everything I bake comes from this book: our Christmas pecan rolls, our Easter bread, our "company" coffee cake, our birthday chocolate cake, my favorite yogurt cake. I could go on and on and I haven't even mentioned the actual bread recipes in the first half of the book. This book is the reason I have never been able to cut wheat and sugar out of my diet.

The muffins were a huge hit and there are actually none left now. Between yesterday's breakfast, yesterday's lunch in the car, and today's breakfast we polished off a full dozen. I think I'm going to make them again for our friend Brett. Though the recipes don't call for overnight preparation I find that I can make yeasted breakfast doughs the night before, punch them down and refrigerate. I can then shape the dough and let it rise while the oven heats and I've turned a big breakfast project into something manageable for a normal morning.

We ate our lunchtime muffins in the car en route to a job interview for Eric. It went well on his end and my task while he was on campus was to poke around the area to try to generate some excitement about moving there in the event a job is actually offered. I was somewhat successful. We passed a lot of farms. Joseph votes for living on a farm and I didn't have the heart to tell him that wheelchairs and cow fields aren't that good a combination. We found a good-sized town not too far from the school so we'll just see what happens. Please keep us in your prayers these next couple of weeks as that school makes a decision and as we're hoping to hear from another.

Darn Blogger won't let me upload pictures but I'm going to post anyway and come back with pictures later.