English Muffins???

My family eats a lot of English muffins. And I mean, a LOT of English muffins. There’s only three of us, two adults and one toddler, but we go through English muffins like candy. I eat one muffin, one egg, and about a half a cup of yogurt every morning of my workweek, and Mr A sometimes refuses to eat anything BUT English muffins (or candy, but, well, candy is a sometimes food). And because of my eating habits and toddler’s eating adventures, husband tends to forgo the English muffins, even if he wants them.

So, after going through half a dozen English muffins in just a couple days, I decided to try making some. I got out my trusty Joy of Cooking cookbook (I grew up with this cookbook and found a copy for myself in a thrift store). It hasn’t failed me so far (granted, I mostly use this cookbook for cookies).

I followed the recipe, making some wonderfully bubbly watery dough with half the flour, then adding the rest of the flour and forming lopsided dollops of dough to form the English Muffins (it said to use rings—muffin rings or jar rings, but I don’t have any of those) and letting them rise some more.

Then came the hard part.

The recipe says to transfer the muffin dough from the cookie sheets where they’ve been rising to a warmed, buttered griddle. I tried, and…

…and…

…And the hand-formed imperfect muffin with wonderful air bubbles collapsed into a misshapen elongated heap! All those beautiful bubbles, gone! All those somewhat circular shapes, eliminated!

I managed to get the muffins more or less onto the griddle and re-formed them into semi-circular shapes, but their wonderful large muffin-ness was now gone!

Add to that the fact that nowhere—not in the Joy of Cooking, not online—can I find what temperature my griddle is supposed to be at (medium low, medium, warmed, heated, huh???), and it seems my muffins are failing to cook. I am cooking them right now, right this very moment, and they are refusing to brown.

Batch 1, after placement on the griddle, such sad things.

Is this because it’s not warm enough? Is it because there’s not enough butter on the griddle? Is the browning from the browning butter, like with pancakes, rather than the dough?

Alas, I do not know. All I know is that we are supposed to wake Mr A early from his nap to go have a dinner with my fellow quarantining in-laws (none of us are sick, and none of us want to be), and these muffins need to be done before we can leave.

Cook until brown, huh? Is kinda pale white okay?

I may need to eat one to see if it’s done.

Alas, I have returned from consuming one of the muffins, and it looked cooked. It looked cooked, but more dense than I would like. And….it tasted like dough and stuck to my teeth. For shame! The great British Baking show hosts would be ashamed of me!

I may have to stuff them in the oven. I know these are supposed to be griddle muffins, but time is not on my side!

I double checked online, and all the recipes are saying that the griddle should be on medium (???) heat and the muffins should be flipped when golden brown, approximately 3-5 minutes. I don’t know about any of the internet users, but my griddle’s medium low is 175 degrees Fahrenheit, and my medium is 250 degrees Fahrenheit, and my muffins are still white after 12 minutes on one side.

Someone somewhere needs to provide temperatures, whether in Fahrenheit or Celsius. All us muffin makers depend on it!

One mentioned finishing them off in the oven at 350 F, but not for how long. So I’m gonna try to save these muffins.

Currently, Batch 1 is in the oven at 350 F, and Batch 2 is on the griddle at, now, 300 F. I have waited the 3-5 minutes and flipped them, and they have the slightest hint of brown. I tried to do the first batch at medium-low, as recommended, which for my griddle was 175 F. It was not enough.

Batch 2. Can these even be called English Muffins?

The first batch is now out of the oven. They look…like American biscuits. I’ll let them cool, then eat one.

Poor, poor English muffins. Such a sad, sad tale of defeat.

Yup, definitely a biscuit, not a muffin.

And alas! Even in the oven at 350 degrees for 6 extra minutes, it still tastes a bit doughy.

To all those who have recipes out there for English muffins, what is your secret? We shall keep these sad muffins, for there were several hours of labor and waiting put into them, but we will freeze them so that we can safely eat them after they are FULLY cooked.

Seeds!

Christmas was just a little over a week ago, and one of the presents I got was a windowsill herb seed kit. Now, I’d been thinking about starting seeds this winter and purchased an herb seed packet along with a veggie seed survivalists’ packet (because if I don’t plant them this year at least I have them, right?), but I didn’t have anything else. No seed pods, no starter soil (or non-soil) mix, no nothing. So I was still pretty ecstatic when I opened the gift.

I couldn’t plant the seeds right away because I was going to my in-laws while my parents were helping with a newborn (my parents are Mr A’s daycare right now…well, they have been his entire life, and since it’s a pandemic it’s kinda hard to change if I ever want to see them again). But the day after we got back, I told Mr A we were going to plant seeds.

Mr A was understandably excited, and I opened the packet and read the directions…only to find that Step 1 was to soak all the seeds for 18-24 hours. This surprised me. I’ve sown seeds outdoors before, and never have I ever soaked them for 24 hours (maybe we would’ve had better germination rates if we had? I dunno. Don’t look at me!).

While Mr A got more and more excited, I got worried. “I can fix this,” I thought. I got a water bottle and filled it with warm water, then guided Mr A in filling lots of little jars with water. He was enjoying himself despite the absence of seeds. Then I opened each individual packet, asked Mr A which jar to put them in, and poured where he pointed.

Success!

The next day, I prepped the soil pucks (which I think might be coconut husks? The package didn’t specify, but it definitely feels non-soil-y. Which, according to the Joe Gardener podcast, is a good thing). It said to soak each puck individually for 10 minutes. Which would be 90 minutes if I did each one individually. I wasn’t having any of that, so I did what any sane person would do: lined up 9 bowls of differing sizes and did them all at once.

All my bowls filled up our dishwasher afterwards.

The soil fluffed up so much that I was worried it wouldn’t fit in the individual cups. But it was showtime: time to pull Mr A from his playroom and do Planting Seeds, Part II.

Mr A joyfully helped fill the cups/pots/whatever with soil, and even helped me put the largest seeds (cilantro, I think?) into a cup. Then he joyfully went on his way playing with marbles while I did the rest (though he did come up a few times to watch me work). His favorite part was spearing the labels into the soil over and over.

Good thing Mr A left. This would’ve taken forever.

The hardest part of planting the seeds was getting the seeds out of the water, onto my finger, then off of my finger into the soil. Maybe it would have been easier if I had toothpicks to work with. But it wasn’t until I was cleaning excess seeds from the jars that I had an epiphany: this would’ve been so much easier if I had wetted some paper towels, placed the desired number of seeds onto the paper towels, and then sealed them in baggies for 24 hours. The results would have been the same: seeds soaked in water for 24 hours. But it would’ve been easier to retrieve the seeds from the paper towels than from the water jars. Plus, there would’ve been fewer wasted seeds. A toothpick still would have been helpful, but overall the process would’ve been simplified.

Major facepalm moment.

All in all, it worked out. I hope I got some seeds into those pots (seriously, some of them were smaller than a grain of sand), and that they germinate. If not, I do have those prepper seeds at my disposal.

And while they grow, I’ll prep an herb garden outside for their permanent home. I just hope they don’t grow too big before it gets warm.

Shampoo Bars Part 2

I gave it a good run. I really did. I used shampoo bars for over a year. I could handle the price, though it was annoying to pay so much for a bar of soap, no matter where I shopped. The scents were lovely, in general. But one day, I turned my back on shampoo bars.

What happened? Why did I turn my back on this way to reduce plastic in my life?

Well, it’s simple. Facebook did as Facebook does and showed me a memory. A simple 1-year-old memory. And my hair looked like I hadn’t washed it in over a week.

I’m back! Apple Adventures

Wow! It’s been so long since I last posted to this blog. You’d think I’d given up on being half-green and kinda crunchy, didn’t you?

Well, I kinda did. Between baby turning into a toddler, living in a small apartment with too much stuff, working every other week seven days in a row, and just not having enough time or willpower to be green or crunchy, I did give up.

But times are changing! Husband and I bought a house mid-July, complete with mature grape vines (courtesy of our neighbors—they’re growing mostly on our side of the fence but in their soil, so they might decide to tear them down someday), a 20-foot tall apple tree, and a forty-foot fall (or 30? Super tall) cherry tree. We weren’t prepared for the harvest and let most of the food go to waste (super cringe), but we promise to do better next year (and make a garden! Though we’ll have to redo the sprinkler system to allow for one).

Hydroponics Part II

Last time we met, we talked about shampoo bars. But the time before that, I was embarking on the adventure of hydroponics.

I’m pretty sure what happened to me/my hydroponics system is the equivalent of going on a hike, all excited, only to find that the majestic waterfall at the end dried up a month ago.

Yes, things would have been different if I’d had a light. And maybe I should’ve fed the plants more food more frequently. But this is the most recent picture I got before I gave up on my experiment:

I forgot to take a final picture, but imagine the tall plants at the bottom left completely wilted and left for dead. And imagine that only one of the top right plants survived to sprout two lone cilantro leaves.

Yeah. That’s the fruit of two months’ labor right there.

Then, when my baby (now nine months old) grabbed the electric cord and nearly pulled the entire contraption off the table, I decided that hydroponics really wouldn’t work in our little apartment. Maybe when we get a bigger place, where we can have a dedicated corner for my experiments, then we can do hydroponics again.

My husband Erik and I split the two cilantro leaves as a final toast to the hydroponics system. And they were the most bland cilantro we have ever tasted.

What a note to end on.