Have you ever tried cooking something new (and a bit challenging) and it turns into a household staple? And when it becomes a must-have, you’re having to make that not-so-new thing again and again because your spouse or your kids (or you!) would be very disappointed without it?
I suspect were all trying new things with the pandemic shutdown. The staying-home-all-the-time part isn’t new to me because writing has been my day job for quite some time now. I’m used to working in front of a computer in my home office. But until the pandemic shutdown hit, I never had to worry about how I looked from the shoulders up or how the background looked via my webcam.
My new skill that led to a new responsibility was making homemade English muffins. I came across this recipe in the Washington Post back in March 2020 and thought I’d give it a try. My husband especially likes English muffins for breakfast so I thought it would be a nice treat for him.
I’ve been baking bread for years, so this wasn’t a huge stretch. But after the first batch, hubby definitely wanted more. He said he could just buy store bought, but I knew he would be much happier eating the homemade ones made him. So that one experiment has become an every other week (or so) ritual when hubby tells me, “I’ve only got two left. Can you make more?”
It’s become a nice cooperative effort. He’s never made bread, so I make the dough and let it rise in the fridge overnight. The next day, we work together to measure out the 12 blobs of dough that will become muffins. I put a blob on our kitchen scale and he shapes it on the cornmeal covered cookie sheet. Then after another 2-hour rise, he cooks the muffins in our electric skillet.
Over the 2+ years since we started our muffin making venture, I’ve modified the recipe. We use our electric skillet instead of the cast iron pan the recipe calls for because we ended up with burned muffins. Hubby isn’t super fond of whole wheat or honey, so I switched to rye muffins sweetened with sugar and flavored with caraway seeds. I’ve also gotten lazy and rather than the egg white called for in the recipe, I throw in a whole egg.
I’ve also started to make other breads more regularly. My favorite is olive bread, my version of a tasty bread we used to buy at the Bel Air market. I use Peter Reinhart’s lean bread recipe from his book Artisan Breads Every Day, and add 3/4 cup of sliced kalamata olives and substitute 1/2 cup of the olive brine for some of the water. It is divine.
Did you start something new during the shutdown? Let me know in the comments.