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Cornmeal with Suspicious Green Bits Muffins
Robin McKinley on 3/21/2008 CORNMEAL RECIPES
1 ½ c flour††
1 c ordinary yellow cornmeal
1 T baking powder
¼ tsp salt if you use salt (I don’t)
(If you’re using water instead of apple juice you might want to add 1-2 T sugar or honey. Or you might not. But you’ll need a splash less liquid or a flick more flour if you use honey.)
1-2 eggs, depending on size and how fluffy you like your muffins, beaten up a bit first
1 c apple juice or water
¼ c non-demonstrative oil††† or melted (slightly salted)‡ butter
1 c chopped parsley
¼ c pine kernels/nuts, toasted
If your jaw is dropping about the parsley, well, it’s a fairly loose cup. And you can chop it very roughly and haphazardly; try to get the big stems out and the rest is up to you. Now I love parsley—my hummous is about half parsley—but I wish to note that I’ve fed a lot of small children Cornmeal with Suspicious Green Bits Muffins and they eat them. Maybe I’ve only given them to polite English children who all turned pale and ran for the loo shortly thereafter, and I’ve just never noticed.
And be sure to toast the pine kernels. This makes absolutely all the difference in flavour. Pour them into a small (dry) frying pan so they’re only one layer deep and put them over medium heat. Watch like a hawk, because they’re waiting for you to turn your back to burn in a flash. You can put them over low heat, but then don’t expect to get anything else done that day, and muffins are a ‘I have six people coming to tea in half an hour and nothing to feed them’ thing. Shake the pan occasionally. When you begin to smell them . . . here’s the fiddly bit . . . you have to turn the little beggars over. You’ll learn to shake the pan so 80-90 percent somersault. You will be motivated to learn to shake the pan so you only have a few to flip over by hand.
You know how to make muffins, don’t you? Mix the dry. Mix the wet. (I use apple juice and melted butter.‡‡) Mix together briefly, just enough to introduce the ingredients to each other, don’t try to beat smooth. Last of all add your bits: parsley and pine kernels in this case.
I use paper muffin cups inside muffin tins: life is too short to grease and then scrub the bottoms of muffin tins. (They do a sorcerer’s apprentice thing too.) This recipe usually runs about twelve muffins plus two custard cups (which are slightly bigger than standard muffin moulds). About 20 minutes in a 400 F oven: they should rise and get light brown and cracky on top. Test with a toothpick if you’re not sure.
Additional comments
†† I am hopelessly crunchy granola, and I will use half a cup of wholemeal/wholewheat flour and one cup strong white bread or all-purposes flour. You can make them all wholemeal, but in muffins this is a bit rough on the general populace who eats Twinkies and squishy white bread at home, especially with the cornmeal, which won’t rise like wheat flour. I use all whole-grain flours in my yeast breads, but then I also let the sponge work for a good twelve hours, which lightens them. Muffins are an instant gratification situation.
††† Non-demonstrative = no particular intrusive flavour. Sunflower is good. Except I always use butter.
‡ Good quality lightly salted butter is good quality. That hoary calumny about only sweet butter being reliably good is not my experience at all.
‡‡ I don’t have to tell you not to pour cold-from-the-refrigerator apple juice into hot just-melted butter, do I?
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made these last week and felt they needed tweaking, though I liked them :)
(this actually made me eat parsley, which I rarely do).
yesterday I made them again. I have no idea what I did differently – I think nothing – but the batter was way runnier than last week’s… still turned out good. better, I think, than the other batch.
I *like* them :). perfect for breakfast with some avocado and a hard-boiled egg.