Gluten-Free Cheese Muffins

I have lately had occasion to experiment with gluten-free baking. Namely, the more pregnant I get, the more picky my stomach becomes. I'm not complaining; I've so far had a ridiculously easy pregnancy, so long as I figure out the rules and follow them.

Anyway, these muffins are a bit of a marvel: crusty, buttery, eggy, and all that, but somehow the cheese gives them a very gluten-like springiness and chewiness. It makes sense, I suppose, given that gluten has a texture like cooling melted cheese.

Gluten-Free Cheese Muffins

Preheat the oven to 375.

Mix together:

1.5 cups sweet white rice flour (Bob's Red Mill brand is what I've found)

1 cup fine cornmeal

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

In a separate bowl, beat:

3 eggs

Then add:

3/4 cup water + 1 tablespoon of vinegar (or 3/4 cup whey, kefir, etc...)

Melt:

2 tablespoons butter

Grate:

4 oz. cheese (I used a sharp cheddar)

Stir everything together. It will seem like way too much cheese at first.

Then I take 3 tablespoons of butter and divide it between 9 muffin holes. I use a stoneware muffin pan with muffin holes that are 1.5" deep and 3" across at the top; adjust the number if yours are much different. Pop the pan in the preheated oven for a few minutes to melt the butter.

Scoop the muffin batter into the melted-butter-filled muffin holes. The batter will come up about level with the top of the pan.

Bake 30 minutes. Remove from the pan to cool.

The melted butter in the pan makes the muffins so nice and crusty! These would also be delicious with some fresh herbs minced in, like chives or rosemary.

Molasses Muffins

W. Crawford is off on a "little" 200k brevet today. A brevet is a long, long bike ride. The big ones take several days; you pedal on the uphill and sleep on the downhill. The main thing is that it's a self-sufficient ride. You have to haul your own snacks, your rain gear, your spare tubes, just like in real life. Once when I was very impressionable I saw a picture of a big colorful bike race. There was a guy in a car leaning out to peel back a cyclist's spandex shorts and squirt some lube down there for him. Nothing like that happens in a brevet.

My job was to pack enough snacks to sustain my randonneur for the ten hour ride (he can stop for a meal, if he feels like it). In lieu of squeezable goo-drinks and other high-tech, entirely artificial food for performance athletes, I sent him off with a stash of well-buttered rye molasses muffins, a quarter pound of cheese, and dates filled with coconut and sea salt.

I'm not just being flippantly anachronistic. These molasses muffins make excellent fodder for heavy exercise. By my calculations, W. Crawford needs nearly 9000 calories today. Exercise particularly drains magnesium, zinc, copper, and iron. If he eats all the (well-buttered) muffins I sent, he'll have 2000 calories right up front, plus 150% of the RDA for magnesium, and 75% of his copper, zinc, and iron. (Along with 500% of his daily manganese requirements, wtf?) If you include the chopped liver he had for breakfast and the righteous supper he'll no doubt have, this is one well-fueled randonneur. Don't worry; I only run the numbers when they're interesting ones, like "9000 calories."

That said, these muffins are dark, chewy, and moist, even if all the exercise you get is grinding grain. That grainy rye flavor is a marvelous (and appropriately subtle) foundation for something as deep and mineral as molasses. Rye flour has less gluten than wheat -- and less of a tendency to toughen -- but still keeps stuff stuck together. The oat flour keeps the muffins from spreading. Substitute quick oats or white flour if you have none.

I particularly like these with a glass of kefir.

Rye Molasses Muffins

Whisk together in a large bowl:

2 cups freshly ground rye flour
1/2 cup oat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground cloves

In another bowl, whisk together
1 egg
2/3 cup molasses
1 cup buttermilk, sour milk, yogurt, kefir, or (water plus a tablespoon of vinegar)

Put 1/4 cup butter in a small saucepan and melt it over medium heat. Let it brown lightly; remove from heat. Stir the liquids into the dries, pour in the butter, and combine. Cover with a plate and let it sit for the afternoon.

Spoon batter into greased muffin cups and bake at 375 for half an hour or until a knife comes out clean.

Cornmeal Peach Muffins: Portable Peach Cobbler

Potlucking by bike is tricky work, almost as tricky as picnicking. For some reason, sweets lend themselves to portability in a way roast goose just doesn't. And so the potluck diabetic begins his insulin spiral through the shoofly pies and gingersnaps and (in some anonymous midwestern towns dear to everyone's heart) triple-cookie marshmallow jello krispy mush.

Just think of these muffins as portable peach cobbler. Pack them full of fiber, butter, and less-guilty sugars, bike really fast, and maybe you'll turn out all right in the end. I flipped open the old Boston Cooking School Cookbook for the structure here, but a little of this morning's oatmeal porridge sneaked in, the butter got itself browned, a streusel fell on top, and the peaches just got all sunny-soft inside.

Cornmeal Peach Muffins

Preheat the oven to 400 and butter a muffin pan.
Peel two big peaches and dice them in medium chunks. Chop the peels a little finer and (not kidding!) add them back to the peaches.

Combine:
2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
4 t. baking powder
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup oat bran
1/2 tsp. grated nutmeg
and whisk it all together.

In another bowl, mix:
1/4 lb. melted and browned butter
one serving leftover porridge
4 eggs
2/3 cup yogurt
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup maple syrup

For the streusel topping, combine:
1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup sugar
pinch nutmeg
pinch salt
and rub in:
4 T. butter

Add the liquids to the dries, fold in the peaches, ladle into the buttered muffin holes, and sprinkle generously with streusel. Bake until golden and a knife comes out clean, some 25 minutes. Makes 1.5 dozen.

Drunk Raisin Muffins

When I put raisins in my favorite oatmeal muffins last time, I found them rather dry. Dry like a town with no cheer. The solution? Get your raisins drunk and send them stumbling into the batter. Rather like making mulled wine -- with the spotlight on the raisins, not the half-drunk cabernet that spent several days on the counter -- I put 1.5 cups of red wine in a little saucepan with 1 cup raisins, 2 sticks of cinnamon, and 3 cloves. I brought it to a simmer and let it sit while I made the batter.

For the batter, combine 2 cups flour, 3 cups rolled oats, 2 tsp. baking soda, and 1.5 tsp. salt. In another bowl, mix 3/4 cup brown sugar, 2 eggs, 1 tsp. vanilla, and 2.5 cups whey (or other sour dairy product, like yogurt or buttermilk). Pour the wets into the dries, mix well, and let sit until the oats soak up the moisture. Just before baking, drain the raisins from the wine (pick out the cloves and cinnamon), and fold them into the batter. If your wine is like mine, its raisin-bathing labors will have only improved it. Spoon the batter into greased muffin cups and bake in a 350 degree oven for 25 minutes or till golden on top. Makes 12.

Oatmeal Raisin* Browned-Butter Muffins

The Grand Dame of Southern Cooking was a Communist. Her name is Edna Lewis, and I was thrilled to stumble across her cookbook, In Pursuit of Flavor, at Goodwill today. She writes, "In those days, we lived by the seasons, and I quickly discovered that food tastes best when it is naturally ripe and ready to eat." And unlike Alice Waters, she started cooking professionally all the way back in 1949. She makes her own baking powder, and braises meat in a clay pot, and advocated seasonal food long before the West Coast jumped on the slow food bandwagon. She fed William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. And, yes, worked for The Daily Worker.

Here's the thing, though. I'm not really pitting one culinary genius against another. Unlike other caustic celebrities, the heroes of cookery play a good game of wholesome charm. Think of a kitchen full of the likes of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, James Beard, Julia Child...? My heart just melts like butter on an oatmeal muffin. Which reminds me to tell you that oatmeal muffins are improved twelvefold by the addition of half a cup of browned butter -- but that does NOT mean you should refrain from topping them with extra butter when you split them open all steamy from the oven.

Browned-Butter Muffins

Melt 1/2 c. butter over low heat. While it slowly gilds to a honey-wheat color, whisk together 2 cups white flour, 1.5 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking soda, 1 T. cinnamon, 3 c. rolled oats, and 1 cup of raisins*.

In another bowl, whisk 3 eggs, 1/2 c. honey, and 2.5 c. kefir or yogurt (some part of which may be old sour milk, water, or other bilge).

Pour the browned butter into the oat mixture and toss it about till evenly coated. Stir in the liquids and let the batter sit and thicken up for an afternoon or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter and flour 18 muffin holes. Bake till golden brown on top, some 25 minutes or so.

*In retrospect, the raisins effectively sucked up the moisture like sponges. I much prefer a muffin riddled with caverns of tart berry juice. Add frozen or seasonal berries instead -- just before filling the muffin pan if you don't want grey batter.

Black Cherry Oat Muffins

Aw, muffins. "Aw," like your mother saying, "But she's such a good-hearted girl, so what if she wears jeans with elastic at the waist AND at the cuffs?" Note: your mother was not referring to me. I refused to wear denim altogether in favor of bright monotone sweat pants with preemptive patches sewn in the knees.

Black cherry oat muffins are bumbling and nubbly, attempting to hide their dark hearty wholegraininess under the guise of black cherries and molasses. Like when elastic-jean wearers grow up to be adolescent Mennonite girls hiding their pimples and purity under white powders and black lipstick.

Whisk together 2 cups whole-wheat flour, 1.5 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking soda, 2 cups rolled oats, and 1 cup quick oats. Or whatever combination you prefer.

In another bowl, whisk 2 eggs, 1/2 c. brown sugar, 1/4 c. molasses, 2.5 c. buttermilk, whey, or yogurt, 1 tsp. vanilla, and 1/4 tsp. almond extract. Let the batter sit and thicken up -- all afternoon, or overnight, or till next Sunday -- while you preheat the oven to 350 and butter and flour 18 muffin holes.

Just before you put them in the oven, add 2 cups halved frozen cherries. The cherries melt and form warm dark caves. Bake till they have risen and a knife inserted in the middle doesn't come out gluey -- 20-25 minutes or so. Actually, the cherries are entirely arbitrary. I just happened to have them on hand from Valentine's Day, and frankly think blackberries would work much better.

This recipe (my bran-less adaptation of a bran muffin recipe) turns out to be very similar to an old one my mother just sent me; which, when my kitchen is back up to muffin-production standards, I'll try for comparison. Wish I had such a muffin now. The tea at the tea house where I have come to fetch the Internet is very fine indeed, but the scone tastes like baking powder. Hmph. 

Two Meals from a 3 lb. Chicken with a Tragic Past

A few miles from my old house is a hamlet called Singer's Glen, where Joseph Funk assembled the Harmonia Sacra and where my friend's grandmother made two suppers from a three-pound chicken (the recipes for which are in More-with-Less). Her daughter worked for a time in a local poultry barn and contracted something called Brown Lung -- a chickenshit-and-dander version of bronchitis. The long poultry houses smell like ammonia from yards away, and the dirty gray birds are overgrown broken-legged things that we'd commonly see smashed into tractor-trailers on their way to the processing plants. Sometimes a young one would fall off the truck, and you'd see it wandering by the side of the road looking for all the world like a white grocery bag buffeted by the wind from passing cars. We'd stop and take it home and raise it for a while till it got old enough to crow and attack us, and then we'd do it in -- and stretch it into two or three meals. Poor lucky bird.

The principle: Stew the chicken the first night, with the usual onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, peas or sweet corn, reserving the broth and some of the meat for chicken soup the next night. Complete the classically Mennonite simple meal with raisin-studded refrigerator bran muffins (which reminds me: the usual recipes for refrigerator bran muffins call for boxed cereal, like raisin bran. I do not condone the existence of boxed cereal, so I'm working on a recipe that doesn't depend on something so expensive, preservative-ridden, and disgustingly sweet).

When I had raisin bran as a child, Mama picked out half the sugary raisins to use in baking.