Using What I Have Journal Entry #14: English Muffins

I have tendencies to overbuy when I visit grocery stores. I am getting better, but I'm also not all the way to where I want to be yet. One of the solutions I've found, for now, is to just not go shopping if I can figure out some way to get through a week without it. I don't mean by having emergency-only food (one can't live on saltines alone), but rather by ensuring a balanced meal plan. It is one of the ways I'm gradually learning to buy less, because the time between shopping trips can really stretch.

And that is why, as I avoided shopping when I was completely out of bread and kind of wanted English muffins, I chose to just make English muffins.

I'd never made them before, though I've wanted to for a long time. I was annoyed by most recipes, which seemed to require me to have breakfast 3 hours after I get up, minimum, with all the resting and rising. I couldn't find a recipe online that had an option to stick the dough in the fridge overnight, but I did find one in a cookbook from the 1970s that included that. (You really need 20th century cookbooks, sometimes. Those people didn't have fancy equipment or difficult-to-get ingredients, for the most part.) The 1970s version had me cut the muffins and then stick a pan in the fridge overnight, which I pulled out to "bake" on the stove in the morning.

They were pretty easy to make, all things considered, and they tasted good, because homemade breads basically always taste good. But these are not the kind with nooks and crannies, which I think relies on baking powder (and is why you can't have them resting in the fridge overnight, I assume). So they weren't exactly what I was going for.

Also, I had a few that looked really weird, made from the dough that had to be pieced together again after the first cutting, but that was fine; they still tasted good.

I stuck some of my muffins in the fridge for later, and made it through another week without shopping.