Day Twenty One - Page 235 English Muffin, Page 238 Bay Leaf Butter, Page 89 Fried Chicken & Octo Vinaigrette

Taking a break from cooking with pork, I made English muffins. It turned out to be a big commitment of time and the resulting bread was successful as long as we didn't call it an English muffin as Andrea so diplomatically put it. It began with mixing the dough. Midway into the process, the recipe says that the dough will look like "an appendage of the sandman". Now, that is some strange image and had me puzzled for quite a while until I actually got to that point and, voilà , the creature's arm appeared. (See Sandman).

The next part was easy. Rolling the dough into balls and dusting tops and bottoms with cornmeal went very smoothly.

The slow baking was very tedious because I had only a cast iron skillet that held only a few muffins at a time. But I got the hang of how to do all the flipping - very, very carefully so the muffins do not deflate.

The final step, spreading the split muffins with bay leaf butter and toasting them on a hot skillet, was completed by John. He did a good job of getting a crispy top but nothing was going to make them full of holes like the things I thought I was making. They were perfectly edible, even good cold, but they just weren't English muffins. I think we'll just go with Chang's description of what he envisioned for the bread course, "a fat bomb."

Next on the menu was fried chicken. I thought I'd try it with just wings before jumping into frying up a whole chicken. They were tasty but on the dry side. The next time I'll steam them less and use larger pieces of meat.