Muffins Muffed, Chilies to the Rescue

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I planned to proclaim—Ta! Da!—that anyone can make a terrific muffin, anytime.  As I always have.  Super simple. Super successful.  This morning—alas!—I ended up with two dozen burnt-on-the-top, foam- rubbery blobs studded with lush, sadly wasted blueberries.  Two were edible.  Just.  The rest, I presume, are on their way to the Gulf of Mexico via whatever happens to waste water in Santa Fe.

Here’s the yummy anyone-can-do-it secret I planned to share with you, mainly because it prompted accolades from my grandson who voted yes! yes! yes! for last week’s batch of only twelve blueberry muffins: cinnamon sugar sprinkled plenteously over the batter just before the muffin tins are shoved into the oven.  My banana bread and apple cake often receive the same treatment.  Result: a delicate layer of spicy crunchy sweetness— and the prep’s quicker than mixing up a streusel.

Not that I would ever denigrate anything related to a crumb cake!  I make a weekly pilgrimage to a local bakery where I order a creamy cheese Danish sprinkled with crumbs a la français, plus a double espresso.  To earn this treat, I make myself walk six miles. It’s not torture, mind.  The route is lovely and not gruesomely hilly.  And the Sunday morning treats I remember most vividly from my childhood, aside from waffles flooded with real maple syrup: the crumb buns from a German bakery in South Jersey, whose closest kin I joyously found in Frankfurt-am-Main, when I was working the book fair one year.        

So what happened to the botched batch of muffins?  Stupid me, I forgot to turn a very hot oven down to 350◦ when the muffins went in.  The sugar burnt to black so fast all but two were beyond rescue by the time my nose detected trouble.  Also, having decided to make two batches at once, I blended the hell out of the batter when I was adding the milk and then the blueberries. Delectable muffin texture depends on a truly lumpy batter.  Finally, the butter had got so soft at tropical room temperature I figured I could whip it into the sugar instead of melting it and dribbling it in along with the milk.  Result of inattention  and bad guess experimentation: foam rubber. Usually I’m an apostle of spontaneity.  But, every so often, rules  matter.   How do you tell when?  Ah, well, age does have its compensations.

This tragedy, fortunately, has a deus ex machina.  The new chili season has begun. I’d already decided to turn a muffin story into a sumptuous breakfast story by making a green chili omelet. 

Everywhere in Santa Fe during these days of late summer there’s the smell of chilies being roasted.  This is how it’s done.  A huge cage-like cylinder is nearly filled with red or green chilies,  then rotated over a bed of coals.  When the skins look burnt, the chilies are ready.  (Some things are supposed to be scorched.  Sigh!)

Now, about those chilies. Some people go for Hatch, grown in  the southern lowlands.  I’m a Chimayo fan.  So where may Chimayo be?  Deep in the valley below Truchas, a hillcrest village where the The Milagro Beanfield War took place, there's another old village.  This one, famous for a yearly pilgrimage of the Lourdes variety and for its chilies, is Chimayo.

Some years ago a big maker of canned and frozen Tex-Mex food tried to trademark the name so the people of Chimayo couldn’t market their own chilies under the village name.  Subsistence farmers are poor by definition.  Corporate interests count on this, figuring they can outspend and outlast their feeble competition.  But sometimes the little guys win. (I spent an hour trying to find a coherent link for this data and failed.)  So Chimayo chili, red and green, still comes from an eponymous village in the high desert—and now’s the season when it’s harvested, roasted and—well, here’s what I do, in order to be sure of a year’s easy-to-use supply.

I buy a dozen pint-sized bags of just roasted, mouth-burning and/or mouth-tickling green chili.  I toss all but one bag into the freezer for later processing, then peel  the remaining chilies (an easy job if the chilies were roasted right), slice off their heads, remove their seeds and chop up the meat, which I spoon onto a cookie sheet in one- or two-tablespoon-sized dollops.  The cookie sheet goes into the freezer.  When the little mounds of  chili are frozen solid, they’re popped into a baggie and returned to the freezer.  Presto!  I have green chili ready for all occasions, including breakfast burritos when the gang comes for Christmas and for omelets, which brings us back to the subject of the day: today's breakfast.

Since this was to be my first green chili omelet of the crop year, I kept it simple, although I often add chopped  tomatoes, onions and/or mushrooms, depending on my mood and the contents of  my fridge.  In all cases, cheese gilds the lily.  My taste runs to a sharp cheddar, so that’s what I grated  this morning.  Now beat the eggs, adding a splash of water (or milk—ugh!), if you must.  Pour the eggs into a pan prepared as you like it—I believe that even a non-stick skillet needs a little butter.  Sprinkle as much chile and cheese as you like over the eggs, cook to dry or runny, roll or fold, and serve.  Delicious!  Especially outdoors, on the portale, with an old-fashioned tree-killer newspaper. As for the muffins, who needs all those carbs when the omelet comes out just right?   Oh!  Those little garnishing chilies?  A mild but pleasantly bitter Japanese variety now available at the Farmer's Market.  Fry them for a couple of minutes in a glaze of super hot olive oil.  When they start popping, they're ready.

But, folks, muffins really are easy and infallible—if (1) if you pay attention to idiot-level matters like oven temperature and timing and (2) you don’t beat the batter to death.  And hey!  Fluffs, flops and failures are the live-and-learn part of the cooking game—or of any game worth playing.