Now that's a Lot of Batter

My friend Sparky bought me some jelly last year from an Amish market. It’s cherry jelly but it’s yellow. Apparently the Amish don’t understand that if you are going to call something cherry that you need to add some industrial red dye. (Saw some Amish people one time in a 7-Eleven in Pennsylvania buying a loaf of Wonder Bread. Can’t say that didn’t sort of kill the romance of being Amish for me.) I never had this problem with odd colors growing up. We had two candy stories within biking distance of my house, Arnold’s 5¢ and 10¢ store and the Goodie Shop (that even had a soda fountain!). When you got candy there, like watermelon “Now ‘n’ Laters” or a gigantic molar-extracting Charleston Chew, the colors never surprised you. Apple was green, cherry and strawberry, red, etc. Despite the baffling color of my cherry jelly – I am told there are such things are yellow cherries by the way – it is delicious. It is really good, but just putting it on toast is kind of boring. And you can’t just eat jelly plain. I’d sooner have a big ole spoonful of mayo than try to eat jelly by itself. I do have a bit of a weakness for the jelly doughnut, but that’s a different story.

So I began thinking that I might make some muffins for the cherry jelly – sort of like buying a car because you found some sweet floormats – but it reminded me of the last time I got enthusiastic about making muffins. I am not totally lame in the kitchen, but I am not a baker. I decided a while back that I would make raisin bran muffins to polish off a box of cereal that I had in the cupboard. Not able to find a recipe readily, I pulled a cookbook that an old girlfriend had picked up at a yard sale – recipes from country inns across America. They had a recipe for muffins, so I scribbled down the ingredient list and went off to the market. It called for buttermilk. I’m not sure how I feel how buttermilk; it seems to me that goats don’t seem like the type of animals that would willingly give up their milk. Nevertheless, I gathered everything up and brought it home. I got out my biggest mixing bowl and began making muffins. I dumped in three or four cups of cereal and then almost all of the butter milk, three or four cups of flour, and bunch eggs and other ingredients. Mixing away, the bowl was getting kind of full. It struck me that this looked like a lot of batter. I took another quick look at the recipe. You see, taking a recipe from the cook at one of America’s great country inns has its upside – you know you’re going to get a high quality product. The downside of course was that I had just followed a recipe to make 12 dozen muffins. That’s a lot of muffins. I guess the quart of buttermilk should have been a redflag.

Maybe I’ll just buy some delicious Thomas’s English Muffins for my yellow jelly.