By G. E. Shuman
I am not a ‘sweet’ person, especially at breakfast time. Just ask my wife if you don’t believe me. Bacon and eggs is a very good breakfast, to me, so is a couple of sausage burritos from my friendly neighborhood McSomething restaurant, but anything with any kind of sugar or maple syrup, (sorry native Vermonters) is really more than I can take, especially in the morning. Actually, I don’t like that stuff any other time of day either. (I can’t believe, any more than you probably can, that I’m dedicating a column to what I eat for breakfast, but I really just want to share my great muffin experience with you.)
No, I’m not a sweet person, sweet eater, or sweet anything else, I guess. My idea of a snack or dessert leans more toward the chip and dip, or crackers and cheese side of things. Chocolate is okay, but I could go forever without another candy bar, (sorry Mom and Lorna); probably not so for French fries or onion rings. My wife is pretty sure that chocolate is good for you, and tells herself that by telling me so, every once in a while. So is broccoli, but I never hear her trying to convince me of it. For breakfast I’m an eggs, sausage, hot sauce and home fries kind of guy. Or, cold pizza is always good, too. I also think I make a pretty good spinach, sweet pepper, and tomato omelet. Yum! My wife eats things like waffles, with strawberries and mountains of whipped cream on them, for BREAKFAST! I can’t imagine that, and will likely never understand that woman. I guess it’s all just part of her great beauty and charm. (Nice save, George.)
So, about my unbelievable, incredible, breakfast muffins. After Easter I was looking online for something to do with leftover ham.Ę We had visited our daughter Cathy’s home for Easter dinner, and I brought the ham. Actually, I brought two large hams, because, to me you can’t have too much ham, although, in this case, I guess we did. We ended up bringing one of the hams home with us. I googled leftover ham recipes, and found a perfect one, at least for my tastes. It is a recipe for ham, spinach, onion and cheese muffins. To me, that is the perfect combination for a very well-rounded breakfast. Well, the muffins are round, they taste great, and that’s well-rounded enough for me. Also, they are muffins without any berries, nuts, chocolate, marshmallows, raisins, grains, seeds, roots, tree bark, or other foreign objects that don’t really belong in muffins in the first place.
One recent evening I made some of those great muffins. I had run out of printer paper, so had to balance my laptop on my coffee maker top, so that I could see the recipe, in our very small kitchen. This turned out to be somewhat less of a necessity than I thought it would be, as I didn’t quite, really, follow the recipe exactly, anyway. I’m not very patient with things like recipes, I guess. If all else fails it’s okay to follow the directions, I suppose, but this time ‘all else’ didn’t fail. I did use the basic ingredients, like the flour and milk and eggs and other stuff, in the correct amounts, and also the cooking time and temperature were right. When it came to the quantities of ham, onion, spinach and cheese to use, the recipe writer was somewhat wimpy, I thought. So, I had to improvise a bit, because I had to save my muffins. Three quarters of a cup of diced ham didn’t look as good to me as a cup and a half did; a small diced onion isn’t as big as a big diced onion, (something I thought the recipe writer should have known,) and things like that. I have never been very interested in the concept of moderation.
I want you to know that, in my opinion, my unbelievable, incredible breakfast muffins are exactly that. My wife even ate a few of them, without whipped cream or anything. I hope you will try making them. If you want the specific recipe you can drop me a note at: vtpenner@gmail.com, or check the internet for leftover ham recipes. Just don’t follow my recipe, or any other recipe exactly, as doing so is a recipe for disaster. Enjoy!