Ran out of bread last week for brekkie. I was craving for English muffins. I used the high gluten flour and added some wholewheat. I was being creative again in my safe and happy place, my kitchen. I made the muffins too large and still getting use to my high gluten flour. The first tray was too dark. The second, experimenting and baked it lighter. I only had 12 rings and ended up with 14. I pan fried the front 2 in the first dark baking pan as I ran out of rings. I made these before I got sick. I tried being creative as usual as did not want to slave over the stove frying them. Tropical weather here and so hot and extremely humid. It was 90 F. I decided to bake instead of frying them. I covered them with another baking pan on top. Trying to be innovative and thinking out of the box. Here is the recipe I used and halved the recipe for 12 English muffins. Please do try as they were such great tasting English muffins I have ever tasted. I used active starter as I had extra that I had made. Bim’s Sourdough English Muffins Recipe 1,200 g. Bread flour 760 g. Milk 300 g. Discard one week old 80 g. Honey or sugar 22 g. Salt 3 eggs Mixed everything I large bowl followed with 4 sets of stretch and fold in every 30 minutes (2 hours) Proof another 2 hours or until it rises 70% at 25-27 degrees Celsius Option one same days baked cut the dough into 110 g. Or your preference size and bake Option two retard over night, cold retard give the bread nice flavor and also give you a good benefits for your health 🥰 In the morning cut the dough in to size of your preference and mine are 110 g. (24 English muffins) making ball I use a lot of flour to handle them, rest dough on the counter top to proofing another 2 hours or until double in size. Heat up the pan on medium low, put muffins in and covered the lid for 4-6 minutes each side or cook until golden brown, then transfer the English muffins in to the baking tray and bake in the oven or air flyer another 4 minutes at 190’c This way is to avoid uncooked inside English muffins.

Not a metaphorical one. A real one. Sharp and layered and impossible to mistake. I'd wake before my eyes were fully open, before the house itself had stretched awake, and I'd already know what day it was. Shoe polish. That dark, waxy smell floated through the hallway before sunrise every Sunday morning of my childhood. My father sat at the kitchen table with yesterday's newspaper spread beneath his shoes, working the polish into the leather with slow circles of an old cloth rag. My grandfather had done the same thing. And eventually, so did I. There was something sacred about the rhythm of it. The scrape of the chair legs across the linoleum. The soft cough of the AM radio in the background. My father clearing his throat while the coffee perked nearby. Nobody spoke much that early. The house communicated in sounds and smells instead. And from the oven came the biscuits. Not the canned kind. Not the kind that pop open with a cardboard sigh. These were my mother's biscuits. Flour dust still hanging in the kitchen light. Butter melting into layers before they even cooled enough to touch. You could smell the heat of them before you saw them. Warm flour. Browning butter. A faint sweetness from the coffee cake she baked almost every Sunday beside them. That smell wrapped around everything. The polished shoes by the door. The steam fogging the kitchen windows. The hiss of bacon grease snapping in the skillet. My church clothes hanging stiff and waiting on the bedroom door. Even now, decades later, if I catch the smell of shoe polish and hot biscuits in the same morning, time folds. I am sixteen again. Barefoot on cold linoleum. Rubbing sleep from my eyes. Hearing my father say, "Boy, you better get moving or your mother's gonna leave us both." And somewhere behind him, my mother laughing softly while opening the oven door, releasing a wave of heat and flour and butter into the air like a kind of blessing. Funny thing is, I don't remember many sermons from those Sundays.