Blue Corn, Piñon, and Apple Muffins

Biting into these muffins is a small journey through the Rio Grande River Valley: blue corn, piñon and apples

Makes ~20 small or 10 large muffins:

1.5 cup Harina Para Atole (Atole is a toasted blue corn meal good in cook cereals)

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

Handful of piñon

1/2 cup butter

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 cup plain yogurt or sour cream

1/3 -1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 peeled and chopped apple

Preheat oven to 375

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs, sour cream, vanilla
Stir in mixed dry ingredients and milk

Fold in chopped apple and piñon.

Spoon batter into 2 greased muffin tins, each cup 3/4 full
Bake ~12-15 minutes until a tooth pick comes out clean

 

Nice with butter and jam.

Piñon trees are just here. Always here. Everywhere, occupying this place long before the people came at all; their tough little ancestors living in happy harmony with the Piñon jay, who stashes their seeds, and despite a prodigious memory for hiding spots, always forgets a few, scattering the seeds over the country side and letting the trees spread and prosper. The trees grace the hills and mountains that cradle the Rio Grande. They offer up delicious pine nuts gathered by our neighbors, both the mouse and human sorts.

Blue corn makes me think of Taos, of crops tended carefully, ancient lineages, seeds honored and passed through so much time they could make a Bristlecone pine blush. Taos pueblo was already very old when the Spanish first came to it, and the corn was there before memory.

Apple orchards came with the Spanish. Now there are trees here gnarled and twisted with age, dignified, black and silvery bark, white flowers, golden apples, red, green, some blushing, some like jewels, some tart and crisp and some honey sweet.  September ripe, then harvest.  Apple trees reveling in the high mountain elevations, directly touched by the sun. Many are nourished by  acequias, lifelines of water that thread through this high desert county. This is water with gravity as a dancing partner, down from snow melt on the high peaks around us.  Acequias are tended by neighbors, kept clear and flowing by communities, with water rights bound to the land. Old wooden sluice gates are open or shut depending on your turn, your field, your need, your orchard, your chiles, your garden. A mayordomo is chosen by vote by those who share the water, and the mayordomo decides how the water is parsed.  

 

We lived near the Nambe pueblo for many years, with an acequia that was first dug by Franciscans close to 400 years ago flowing by our home; you could hear it rushing by our bedroom window in the summer, a good water song to sleep to.  I’ve been told the Franciscans made wine in the Nambe river valley, for Santa Fe.  We had tough little grapes vines growing wild in our field, I like to imagine they were the great great great grandchildren of a carefully tended vineyard. There was a beautiful apple orchard by our acequia, belonging to and minded by our neighbor, a family matriarch who was a wonderful woman, in her 70s, her family with deep roots in Nambe. Also among our Nambe neighbors were some buffalo, a proud white Arabian horse who was king of a cool green pasture, butterflies, dragonflies, a river, a talkative cottonwood, many crows, and Coyote.   

 

In the history museum in Santa Fe, there is small very old frontier fiddle, pieced together from rawhide by some resourceful spirit. I like to think of a glass of wine, some cheese, an apple or two, a wild tune on a crazy little violin, shared on some Saturday night a few hundred autumns ago. 

 

Tonight, again, it would be an excellent plan.

My grocery store carries local blue corn atole, Harina Para Atole, that comes from the San Juan Pueblo Casados Farms.

But your market might not.  You can order blue corn atole on line, if you can’t get it otherwise:

Albuquerque-tortilla.

Here is a tune by Brent Berry, a Taos singer-songwriter and river boatman, who once sang this song as he sat behind me and steered a raft down the beautiful Chama river.  Brent is among the gentlest souls I’ve ever met, and he calmed both me the wild river: Mesa Mariposa