Wild berry & wild rice muffins

Now that it's finally summer, my mind turns to incorporating more wild and local food into my diet.  I'm also thinking about using up anything that I have left in my freezer from last summer-- including my berries that I've hoarded away all winter.

I LOVE berry picking at the end of the summer-- whether it's an outing with friends or just sneaking away for a half hour to my secret neighborhood berry picking spot.  Alaska's berries are totally topnotch.

The wild blueberry, Vaccinium uliginosum, is a small and tart berry full of flavor. 

 

Lingonberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea, (also called lowbush cranberry) has antioxidant levels off the charts.

My favorite memory of berry picking was a trip I did with a few friends out to the Granite Tors trail in August of 2008.  It wasn't a good berry year around Fairbanks, but I had heard that there were some good berries out on the Granite Tors trail, so four of us-- Karen, Cara, Jon, and I-- headed out for the afternoon.  It must have been about a two hour hike to get up to the spot, so we started picking when we above treeline and found some berries.  Unfortunately, the weather wasn't cooperating with us and soon it started raining.  After hiking all that way and dismall prospects of finding other berry patches to pick, I was not ready to give up.  My poor, fair-weather friend of a dog Oban just looked at me pathetically wanting to know when we would be finished.  He did the best that he could to hide under a bush to stay dry, but it was to no avail.  Once the rain started pelting us, we headed back down the trail.  Afterwords, we went up the road a few miles to Chena Hot Springs to warm up.  We grabbed dinner at the restaurant-- burgers and fries.  Somewhat delirious from being wet and cold and also slightly obsessed with the Summer Olympics that were going on at the time, I devised a new game-- the French Fry Olympics.  Some of the french fries I had on my plate were super longer, so I made everyone pull out their longest french fry and measure them up.  Sure enough, I might not have gotten a lot of berries that day, but I took home the Gold Medal.

I adapted this muffin recipe from something I saw in the a newsletter from the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission where my friends Sara and Lauren work.  The newsletter with the original recipe also had articles about how awesome they are (Sara is a wildlife toxicologist and Lauren does law enforcement).  The original recipe wasn't for gluten-free flour and only called for blueberries, but I like how the blueberries and lingonberries compliment each other when mixed.


Wild berry & wild rice muffins

Ingredients

1 cup cooked wild rice
2 eggs
5 tbsp oil
1 cup milk
1 1/4 flour (I use a premixed gluten free flour and usually use ~1/4 cup of whole oats mixed in with it)
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
1 cup wild berries (I use 1/2 Alaska wild blueberries and 1/2 lingonberries)
extra sugar to sprinkle on top

Directions

The first thing to do for making these muffins is to cook up the wild rice.  I use a rice cooker and throw in 1 cup of rice with 3 cups of water.  This will yield more rice than you'll need, but leftover wild rice is not a problem (and my sister taught me that cooked wild rice freezes well if you can't get around to eating it within a couple of days).

 

Next, mix together the dry ingredients.

Add in the eggs, oil, and milk.

Fold in the berries.

I try not to stir it too much after adding the berries since it turns the batter a purply-pink from the juice of the berries.

I use a 1/4 cup measuring cup to spoon the batter into muffin tin.  Definite use paper liners since these muffins are hard to get out of the tin without them.  Even then I usually have to gnaw part of the muffin off of the paper liners anyways...
 

I usually sprinkle a little sugar on top because I like the texture it gives to the muffin.  The sugar I used was a bit too fine of a grain-- demerara sugar (like Sugar in the Raw) works best.

Bake at 425 degrees for 15-18 minutes.

These muffins are best serve fresh.  After a day or two, the wild rice starts to get crunchier, so find some friends right away to serve these muffins to!