Professor Butter Beard’s “Self Portrait with Straw Hat”
Carrot Top. Pumpkin. Gingerbread. Ketchup. All names I remember being called as a young boy with crazed ginger curls atop my noggin. My parents did their best to keep them tame with bi-weekly trips to the barber, but their deep red intensity maintained a vibrancy of their own. As I continue my studies of the life and passions of another ginger, the artist Vincent Van Gogh, I appreciate that this is a trait that we shared.
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, in their book “Van Gogh: The Life,” write that it would have been hard to miss this youth with “a head full of thick, curly red locks.” He had dense freckles, and small eyes of a pale, changeable blue-green color. Vincent “tended to hang his head and shift in nervous unease,” and when it struck him, he would “slip awkwardly out of the room to return to his post at the attic window or resume some other solitary activity.” I know this lad very well.
Of all Vincent’s self-portraits, the “Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat” speaks the loudest to me. Vincent painted “The Potato Peeler” in 1885 while in Neunen (in the Netherlands) and later in Paris during the summer of 1887, he turned the canvas over and painted this self-portrait on the other side. He gazes just over my shoulder with such intense eyes surrounded with pulsating orange, blue, green and yellow brushstrokes depicting his ginger hair and beard and sun-bathed straw hat. I can feel the thoughts in his head pulsing like a humming beehive.
I want to share a quick breakfast with this man, offering him a carrot muffin studded with explosions of butterscotch. I hope that the vibrancy and the surprise of mounting flavors make him smile as he whispers thank you and dashes off already absorbed in his next dream.
Butterscotch Carrot Muffins
12 Muffins
Dry Mix:
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup white sugar
¼ cup dark brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ground ginger
½ tsp salt
Wet Mix:
1 large egg
½ cup vegetable or canola oil
¼ cup buttermilk
1 Tbsp apple cider
1 tsp vanilla extract
Additions:
1 cup grated carrot – and a squeeze of juice from ½ lemon
¾ cup butterscotch chips
Sprinkle of turbinado sugar on the muffins before baking
1) Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
2) Line your muffin pan with paper muffin cups, or make your own with parchment paper squares.
3) Grate one cup of carrot and toss with the juice of ½ lemon – set aside.
4) Whisk together the dry ingredients in a small bowl until no clumps of brown sugar remain.
5) In a larger bowl, whisk the egg, oil, buttermilk, cider and vanilla just until smooth. Fold in the dry ingredients with a spatula until just fully moistened and then fold in the carrot and butterscotch chips.
6) Portion the batter evenly into the twelve muffin cups using an ice cream scoop. Sprinkle each of the muffin tops with a pinch of turbinado sugar.
7) Place the tin in the oven and immediately turn the oven down to 350 degrees.
8) Bake 20-22 minutes until the tops are just firm and slightly browned.
9) Cool in the tin ten minutes and then remove the muffins to a wire rack to finish cooling.
