Kitchen Adventures 1 1/2: Bacon Avocado Muffins

  There aren't many things I know I do well - sure I know my internet memes, can talk Dr. Who forever and I can sing you a song by Sondheim, Gershwin and Cole Porter - but I'm talking applicable skills. I can sew on a button, but despite the recurring purchases of sewing/knitting materials I don't think I'm ever going to produce an actual garment any time soon. One thing, however, I would like to say I do well is food.  I love food. Really, all I ever actually think about is food. I could talk about food forever (those who know me I wil.) I love cooking food, eating food, everything there is about food.

So now I would like to talk about food.

First,  a little background...

Since we moved into our new apartment I would sit and dream about the kinds of food I could make in our new awesome, awesome kitchen.
Also since then I keep remembering that I live with two people:

My Mother - who is forever on a diet and eats portions I swear a mouse couldn't survive on.

My Father - who doesn't understand why I want to "bother" cooking when we could just go out or order in (now that we live somewhere where you can go out or order in.)  His response when I say "would you eat this is I made it?" is always "why trouble yourself?"

These two (three?) facts in combination made me a very sad person.

But recently I decided to just start cooking for myself. Its something I enjoy doing, so I'm going to just go ahead and make stuff. I've built up a following of some rather eager taste testers. Someone'll eat it.
So far I've made quite a few things, mostly for myself or  out of curiosity or necessity.

If you call a craving for Bialys a "necessity." I certainly do.

So, a few weeks ago, I'm looking for a juice bar (Don't judge me - vegetable juice can be delicious, I had a craving for a Carrot/Apple/Beat/Ginger and I left my juicer in Pennsylvania. I will have no judging.) I found a place off Dale Mabry - sadly too far for one juice for me. So, after deciding to go to the much closer Village Health Mart to satisfy my juice needs (What? Sometimes a girl needs a Carrot/Apple/Beat/Ginger juice and she doesn't have her juicer) I looked over their menu.
 They had a few muffins and breads on the menu and there I saw it - a Sun-dried Tomato and Feta muffin.
So obviously delicious, I had to have one. But I certainly wasn't driving all the way there for a juice and a muffin. Not when I had recently conquered Bialys. Sure, I'd never made muffins before, but I was willing to take the chance.

So after comparing a number of savory muffin recipes and picking I came up with a basic savory muffin batter recipe.  Then after comparing a couple more recipes I came up with a mixture of add-ins I thought I'd like. Then I made the batter and fudged the recipes a bit more (I don't exactly know how much milk I put in.)

And they came out amazing.

No, I could not wait to take the picture before I took a bite. 

I discovered something I'm pretty sure I already knew -
I love savory muffins.

So here's how I made my newest experiment in savory muffins:

Bacon Avocado Muffins

Here I'd love to credit all the online recipes I referred to when working on these muffins, but I accidentally lost all them - call it a case of Too-Many-Tabs. I'm lucky I didn't throw out the recipe I wrote down for myself. The one I typed up got deleted along with those websites. Silly. This is what I used for my Bacon Avocado Muffin. My last savory muffin batter was slightly different, and I think I liked this version better.

ingredients:

2 Cups Flour
1 Tbsp Baking Powder
1/2 Tsp Salt
1 Tbsp Sugar
1 Cup  Milk (I add more as needed to pull the batter together)
1 Large Egg
2 Tbsp Vegetable Oil.
1 Avocado
4 pieces of Bacon
1 Cup Grated Cotijo (Use what you have. This is what I had in my fridge. Mmm pao de queijo. . .)
1 Tbsp Cayenne Pepper

instructions: 

First off, you're gonna sift your flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. I'm not sure if this is actually necessary. I'm not a trained chef and I don't pretend to be. I just know that most muffin recipes I've seen tell you to sift*. So sift, dammit! I plan on looking into the reason for that later. But you know. . . the internet is big and full of kittens. . . Anyway, sift that and set it to the side.

In another bowl mix your liquids and cayenne pepper. Now, ordinarily I would use melted butter. You'll notice this recipe does not contain melted butter. Reason - I curdled 3 batches of milk and egg before I made these. The last few times I've made muffins with melted butter I had no problem, but this time no (either letting the butter sit for 15 minutes wasn't long enough or the universe just willed it so.)  So I used oil. And ya know what - I think I liked it better.

Onto the Mix Ins! 

Chop the bacon and avocado into reasonably similarly sized pieces. 

Dry off the bacon after you've cooked it and dredge them in flour, also dredge the avocado.

I learned this trick from watching WEDUCreate late at night. Some show was making Blueberry Muffins and the lady said that coating them in flour helps them not to stick to each other and to evenly distribute rather than settle at the bottom of the mixing bowl.

Add your Mix Ins to the liquids ( I added cheese first.) Then this mixture to the dry mix.

You could probably also add the liquids  first and then the mix ins but . . . eh. . . 

Anyway, I added in more milk until a majority of my batter was wet - there were still a few dry spots which is fine. DO NOT OVERMIX!** 

  

Then, into your prepared baking pan (you did prepare it, didn't you?) put 1/4 cup of batter into each cup. I used a standard ice cream scoop. I also ended up with 10 muffins instead of 12. So do what you will with that information. 

Bake those puppies for 20 minutes at  400 and you'll be golden.  

I plan on eating one again in the morning with a poached egg and maybe some salsa. 

I'm betting they'll be delicious. 

                       * For all I know this could be a lie of the internet. 

** I almost forgot that I wanted cayenne in these so I decided to mix it in at the last second. "Overmixing" to my taste with no obvious ill-effects. This rule may also be a lie of the internet.