Muffins! Blueberry and Banana Pear

I love muffins. Really. Better than I love cupcakes. But I love them in a way that's what some might call... particular. Hence these blueberry muffins. They're just the red-spoon box variety, but I make them against the directions because I'm a rebel. Here's how: Forget the oil and instead put in a melted half stick of butter and the juice from the blueberrys as well as the two eggs, then mix in the berries. It makes for a violently purple batter and a muffin with no white at all. I hate when I get a blueberry muffin and it tastes like a coffeecake with a few blueberrys in it. This way maximizes blueberryness. And it's fun to have purple food, because that's not a common natural eatable.

The other muffins were the actual reason for making muffins. I had this squishy banana and two squooshy baby pears (one forelle and one seckel, which is my fav, but haven't been all that good this year and they keep getting soft). So I looked up a basic muffin recipe in my handy dandy Encyclopedia of Food. Goes like this:

2 c flour, fluffed and de-lumped

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 c sugar

+

1 egg

2/3 a stick of melted butter

1/4 c milk

Simple, yeah? So I mushed up my banana and pears, then mixed them with the milk-egg-butter slurry and threw some cinnamon and nutmeg into the flour and stirred it all together. I use a rice paddle. Nothing sticks too much and it fits my hand well. 

Fill up all the cups and cook for 15 to 20 minutes at 400 or 425. I listened to five songs on my Happy Goth Playlist and it came out perfect. Poke with a fork or something, and if it comes out clean, they're done.

The banana ones were smaller and denser than the box ones, but that might be my own overzealous stirring as much as any box-mix voodoo. Both kinds were fluffy and moist and still moist the second day, and just sweet enough. I've been eating far too many myself-- I made two dozen yesterday and there's like six left. Only about four were eaten by others. Oink oink oink.

I love this basic muffin recipe though. You can throw anything into it. I'm keeping it around to make year-round, and I'll just toss whatever seasonal fruit or sweet veg I can get my hands onto in and see how it goes. I have visions of apple-brownsugar, strawberry, mullberry, grilled plum and peach, cherry, marigold and honey-- even, if I take the sugar out, bacon and cheddar, ham and cheese, spinach and feta, black olive and sundried tomato. Possibilities are endless!

Forelle Pears

This right here is a Forelle Pear. In a shopping trip where I managed to only buy one pre-made item-- a bag of cookies-- I came across this little cutie next to the Seckel Pears I was looking for. It looks like a little baby d'Anjou, as you can see. Curious, I looked them up on the interwebs and found this little snippet: "Forelles are a very old variety, and are thought to have originated sometime in the 1600's in northern Saxony, Germany. The name Forelle translates to mean "trout" in the German language. It is believed that the variety earned this name because of the similarity between the pear's brilliant red lenticles and the colors of a Rainbow trout. Forelles were introduced to the United States by German immigrants in the 1800's, and they are now produced in the Northwestern states of Oregon and Washington."

Yay! An old variety! I'm not sure what makes a vintage variety, but this seems old enough to count.

The interwebs don't say anything about a relationship with d'Anjou Pears, but to me, it seemed very similar, but sweeter. The skin has the same texture and the flesh is the same juicy-but-not-drippy. I got about five bites out of it, but I have a small mouth; normal sized people with jaw hinges that function properly will likely get, like, three. There's about four to a pound, as opposed to seven a pound of the Seckels I also bought (though they aren't yet ripe enough to eat). It's tasty, a little floral, sweet, not tangy at all. I think it would be good carmelized.

In fact, I think so strongly that it would be good carmelized that I bought more and have plans to try doing just that, and eating them with plain yogurt. Or maybe in a pear upside-down cake. Mmmm, cake...