I got home from work last night, ate dinner, tried to help clean up the dishes (got in trouble for doing things wrong), and realized that I was still hungry.

Not hungry hungry, like I didn’t eat enough for dinner.  Hungry as in I wanted a muffin, and I wanted that muffin now…or then…immediately….whichever one it was.

I dug through my pantry: no muffin mix.  My mom even helped me search: we unearthed mixes for brownies and nut bread.  But they wouldn’t do.  I wanted a muffin and I was going to have a muffin gosh darn it.  Preferably one with fruit in it.

After getting in trouble with the dishes, (apparently I don’t stack them properly in the dish drainer after rinsing…and yes, apparently there IS a right way) I really didn’t want to make something completely from scratch that was going to require a whole lot of clean up.  I would have done it had there been no other option, but the bigger mess was not my first choice.

So I stared at the pantry.  Gave it the old once over, and then a twice over, and after the fifteenth over (or so) a spark of insight hit me: someone out there in the universe somewhere has probably come up with a way to make Bisquick into muffins.

Not being a master chef myself, I consulted the universe (i.e. the ever useful internet) and landed myself here.

They didn’t look too terribly difficult, and I will admit that I did add a little bit of this and that to meet my tastes, but altogether I give them two thumbs up.  Without further ado:

Bisquick Blueberry Muffins

Not only is that Bisquick, but that’s “heart healthy” Bisquick…because straight up unhealthy things don’t exist in my house. They’re like fairy tales, you’ve heard legend of them but you never see them.

Ingredients (i.e. what I used):

• 2 cups Bisquick (the Heart Healthy actually tasted just fine)
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2/3 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon orange extract
• 3/4 cup frozen blueberries (smaller ones would work a little better than larger, but my large ones were still delicious)

Action Plan:

1. Preheat your oven to 400° and grease a muffin pan.  The original recipe says 9 muffin cups, I should have used 12.
2. Stir together all of the ingredients, except the blueberries, until moistened.
3. Fold in the blueberries. (This is where I managed to dye the batter purple….but it was a very pretty purple)
4. Divide batter.  (I say fill your muffin cups 3/4 of the way full.  If you have a larger muffin pan than mine this might result in 9 muffins, otherwise 12.)
5. Bake 13 to 18 minutes until golden brown. (I baked mine 16, and because they were so large–I had overfilled and made 9 of them–they didn’t cook all the way through in the middle, even though they were turning golden brown.)
6. Let cool and remove to a wire rack.

So many muffins!

You can see in the picture how they’re all kind of stuck together?  My pan had 3 more cups.  I should have been brave and ignored the directions a little.

They were delicious, though.  Despite being slightly undercooked.  The vanilla extract was intentional, the orange extract was a happy accident.  Someone had put the orange in the vanilla box and I poured it before the smell hit me.  It could have been…oh I don’t know, concentrated liquid atomic wasabi, and I probably would have poured it in because I wasn’t paying attention.  I’ll definitely try the recipe again(despite the whole undercooked thing, I think filling the cups less and cooking them longer will solve that problem).  It was just as easy as a boxed muffin mix, but required only things that we normally have lying around the house.  That’s always a plus.

And in case anyone wanted an update on the wok (I promised, I know), we did manage to season it without burning down the house.  We used the oven method: greased it all over with vegetable oil, removed the removable handle, wrapped the other wooden handle in a wet towel then covered that in tin foil.  Finally, we baked it upside down in the oven for about 20 mins on 400° (It might have been 425º), and that gave it this really pretty golden coating.  We then seasoned it by cooking some chopped ginger and scallions for about 15 minutes on it.  I wish I had a pic, but alas, I can’t find the battery charger for my camera, and as it has to be on for me to transfer the pictures…yeah.

So I’ll leave you with a pic of the really yummy “Chicken with Pineapple and Peppers” that we made out of Grace Young’s Stir Frying to the Sky’s Edge.  We’ve made two recipes from there now, and she has yet to let us down.

For the record, I am no food photographer…also, I’m working with the camera on my phone…boo!

Have a great week everyone!  Hopefully I’ll come up with something unrelated to food for next week…