Muffins are pancakes!

Today, for the first time in my life, I baked a batch of blueberry muffins from scratch!

I wasn't trying to bake the "ultimate" muffin or anything like that. I just had a bunch of fresh blueberries that I picked from a farm and needed to use them up. At the same time I had just gotten a memoir/cookbook that had a pretty simple blueberry muffin recipe in it and so I broke up the mixing bowls and got to baking!

So the recipe was pretty basic:

• 1 Egg
• 1 Cup of Milk 
• ¼ vegetable oil
• ¼ granulated sugar
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 Tablespoon of baking powder
• 1 Teaspoon of salt
• 1 cup fresh blueberries
• Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. 
• Grease a 12-muffin pan 
•  In a small bowl, beat the egg, milk, oil, and sugar. Set aside
• Sift the flour with the baking powder and salt into a large bowl. Pour in the wet ingredients. 
• Stir Just until mixed. The batter will be lumpy. 
• Fold in the berries.  
• Fill muffin cups two-thirds full
• Bake for 20-25 minutes , or until the tops are light brown. 
• Remove from the pan immediately.

That's it! Even with my limited cooking experience it wasn't a hard recipe to figure out. But, as I was spooning the batter into the muffin pans I thought to myself this seems really familiar.. this looks, smells, tastes, and awful lot like pancake batter. And sure enough a quick run down of the ingredients shows that it's almost the same thing, some of the amounts are a bit different, a bit more milk, a bit less flour, butter instead of oil, (though the muffin recipe said you could use either), a bit more sugar, you get the idea. 

Suddenly I realized that if you know how to make pancakes, cut back a bit on the milk, maybe add a bit more flour and sugar and instead of frying bake them in the oven.. you have muffins... 

Now I know there are going to be a lot of people out there who know this already but I didn't and this is really the amazing thing about cooking. Today you see all these cooking shows and they wow you fancy recipes and exotic ingredients, but cooking at it's best is learning some basic techniques and maybe some basic recipes and then learning that with just a few adaptations you can make something else entirely. 

If you can make a chicken soup, you can make a chicken stew, and from there a chicken pot pie. 

If you can make a custard, you can make a flan, or a bread pudding or a pumpkin pie. 

It also means if you have a few basic recipes under you belt with just a handful of ingredients in the house can make a lot of different things. Take a look at the recipe above with most of those same ingredients you could make pancakes, muffins, cookies, a basic cake, pie. 

Yet today, we buy a tube of cookie dough, pancake mix, muffin mix, cake mix, pie crusts and in doing so lose out on learning the secrets in the kitchen that allowed our mothers and grandmothers, (and I'm sure a few dads and grandads) to make great meals from what seemed like nothing!

So, try the recipe above - I don't claim it to be world class, but it will make muffins and it's the starting point for you make it your own.