Bacon - Gasp! - Ain't For Everything!

Every year I adapt my stuffing muffins recipe a little bit, depending on whims and availability, nevermind how well my brain is functioning. This year we may have made a mistake. To be fair, not everybody dislikes it. I don't actually hate it, but it won't be repeated.

There's a part where the chopped onion and celery get sauteed before being added to the bread crumbs. Usually that's in butter. This year we'd accumulated an oversupply of bacon fat, collected from frequent cooking of strips for Steve's favorite sandwich, BATs. AKA, bacon, avocado and tomato. It's just like you'd do a BLT, but switching lettuce for mashed avocado, and it's totally yummy. Just a little Miracle Whip on the toast and it's a bite of heaven. Avocados tend to be cheap down here, so we take advantage.

BATs are a good use of bacon. Turns out, turkey stuffing, not so much. It's not awful. It's just not my stuffing. On the plus side, there is one less container taking up refrigerator space.

Since I've gotten complaints that my way of making the stuffing "isn't replicable", I've been working on writing it down. Of course, it still offers a range of the amounts of the ingredients, since so much of it is "to taste." If dill isn't your thing, smuggled in to the mix in mini doses, your taste will tend toward the lesser amount. If you're a garlic fiend (this isn't perjorative: I'm one myself) then you'd add on the high end of the range, or maybe even top it. If no chicken or turkey drippings are available from a previously cooked bird - yes, we save them too, forget making gravy! - then chicken broth in a can is a (poor) substitute.

Other things were learned with this year's first batch. More muffin tins are needed. We had some pretty foil cupcake papers for the stuffing to bake in. With more stuffing than available tins, and no desire to leave the oven on longer than absolutely necessary, I decided to pry them out as soon as they came out of the oven so the tin could be refilled. Unfortunately, while they're fresh hot, foil bits stick to the aluminum muffin tin. Meaning, of course, that several muffins had uncovered bottoms, not the most appealing way to serve them for a pot luck. Those are the ones we ate. It also turns out that as soon as they cool a bit, say 15 minutes, they can be removed with absolutely no sticking and no fuss. Go figure.

But hey, shopping trip!

There's more bacon fat in the fridge. Time to make pancakes or something. There are also frozen bananas and blueberries taking up space. But it's turkey dinner day today, and that's enough cooking for me for now. Next batch of stuffing muffins comes Thursday or later, and these stay here for us! Not only will they have turkey drippings, we'll pop in chopped turkey meat, and they'll be frozen for a ready mini meal. I think they theoretically can last for about 6 months. I've never ignored them long enough to have proof.