Do you know the muffin man?

So the new recipe was a total flop. It's so disappointing, I had such high hopes... It was called "Herbed Tuna in Tomatoes," so basically a stuffed tomato. I finished mine and was just like hm. I wouldn't ever make that again. Which I said in order to give my two friends permission to not eat it any more. And they didn't.

The rest of dinner was very good though. I have been working on another muffin recipe all week, and finally feel like I got the proportions and measurements right so that the muffins turned out really well. They actually even stood the eating at room temperature test.

So I'll share the two recipes.

Heather's Pasta Salad
8 oz box of rice penne pasta
1 box of grape tomatoes
1 can of olives
1 green pepper
1 container of feta cheese
italian salad dressing (This time I used a balsamic vinagrette, it was quite good, although I think usually I do a "zesty italian).

Cook the pasta, then shock it in ice cold water. Drizzle a little of the dressing over it, to keep it from sticking. Cut up the pepper, tomatoes, and olives and add in. Add the crumbled feta. Add a little more dressing. Stir. Enjoy.

Note: with the rice pasta this salad is better at a more room temperature. Rice pasta gets really hard when it is straight out of the fridge. So if you refrigerate it (as you should for food safety), just microwave it for 10-15 seconds.


Orange Juice Muffins
This is a modification of an "Orange Muffin" recipe I found on allrecipes.com
2 cups of "Life Tastes Good Again" gluten-free flour mix
1 tsp xantham gum
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1 egg
1 1/3 cup orange juice
1/3 cup canola oil

Mix the wet ingredients. Add in the dry ingredients. Mix until just incorporated. (It is very important to not over-mix gluten free flours. It makes them gross). Your dough will be thicker than cake batter and kind of stiff.

Bake at 400 for 20 minutes. Yield 12 muffins.

Put the muffins on a rack to cool. This is important. I left the first batch in the pan to cool and the bottoms got all soggy and that is gross.

UPDATE: What I should have said is that the orange juice muffins stood the test of being fed to non-gluten free people at room temperature. They ate them all. I call that a success.