Answers, Part 7 - and MUFFINS!

This question, from my awesome boss Amy, reminds me that I have SO many more recipes to share. I need to figure out a better and easier way of doing it other than writing a whole post about each one! I will use this post to share 2 awesome muffin recipes I made recently, since my answers will be kind of short.

AmyO asked: It is always fun to ready your blog posts, Erin. I have gotten some good recipe ideas from you. Here are my questions -

1) What is your favorite site to use when you have a few ingredients in the freezer/fridge and want to use them up in a recipe?
I mentioned this a bit in my meal planning posts - I use Google Reader to manage all of the cooking/recipe blogs I follow, and star items that I want to make. I then search for things in my starred items (this is why I hate blogs that don't have their full feeds in Reader, because then my search is useless) - so if I need to use carrots, I'd just search for that. Obviously, most people don't actually use Google Reader in this same way. I know that allrecipes and epicurious both have pretty good recipe searches by ingredient that I have used in the past, however the results are usually pretty overwhelming to me. If a reader has anything they love to use, please comment!

2)What are your top 3 pantry/freezer/fridge staples to have on hand at all times?
We have a pretty well stocked pantry by this point, and it's so helpful to have the ingredients for a lot of things on hand. That way, if the urge struck me to make chocolate chip cookies, I can do so at a moment's notice without a trip to the store! (Ben wishes this would happen more frequently) I will pick my top 3 in each category (which is actually way harder than I thought!)
Pantry: In addition to baking-stuffs, we always try to keep canned diced tomatoes, canned black beans, and onions on hand - those 3 things provide the base for many quick meals!
Fridge: Eggs, milk, diced sweet potatoes (seems random - but we have grown to love the sweet potato in savory dishes - again combined with the above pantry staples, you've got a pretty balanced meal going on! Bonus is that if we don't have a meal for Annie we can just whip up some sweet potatoes super quickly if they are already diced in the fridge)
Freezer: You know my love of freezer meals! I like to always have frozen fruit to top my morning yogurt (usually strawberries and blueberries), frozen pizza dough, and frozen spaghetti sauce in there.

In addition to those 3 things in the freezer, I always love to have a supply of frozen muffins! I made these 2 muffin recipes recently, and they are actually pretty healthy and don't contain sugar (sweetened with honey) so I feel okay about giving them to Annie as part of her breakfast or snack. Most of the muffins I like are basically glorified cupcakes with fruit thrown in - fine for ME, obviously, but not acceptable on a regular basis for my precious offspring :) I doubled both recipes so that I'd have plenty for the freezer. As I mentioned in my freezer meals post - to freeze muffins I put them in the freezer on a cooling rack so they freeze individually - once frozen, put in a freezer bag - that way they don't stick together.

Pumpkin Apple Waffles from Weelicious (who has a new FREE iPhone app out that is awesome!) - if you don't want to shred apples, you apparently can just use applesauce as mentioned in the comments.


Banana Berry Muffins from Annie's Eats - Chock full of fruit with 2 kinds of berries and bananas, these were delicious - I couldn't find dried milk at the grocery store, so I used regular milk and slightly decreased the amount of orange juice to make up for the extra liquid. Turned out great!