Have I mentioned like 1,000 times that I’m behind on my Christmas party prep?  Well finally after this weekend I’m a little bit less panicked.  About half of my savory bite-sized items were prepared so now I can breathe a little.  One of the new recipes I came up with this year was for these olive and rosemary quickbread muffins.  I love the combination of black olives with rosemary and didn’t really have a savory muffin on the menu yet, so it felt like this was worth trying out.  I based the dough portion of the recipe on this one from CookinCanuck.  As you’ll see in upcoming posts, I already have a metric shit-ton of spinach on the menu so I wanted to switch up the mix-ins.

There’s no reason that you couldn’t bake this in a loaf pan.  I can just imagine having a warm slice of this bread smeared with cottage cheese.  Have I mentioned how much I like cottage cheese on toast?  I REALLY like it on rye toast, but I’m allergic to rye and can’t have nice things.  But seriously, spread some cottage cheese on a slice of rye toast one morning for breakfast.  You’ll like it.

Olive and Rosemary Muffins

• 2 medium onions, diced
• 1 tsp salt
• four sprigs of rosemary
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 can black olives, drained and chopped
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 3/4 cup milk (I used whole milk because that’s what I had)
• 2/3 cup olive oil

For the compound butter

• 1 stick butter
• 1 tablespoon Kosher salt
• 2 tablespoons rosemary needles
• 2 ounces feta

Preheat your oven to 350F and spray your muffin tins with Baker’s Joy.  Caramelize the onions in olive oil with the teaspoon of salt and the rosemary.

While those were beginning to brown, I drained and chopped the black olives.  You could easily go with a more flavorful olive here, but I didn’t want the olive flavor to overpower the rosemary.

Saute with the onion mixture for a few minutes to dry out the olives.  Remove from heat.

Beat together the eggs, milk, and olive oil.

Stir in your dry ingredients and mix until just combined.  Scoop the dough into your prepared muffin tins.

Bake until the muffins begin to brown up.  As I was making mini-muffins this took about 7 minutes.  Larger muffins are going to take longer and a loaf of this bread will probably take 30-40 minutes.

Now, these muffins are perfectly delicious as they are.  Especially when they’re warm.  But I’m getting ready for a party, so perfectly delicious isn’t good enough!  I’m looking for phenomenal!  So I made this compound butter to melt on top of the muffins when I reheat them for the party.  I didn’t take pictures of making the compound butter, because I had my hands full with other things (I was frying up some arancini).  But here’s how one makes compound butter: take the list of ingredients and blend them together.  That’s it.  I did it in my mini food processor and then scooped the whole mess into some Gladware.

Once the muffins had come to room temperature, I lined them all up on a cookie sheet and froze them.  Then I took the frozen muffins and put them in a gallon-sized freezer bag.  They’ll be just fine for a couple weeks in the freezer!

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