Savoury gluten free muffins

This recipe is:

• Gluten free
• Dairy free
• Egg free
• Yeast free

I must admit, I'm a latecomer to the concept of savoury muffins, gluten free or otherwise. Apart from your standard cheesy muffin, I've never really come across them - don't know if they're an American thing or what.

Anyway, as I often do, to escape from the corner that various food intolerances keep trying to paint me into, I was trawling the net for stuff I can eat. I'd known about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) for a while, so I thought I'd check it out.

The good thing is, SCD recipes are gluten free because (I think) the diet is totally grain free. The bad thing is, SCD recipes seem to use a whole ton of eggs, which aren't my best friends at the moment.

So when I came across these egg free SCD recipes I was kind of excited:
http://sanjayamma.blogspot.com/2007/08/more-non-egg-breakfast-ideas.html

I thought I'd give the eggless chicken muffins a go (towards the bottom of the page) and so adapted the recipe a little. So far so good.

But have you ever followed a recipe and thought afterwards "There's no way that worked"? I mean, there is no way, no WAY this could have worked the first time round, unless I'm missing something (which has been known). Anyway, here's what I did and what happened:

Savoury gluten-free chicken and butternut squash muffins

3 chicken breasts, chopped and cooked (I microwaved mine)
4 cups cooked butternut squash (again, microwaved - keeps so much more flavour than boiling it)
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
Good handful pine nuts, toasted
Salt and pepper
4 tbsp olive oil

You blitz the chicken and squash with your oil and salt and pepper until fairly smooth, then mix in the baking soda and pine nuts - work quickly and don't over stir.

Put good dollops into muffin tins (I made 16 with this amount of mix) and put in the oven at 180C for 25 minutes.

Now, the problem is, these are wet. And look at the original recipe - it had pears AND water in there too. When I turned these out, several just fell apart. I rescued them by putting them back in the oven on the cooling rack to dry out the undersides.

One thing I can improve on next time is not to include the water that came out of the (free range) chicken. And I reckon the addition of some sort of flour would help a lot. I don't know what would adhere to SCD guidelines (I suspect the olive oil didn't), but gram flour would work pretty well I think - perhaps half a cup.

The reason for the effort is that these are actually really tasty. And surprisingly eggy, considering the egg-free-ness of them. So I'm going to give them another go soon, so keep your gluten free eyes peeled - or subscribe top right so you hear when I next update.

I'm off for some rescued savoury gluten free muffins. Mmmmm...