Corn Bread Dog Muffins

Where can you find fried chocolate pickles, endless BBQ, men jumping off horses to tackle cattle to the ground, crazy bull and bronco riding, teens shooting revolvers on horseback, little kids racing on sheep, and more barn animals and cowboy boots per square mile than anywhere else?

The Houston rodeo (the world's biggest) of course!

I was super excited to have my college friend Karen visit during the rodeo season. She's a liberal, semi-vegetarian, organic/free range eating Californian who lives in a co-op house with 20 people. You can imagine the HUGE culture shock she got here on her first time to Texas, hehe.

It was my first time seeing the full Houston rodeo as well since I bought us tickets to the rodeo championships and concert (country, of course!). The event really is huge - we spent 8+ hours and still saw just a fraction of the rodeo. As Karen put it, "It's like a zoo, museum, carnival, sporting/gladiator event, food festival, and music concert all rolled into one!"

We saw president #41 and the lady at the rodeo show too showing off their Texan pride. Pretty cool.

You can't have a rodeo without unhealthy food of course. We ate the deep bacon with powdered sugar and syrup as well as two huge plates of BBQ and carbs, including yummy cornbread. Yay diabesity!

Inspired by the fun rodeo/carnival cuisine, I made these cute mini corndog muffins adapted from Allrecipes, which are a tad bit healthier that the rodeo food we sampled, but equally delicious. I've been excited to use my mini muffin pan and I've been on a hot dog / sausage craze lately.

Fun fact:
The prize wining sheep sold for >$260,000!! So I could have a barn animal for the price of full Stanford tuition.
A few years ago the prize winning steer was sold for > $360,000 - you can't even breed steer!! I bet that would have made for some tasty hot dogs to go with cornbread...

Corn Bread Dog Muffins

Ingredients
1 cup cornmeal
1 1/4 cups milk
3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup white sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup vegetable oil
5-6 hot dogs

Directions
Preheat oven to 400 deg F. Spray two mini muffin tins.

Grill, bake, boil, or microwave your hot dogs according to package directions until half cooked.

In a small bowl, combine cornmeal and milk. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Mix in the cornmeal mixture, eggs and oil until smooth. Pour batter into prepared muffin pan.

Cut your hot dogs into about 1 1/2 in pieces and place in the center of each muffin tin. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes until golden brown. Makes about 28 mini corn dog muffins.

Tip: If the tin doesn't cook evenly (like my el cheapo pans), bake in a water bath.