One of the hardest parts of having Peanut get sick over the last month is the food aversions she’s developed. She won’t go near baby food any more. If it’s on a spoon, she wants nothing to do with it. She also ignores the cubed avocado we offer her. Until she got sick, this was her favorite. The baby food is understandable. She never really cared for most baby food from the beginning with the exception of spinach, carrots, and sweet potatoes. But, she loved avocado – and her leap in weight gain was at the same time she started eating avocado. (Fortunately, she had gained the weight she did. She lost all of it while she was sick.) We had hoped the added fat and calories in the avocado would help her catch up.

That got me thinking – how do you hide avocado? Short of making fresh guacamole, I really hadn’t thought of “making” anything with avocado. What did we ever do before the internet? Did you know that you can swap out butter or oil in most baking recipes for the same amount of avocado? You may need to make up for the liquid of the oil in some recipes, but normally just a 1 to 1 swap will work – now I had an idea.

I pulled out the old faithful zucchini muffin recipe and started modifying. I cut the recipe in half – I wanted to limit my investment in case this bombed. One of the main restrictions on Peanut’s diet is sugar, so the next thing I did is cut the sugar. The original recipe (when cut in half) called for a cup of sugar – I went with a 1/4 cup. I then added 2 mashed avocado, a splash of olive oil, and an extra egg to replace the oil that was called for. The zucchini that is shredded and then froze always gets very watery, so by the time I added that to the mix everything was just about right.

The muffins baked like normal,smelled like normal, and (with the exception of a slightly green hue) looked like normal. The true test would be how they tasted – and not to me, but to Peanut. So when the next snack time rolled around we had the official test test…

Success! At least for the time being.