UMA -- how to insert avatar in scene?

Hi All, I'm starting to play around with UMA to see if it can fit my needs. There's a lot of detailed videos out there regarding how uma works (and that's awesome and I really like what it does) but... The simplest thing just is not obvious to me: how to get an avatar into my scene in a game object? I see how to save a random one to an asset file in the example scenes, but how to get that asset file in my real scene game object so I can use it as a character?

The closest I got was putting a UMADynamicAvatar script in a game object, and setting it's UMARecipie property to my saved uma asset file, but when I run it, says "UMA Data not loaded." and it looks like I need to specify something for UMAData because it's null. Am I even barking up the right tree?

I realize I could go through the scripts in the example scenes to see how it's done there, but wondering if someone knows of a simple tutorial that just shows this? :-p

thanks!