Pumpkin chocolate-chip muffins

I hadn't gone grocery shopping over the weekend and was in need of something muffin-like for the kids' breakfast on Monday morning.

I was paging through cookbooks and three-ring binders when I discovered a pumpkin muffin recipe that I had printed out somewhere circa the turn of the century when I was a member of several food listservs (Eat Low Fat, KitMailbox, and Fatfree, just to name a few). There were some pretty tasty recipes shared among the participants of those listservs. (Perhaps you were among us?)

Even 11 years later I still remembered how good these Publick House Pumpkin Muffins were, so I made them (with the addition of chocolate chips). 

Ingredients:
1 cup Sugar
1/4 cup light vegetable oil
2 eggs
3/4 cup canned pumpkin
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon Nutmeg (I didn't have any nutmeg, so I omitted)
1/2 teaspoon salt (whoops! totally forgot this)
3/4 cup Raisins (omitted)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts; *opt'l (omitted)

(I added approximately 3/4 cups of chocolate chips)

Preheat oven to 400F. Generously grease a 12 cup muffin tin (even nonstick tins including the flat spaces between the muffins). Mix sugar, oil, eggs and pumpkin. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and spices. Quickly stir together both mixtures. (Don't overmix.)

Fold in raisins and walnuts. (This is where I added the chocolate chips.) Fill prepared muffin cups two-thirds full and bake 18 to 20 minutes, until golden brown. If you prefer large, crusty muffin tops, fill the cups to the top. As they bake, the tops will run together. To test for doneness, use a sharp knife or broom straw. When the knife or straw comes out clean, muffins are done. Remove from oven and let them cool a few moments in the pan before removing. Serve warm with butter or honey butter.

Zucchini and egg scramble

I'm almost embarrassed to post this. It's so simple, some would argue that it's not even a recipe. But when I made this dish for my family Sunday morning, I realized that it has value. It's seasonal. It's healthy. It's kid-friendly. What's not to like?

Here's what you need:

eggs
butter
zucchini, diced or grated
salt and pepper

To give you an idea on quantities, I typically use the equivalent of 1 small zucchini per dozen eggs.

In a medium size bowl, crack and scramble the eggs. Add salt and pepper. Set aside.

In a nonstick pan, melt about two tablespoons of butter (yes, butter—it tastes good) and saute the zucchini. I like to let it get a little caramelized on the outside.

When the zucchini is cooked, add the eggs and gently scramble the mixture until it is cooked through.

That's pretty much it. My family loves this. The zucchini adds a subtle sweetness to the eggs. You can jazz it up with herbs or grated cheese, but honestly, it's quite perfect as is.

Banana/oatmeal muffins

I'm traveling and not cooking a whole lot, so the below is something I scraped from a blog of mine that I put on hiatus, in part because I'm over here posting recipes anyway. These are muffins my children love. You can bake this batter in whatever pan you like--loaf, small loaf, muffin, square...just test the center with a knife or straw to make sure it's cooked through.

P.S. I'm aware that the above is NOT a muffin. The above is a tiny little loaf pan that turns out a beautiful miniature loaf of quickbread.

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I've devised a banana muffin recipe (based in part on the Joy of Cooking) that (a) my kids will eat but that (b) has relatively low sugar and relatively high fiber. Give it a try. They're good buttered, hot or cold, and they last a couple of days. We use these for breakfast and for snacks...either way, they're cheap! My kids really love these, to the point that I double this up every time I make it, which is about once a week or so. Caveat: my kids are a little bit...odd.

You will need...
Old brown bananas
Applesauce, unsweetened
Flour
White sugar
Brown sugar
Oats
Wheat germ
Egg
Canola oil
Vanilla
Cinnamon and nutmeg
Baking soda
Baking powder
Salt
Two mixing bowls, a good whisk, a big spoon/spatula
Muffin pan/cups

1. Get two bowls, a big one and a small one. Set your oven to 350 F.

2. In the small bowl, whisk together one cup of flour (I use white whole wheat--if you use whole wheat, cut it with half white or they'll be too heavy), a half cup of dry oats (I just use Quaker oats), and a half cup of wheat germ (obviously, this isn't for the gluten-free crowd). Add in about a quarter teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda, and then shake cinnamon powder over it until it's all covered in cinnamon powder (or, to taste...sorry, I don't measure my spices). Shake in some powdered nutmeg (I give it about three good shakes), and mix really really well with the whisk.

3. In the large bowl, put in two or three peeled, super ripe bananas and smush them up. Add four ounces of applesauce, a quarter cup of white sugar, a quarter cup of brown sugar, one teaspoon of vanilla, and six tablespoons of canola oil (or some other reasonable oil, but don't use one with a strong flavor, like, say, olive oil). Add one egg. Whisk it all together until you get as many lumps out of the banana as you can.

4. Dump the dry stuff into the large bowl. Mix until all is moist. Muffin recipes always say to mix until everything is "just" moist, but I just mix the hell out of it.

5. Fill muffin liners (I use muffin liners to avoid greasing a pan, but if you don't like them, grease the muffin pan) about 3/4 full. Put in oven for 18 minutes or until inserted utensil or straw or toothpick or whatever comes out clean. I also turn the muffins halfway through.

Cool, butter, serve.

This will get you about 9 or 10 muffins, good for a number of breakfasts or snacks at about 50 cents each. You can also make this into banana bread. Put the batter into a greased loaf pan, bake for about 40 minutes (or until whatever you use to test these things comes out clean). I always turn it halfway through.

If you think these are OK, I've got a pumpkin muffin recipe that'll knock your socks off.

Crumb cake

It's a favorite book in our house, In the Night Kitchen. Thanks to Mickey, it seems, we have cake every morning, an intriguing concept.

Of course, that's not true. At least, not until this week.

I got the bug on Sunday. It was a rare day when I didn't have any work (as in, work for a client) to do. Naturally, not finding the usual work of rearing three boys and wifing one man sufficient, I suddenly felt this urge to bake something. Something...buttery. Crumbly. With a hint of cinnamon. And I'd make it for the boys to have for breakfast the coming week. Give the Viking a break in the morning, as he's the one who handles mornings around our house. What can I say? I need my beauty sleep.

What I had in mind sounded kind of like a crumb cake of some sort, so I turned to my trusty Joy of Cooking 75th Anniversary Edition for a crumb cake recipe that wouldn't take too long or overtax my limited cake-baking skills. Of course, as with all recipes, I made my own idiosyncratic adjustments with a health boost in mind.

The recipe can be found on pg. 630. (Warning: This is not for the faint of heart or the body on a diet). It calls for a 13-x-9-inch pan, and for some reason, all of mine are letter-sized. No matter. I sprayed my letter-sized Pyrex with organic cooking spray and floured it, and set the oven to 325 F.

Then, to make the morning cake. And yes, there was milk involved. I thought about calling out to one of my sons that we needed "Milk! Milk! Milk for the morning cake!" but decided against it as I thought full-bore nudity--a la the book--might ensue.

Onward. Whisk together the following:

1.5 c all-purpose flour. I used white wheat flour here.

0.5 c sugar

2.5 tsp baking powder

0.5 tsp salt

I also added in about a half cup of wheat germ, which meant reducing the flour by about the same amount.

In a medium bowl, whisk together 1 large egg, 0.5 c milk (for the morning cake!), 2 tbsp vegetable oil (I used canola), and 2 tsp vanilla.

With a rubber spatula, add the dry to the wet, mix to smoothness, and then drop in dollops into your greased, floured pan and spread until it's evenly covering the pan bottom. This was NOT easy to do, and I found that greasing the spatula every few spreading attempts helped a lot.

That was the cake part. The crumb part may give you a heart attack just reading it. Here we go.

Combine the following:

2.5 c. all-purpose flour

(You can also add in 0.5 c. nuts or coconut--I did not do this)

1 c. packed light brown sugar. Yes. That says one cup. I did 0.75 cups because I just couldn't stand it.

1 tsp ground cinnamon.

Now for the heart attack. Melt two sticks--complete sticks--of butter and pour it over the above mixture. Mix until it's like...well...crumbs. If it's not crumbly enough, add more flour, which is what I had to do.

Sprinkle the crumbs on top of the cake and bake for 30 minutes or until tester is clean. I ended up going for 40 minutes, the last 10 minutes with the oven jacked up to 350 F, probably because of the wheat flour and wheat germ.

The result is a buttery, crumbly (very crumbly) pretty sweet treat with a lot of fiber that's no worse than, say, a muffin or a scone for breakfast. My kids liked this a lot, and it was exciting to truly have cake for breakfast every morning. At least for this week.

Oatmeal maple scones

The tale of oatmeal/maple scones 

It all began with spilled oatmeal. Having cleverly stored an enormous cylinder of Quaker Oats on its side, I should not have been surprised when the lid burst free of its moorings and released a flood of oats onto my countertop.

Like any good mother, I flashed on the various contamination-related scenarios, assessing with a deep maternal calculus whether or not the oats would still be usable after having possibly intermingled with a few breadcrumbs and who knows what else on that countertop. On the pro side, I never work with raw meat or other dire animal products on that counter. On the con side, I've got at least one child who climbs up there frequently to acquire a drinking vessel.

Obviously, heat would be needed. As with many of my cooking adventures, necessity drove me to the index of a large cookbook, desperately seeking to build something around a single awkward ingredient I had available. So, I turned to my new America's Test Kitchen cookbook, a Christmas gift, and looked up oatmeal. Lo', the Test Kitchen came through for me: There, on page 488, it offered up a recipe for oatmeal scones that just happened to call for 1.5 cups of oatmeal, almost exactly the amount I'd just hand-swept from my countertop into a bowl.

The rest of the ingredients

In addition to the oats, the scones required 1/4 c. whole milk, ditto of heavy cream, an egg (large, as usual), 1.5 c. all-purpose flour, 1/3 c. sugar with a bit extra for sprinkling on top, 2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, and 10 tbsp unsalted butter. This last had to be cut into 1/4-inch cubes and then chilled. This cubing of butter was by far the most time-consuming part of the recipe.

The instructions

Oven set to 375 F, I dug in. First, I spread the oats on a baking pan to toast for about 8 minutes (I viewed this as a sort of decontamination step); after removing them, I fired up the oven temp to 450 F. Then, milk, cream, egg whisked together, and I added in 1/4 c. maple syrup to enhance the oats with some maply goodness (an option offered on p. 489 of the cookbook). A tablespoon of this milky mixture went on reserve for brushing on top of the scones. After I food processed the dry ingredients, I added in the cold butter cubes and processed again until it all looked like light cornmeal.

In a medium bowl, I combined the flour mixture with the toasted oats and added in the milk mixture. At this point, I could tell that I needed more flour, so I added in another quarter cup or so to give the dough a decent stiffness.

Shaping and baking scones

There are a couple of ways to shape scones. You can use a cakepan, pushing your dough into it to make a nice circle and then cutting out the triangles. Or, you can shape it into a circle yourself on some wax paper and then cut it into triangles as you would cut a pie.

Place each triangle on a cookie sheet prepped with parchment paper. Brush the tops with the reserved milk/egg/syrup mixture and then sprinkle to your tastes and desire with the reserved sugar. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until they look pretty much like golden brown scones. You can eat them after about 10 minutes of cooling, or you can have them over the next three days for breakfast, which was what I did. My three-year-old, the world's choosiest consumer, ate only the sugar-crispy, shiny tops and pronounced them acceptable.

Some scone tweaks

If I were to do it again, I think I'd add in more maple syrup into the milk mixture for an increased maple enhancement. And I also put in about a quarter cup of wheat germ because I add wheat germ to just about everything I bake.

The calorie/fat count on these remains a mystery. I can only imagine that with 1.25 sticks of butter, it's fairly robust. In my mind, that's an excellent reason to eat these flaky, maply little triangles for breakfast--that gives you the rest of the day to burn off that butter. Happy baking!

Guest post: Breakfast cookies

(hi, this is jennyalice with a sneaky little guest post.)

My son eats a lot of food. No really, a lot of food, and since he has a physical disability, he needs quite a bit of help at meal time. Breakfast is always a blur at our house, and in an effort to be most efficient, get out of the house on time, and offer Jack more opportunity for independence, we have tried every cereal on the market. They all end up in little pieces at the bottom of the box, or scattered all over the floor. So we want him to be able to feed himself, and it has to be fast, and his sister has to like it. Frustrated by the $4.00 price tag on 5 ounces of granola nuggets, I decided to try to make cereal cookies. This is my first try. It is basically a takeoff on any oatmeal cookie recipe, with cereal instead of the oatmeal.

I use a professional grade KitchenAid stand mixer and aluminum jelly roll (cookie) pans in a non-convection electric oven.

Ingredients

• 3 eggs (I used large, not extra large)
• 2 sticks of softened butter (I do not ever bake with margarine)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2T vanilla extract
• 1 cup white flour
• 2/3 cup wheat flour
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 1 15 oz box muesli cereal (I used Safeway brand)
• 1/4-1/2 cup oatmeal (as much as needed to make the batter more on the stiff side.)

Directions

1. Pre-heat oven to 350F
   
2. Cream butter and sugars
3. Add vanilla
4. Add eggs one at a time, beat until smooth
5. If you are a good person you will sift your flours, baking soda and baking powder. But since you are not a superhuman, just try not to have any hard nuggets of baking soda or baking powder, then with the mixer on a low to medium speed, slowly add the flours, baking soda, and baking powder.
6. Mix in the box of muesli. You could hand mix at this point, but I have a heavy duty stand mixer, so I make it do the work.
7. Add in the oatmeal a little at a time until the cookie dough is more on the stiff side.

I use cookie sheets with parchment paper to cook most all of my baked goods. It allows me to place all of the batter onto the sheets, then I can slip baked goods onto the counter and a new sheet with raw dough onto the pan and pop it back into the oven faster. No lag time between baking and I don't need to get my hands dirty very 13 minutes.

I tested three different sizes for the cookies. A 1 tablespoon dough ball makes a normal-size cookie, and was more on the soft side. A 1/2 tablespoon dough ball, made a small cookie, and would probably work just fine for most people, but I really wanted them to be "one bite" cookies so there would be less of a chance of my kid taking a bite then dropping the rest. I settled on a fat 1 1/2 tsp. So I just scooped up batter 1 tablespoon at a time and divided it into four little dabs. This made cookies slightly larger than a quarter, which was perfect for my family.

Bake cookies for 13 minutes at 350F, slightly less time if you want them softer; we wanted crisp. This recipe makes, um, a lot of little cookies; it filled a 10 cup container.

I do not know how long these keep, they were finished within 3 days. Even my husband ate them (note to self: do not tell husband that muesli has dates or he will never eat them again). I have several other types of cereal in the cupboard, so I'm going to keep making different kinds until I can find the tastiest, highest protein, lowest cost, batch of breakfast cookies that my family will still eat. Once I figure out a few that work, my goal is to get a ton of cereal on super sale, then spend a day and make batch after batch of breakfast cookies, and freeze them in 1 gallon zip-top bags. I'm sure they will freeze well, since oatmeal cookies do. Of course the way my family mowed through them, it's possible I won't need to freeze any at all.

Breakfast crepes

Finding the new and different for breakfast is something I'm always interested in. Breakfast is definitely the least varied meal of the day at our house. Nearly every day it's cold cereal for myself and one daughter, hot cereal for the other, and oatmeal for my husband. Borrrring.

On weekends we mix it up with organic eggs and organic bacon. Incidentally, if you've not yet switched to organic bacon - hurry and do so now. So delicious!! I will never go back to that overly-processed, filled-with-nitrates bacon that lines the shelves at the supermarket. The taste is awful compared to what we like to call "the good stuff."

Imagine my delight upon seeing that Living Without has a recipe for gluten-free, dairy-free breakfast crepes. I have always loved crepes, and enjoyed them often when my sister and I were roommates, but I had never tried making them myself.

They turned out to be one of the easiest things I have ever made. And now I'm thinking a crepe pan is in my not-too-distant future.

Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Breakfast Crepes
1 cup brown rice flour
3 Tbsp sugar
1 cup milk (plain-flavored rice, soy, hemp or almond milk)
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp oil

Mix flour and sugar in a blender or mixing bowl.

Add milk, eggs and vanilla and combine well. Batter should be thin, like cake batter. If it's too runny, add more flour, a tablespoon at a time.

Place oil in a heavy skillet or non-stick pan and heat skillet to medium high.

Pour enough batter into the skillet to coat the bottom of the pan.

Tilt the pan until batter is evenly distributed.

Tip: If, like me, you have too large of a non-stick pan, it's not necessary to tilt the pan to coat the entire bottom. I did that on the first one and it didn't turn out well. For the rest I just tilted the pan to spread out the batter a little bit (crepes are meant to be thin).

Cook until bubbles cover the crepe.

Peek at the bottom; crepe should cook until bottom is lightly browned.



(Patience is key here. If you flip too early, you’ll split the crepe). Flip crepe with a spatula and cook briefly until done.

Repeat until all batter is used.

Immediately after removing the crepe to a plate, I spread (dairy-free) butter on it and sprinkled with sugar and then rolled them. Heavenly. My mouth is watering just thinking about them.

There would have been quite a few more on the plate, but while I was making them a certain "chef" and her husband couldn't stop eating them. We managed to hold back so I would have enough for a pretty picture.

Just think how much prettier that picture will be when I get that crepe pan and they are all the same size.

Next weekend I think we'll try adding fruit or something else delicious to them.

Do you like crepes? What's your favorite way to serve them?

Pear banana yogurt smoothie

I am a terrible breakfast person. I never do the right thing. Most of the time, I skip the meal completely, only to find myself starved and reaching for whatever is quick and easy (and often loaded with carbs) sometime before lunch.

And so when my mother introduced me to the idea of a breakfast smoothie (yes, I can be slow to think of some of the more obvious solutions on my own), I jumped at the idea. When I was in California for the summer, we kept the fridge loaded with frozen berries and bananas, yogurt and that really expensive pomegranate juice. But back home in NY, and once the weather began to turn, the idea of an icy cold breakfast loaded with berries was a bit hard to take. I needed to figure out a seasonal solution.

I got the idea to substitute frozen pear for the berries and pear nectar or apple juice for the pomegranate juice. Yes, it's still an icy cold breakfast in the middle of winter, but it's delicious and loaded with cinnamon and nutmeg and honey and a generous serving of fruit (something I often forget to eat later in the day). Best of all, the kids will love it, too (call it a milkshake!). And it's absolutely portable—so whether I'm rushing off to help build sets for the class play or to do a little last minute Christmas shopping, I can sip and go!

Here's what you need for one generous serving:

1 chopped and frozen pear (I do this task myself ahead of time)

1 banana (can also be frozen, but not necessary)

1 cup of pear nectar or apple juice (white grape would also work well here)

1 container of yogurt (I like to use Activia vanilla)

1 teaspoon of honey

pinch of nutmeg

pinch of cinnamon

Put everything in the blender: first the liquid, then the frozen fruit, then layer in the other ingredients. Blend until smooth. Pour into a tall glass, garnish with a bit more cinnamon, insert straw, and you're good to go.