Recipes: Oatmeal muffins

I love baking. For someone who has always had long term goals (think years), baking is my instant gratification activity. I start baking and within an hour or two I can be enjoying the results. Baked goods are also great to bring over to someone’s home or to treat someone who is a little down. Of all the things I bake, muffins have become my standard production, and this is because they take only 20 minutes in the oven, so from the moment I walk into the kitchen until I am enjoying them it takes only 30-40 minutes! Awesome!

My husband and I have always been geared to healthy food, but as of the last year we have really pushed it a bit more and I have replaced a lot of the ingredients with healthier ones. For example, oatmeal replacing big part of the flour, the muffins are not as fluffy, but they are really tasty and they are an awesome ~200 cal snack on the go that will keep your blood sugar up for a couple of hours because of the high glycemic index of the oatmeal. These muffins have been a great success of mine and everybody loves them, if I don’t tell, they barely realize there is oatmeal there because the oats dissolve through the baking, so the muffins are soft. Let me share this recipe with you!

– 1 1/2 cup oat meal

Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins

– 3/4 cup flour

– 1 teaspoon baking powder

– 1/2 teaspoon salt

– 1/4 cup sugar

– 1/4 cup honey

– 3/4 cup milk

– 1/3 cup vegetable oil

– 1 egg

– goodies and spices! *

Preheat the oven to 400F (200C). Mix well the first 5 ingredients in a bowl. Then add the honey milk and vegetable oil, beat one egg and add it to the mix. Add the goodies and spices. Mix everything until it becomes uniform and tacky.

Spray some oil in a muffin tray and fill the containers with the batter, you should get 8-10 medium size muffins. Bake for 20 minutes or until a knife comes out clean.

*What about the goodies and spices? Well, that depends a lot on your taste, the possibilities are too many to list them all, but here are some examples that I use:

Brandy Apricot Oatmeal Muffins

– 1/4 cup chocolate chips, cinnamon, vanilla extract, all spice, rubbed sage. (The most popular ones!)

– 1/3 cup cranberries, cinnamon, vanilla, lemon zest.

– 1 pint blueberries, cinnamon, vanilla extract.

– 1 cup dried apricots that have been rehydrated in brandy (if you have porto wine all the better!), vanilla extract.

– 1 pint blackberries, sliced, cinnamon, vanilla extract.

Other things to try: Nutmeg, coriander, pepper, orange zest, cocoa, etc.

Recipes: Sweet oatmeal pancakes

Every once in a while I get sweet cravings, who doesn’t? And I would rather eat something relatively healthy instead of Debbie cakes. I am not the biggest fan of pancakes but I like them quite a bit, and I have been fiddling around with recipes to make them healthier and yummier 🙂 I want to share my recipe with you!

Ingredients:

Sweet oatmeal pancakes.

2 cups of oats

2 cups of milk

2 eggs

1/2 cup of multipurpose flour

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

1 dash of salt

1/4 cup sugar

oil spray for the pan.

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl, and pour 1/2 ladle full of mix into the pan. Cook until golden brown.

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Caloric content: The whole mix is about 1,300 calories, so if you make about 10 pancakes, each one will be only 130 cal, which is about or less than a cereal bar. Not bad! 🙂

Serving suggestion: You can match these delicious pancakes with berries and apricot jelly. I like Smucker’s simply fruit (only 40 calories per tablespoon!).

I also freeze them individually in ziplock bags, so when I am hungry or needing a sweet fix I pull one out of the freezer and into the microwave.

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Enjoy!!