Pumpkin Muffins: The End

I've long been on a quest for the perfect pumpkin muffin. My testing has been neither thorough, nor exhaustive, but after finding this recipe, I've decided to stop looking.

Of course, finding is a relative term. Misreading is perhaps a better way to put it. The recipe clearly says 1 cup of pumpkin, so I added a whole can. I'd like to think this is a major contributing factor to their deliciousness.

I know it's not even remotely close to pumpkin season. In fact, you're probably much more concerned with how to use the plethora of strawberries and stone fruits that are just coming into season.

I'm hoping that you also happen to have a can of pumpkin left in your pantry: it is always wise to stockpile such precious commodities. If so, make these immediately. Strawberries can wait. (Or you can have one for breakfast, with strawberries on the side.)

If not, I'm sorry. Put them on your calendar, sometime in October. (September if you can get away with it!)

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The Perfect Pumpkin Muffin
makes 6 jumbo muffins (note: if they were regular size, they wouldn't be perfect)

1c sugar
2 eggs
0.25t baking powder
1t baking soda
0.75t salt
1.5c whole wheat flour
0.5c oil
0.5c cold water
1 15oz can pumpkin (yes, the whole thing)
spices: 1T cinnamon, 0.5t nutmeg, 0.5t cloves, 0.5t ginger

1. Mix all ingredients together. No, seriously, that's all.
2. Pour into jumbo muffin cups. (We use silicone ones.) Bake for 50 minutes at 325.
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Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or emailing me at piquantprose [at] gmail [dot] com.

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Blueberry Bran Muffins

Last week, Dan put in a request for muffins. Specifically, he had a hankering for bran muffins. With blueberries in the fridge, we went off in search of wheat bran and a blueberry bran muffin recipe.

The recipe we found called for applesauce. We have applesauce from a granola/granola bar experiment (post coming soon! they were incredible!) but decided that banana and blueberry were a match made in heaven.

Although I'm not a fan of blueberry muffins or bran muffins, these were moist and tender--generally positive descriptors for muffins. They be divine with some shredded coconut to mask the bran flavor, and perhaps cranberries in place of blueberries..

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Blueberry Bran Muffins
makes 6 jumbo muffins
adapted from allrecipes.com

1.5c wheat bran
1c milk
1 large ripe banana, mashed
1 egg
0.67c brown sugar
0.5t vanilla extract
0.5c AP flour
0.5c whole wheat flour
1t baking soda
1.5t baking powder
0.5t salt
1c blueberries, rinsed and lightly dried (or cranberries!!)

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a muffin pan or use non-stick.
2. Mix the wheat bran and milk together; let stand for 10 minutes.
3. Mix together the banana, egg, brown sugar, vanilla extract in a large bowl. Add the wheat bran and milk mixture.
4. Sift together the flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt. (Sift! We didn't and our muffins had some flour lumps! These muffins are dark, so it's obviously if you've got a white clump of flour.)
5. Add the blueberries to the flour mixture, coating them with flour.
6. Add the blueberries and flour to the wet ingredients and fold to combine.
7. Divide evenly into muffin cups and bake for 25-30 minutes. The tops will spring back when lightly pressed, and a toothpick inserted into the middle will come out cleanly.

Serve warm with a big glass of water.
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Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or emailing me at piquantprose [at] gmail [dot] com.

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Home to an Empty House

Yesterday was full of travelling! We left Henley-on-Thames at 7 AM British time in order to get to the airport for our 11 AM flight. All went well with the flight and goodbyes were said to teammates in the Newark airport.

After a three hour layover, I caught a flight to Boston and then a connecting flight out to California. When we touched down at 11 PM California time, I had been travelling for 24 hours... and still had an hour to go.

Fortunately, there was a surprise waiting for me at the airport!!! Dan told me he was going to catch a flight down from Oregon on Wednesday, but he ended up booking a flight for yesterday and surprised me as I walked out of the plane. It was so nice to have him there after a really long, uncomfortable day of travelling.

It's always nice to have a man who still think you're beautiful even with bloodshot eyes and feet so swollen they look like stuffed sausages.

We arrived home to an essentially empty fridge as my parents have been off travelling Europe as well, so we had to make do with what we had. We were both too tired to do much more than munch on the two leftover apples last night, but breakfast this morning was a different story.

The only usable ingredients in the fridge were eggs, cheese and carrots (nearing their departure date). I considered omelets but the eggs were old enough that they were really better suited to baking, so I made carrot muffins.

I based the recipe off of my favorite muffin recipe, but with a lot of substitutions due to lack of ingredients. The fact that these turned out pretty well just speaks to the awesomeness of that recipe.

These are incredibly moist and very subtly sweet, with a tender crumb. The carrot flavor is very pronounced but not overwhelming. If you like raisins, a handful would definitely make these a lot sweeter. (I would recommend golden raisins.) Personally, I prefer savory breakfasts, so this was perfect.

After I'd already eaten two of them, I found almond butter in the fridge. A slather of almond butter would have rounded these out perfectly, making an incredibly nutritious breakfast.

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Not-Too-Sweet Carrot Muffins
makes 12 muffins

Updated: The Yogurt Parfait

Dan and I like to eat yogurt with breakfast. This summer, we ate a lot of yogurt with granola and fresh berries. It's kind of difficult to get fresh berries in the Jersey winter, so we've had to adapt. It's also somewhat time consuming to make homemade granola, and nuts are expensive.

Piquant Parfait = yogurt + frozen blueberries + cereal

We like two kinds of cereal in particular. I prefer Kashi GoLean Original, while Dan prefers Honey Nut Cheerios. It's kind of like eating milk and cereal with some berries thrown in, except it takes a lot longer for your cereal to get soggy. I also like plain yogurt more than milk, so this is especially delicious for me!

What's your favorite breakfast food? Let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me at piquantprose [at] gmail [dot] com. 

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Homemade Yogurt: Why You Should Make It Too!

You probably learned at a young age to put the milk away promptly and in the coldest place in the fridge. So if somebody told you to leave the milk out in 100°F weather and actually eat what you got the next day, I can understand why you'd be squeamish. Especially if they told you they'd added bacteria to said milk.

Of course, if you've ever eaten yogurt, that's exactly what you're doing. To make yogurt, you basically add bacteria to milk and then let it incubate at a bacteria friendly 100-110°F. Gross.

Really, though, there's nothing gross about it! The bacteria you add are no more harmful than the yeast you add to bread or the dust mites that sleep in your pillow. (Less harmful if you have allergies!!) Here's what happens:


At around 110°F, the bacteria you add are in full activity--like tourists on a summer beach. They eat up all of the lactose in the milk, a form of sugar that many people can't digest, and produce lactic acid, the same thing that makes your muscles burn when you work out.

Just like lactic acid makes your muscles uncomfortable, it also makes the yogurt uncomfortable--for other bacteria, that is! The high acidity that makes yogurt a little bit tangy discourages the growth of the bacteria that make us sick. It also makes the milk curdle and form a jelly-like matrix of coagulated protein molecules. (The same thing happens if you add vinegar to milk!)

The first yogurts were made by just leaving milk out someplace where it could "catch" good bacteria (much the same way we catch colds!). These days, most people give the milk a push in the right direction by adding some good bacteria (in the form of already-made yogurt) at the start of incubation.

I've already posted on how to make homemade yogurt, but I thought I'd give you a few added benefits of making homemade yogurt:

1. Vitamin D
Lots of research has been done to show the benefits of vitamin D, particularly in aiding absorption of calcium. Unfortunately, most store-bought yogurts don't have vitamin D! Well, when you make your own yogurt, you choose the milk that goes into it, which means you can choose yogurt with vitamin D (and vitamin A) added.

2. Along those lines, you know everything that goes into your yogurt.
A lot of yogurts contain thickeners, like cornstarch or gelatin (watch out vegetarians!), artificial sweeteners and a lot of sugar. You may be okay eating those things, you may not. Personally, many artificial sweeteners give me stomaches and severe bloating so I avoid them. I'd also rather eat a yogurt that was thickened naturally from its wealth of good bacteria, rather than yogurt thickened with gelatin.

Low Fat Banana Bread

The other morning, I woke up at 10AM (ah, the life of a college student) with a pile of mushy bananas in my room. I looked at the clock and started some calculating in my head. I need to be at work at 1PM, which left me 3 hours to make banana bread, get dressed, go to brunch and get to work. Definitely enough time.

These bananas were perfect for banana bread.

Well, it turns out I'm not super efficient in the mornings, and 3 hours is really 2 hours when the banana bread takes an hour to bake (and you have to watch it the whole time). Fortunately, everything worked out.

This banana bread is moist, tender and full of banana flavor. Great for when you have a lot of mushy bananas (and who ever has just one brown banana?). Use whole wheat flour for extra nutrition, white flour for extra convenience; spread with Nutella for extra delicious.

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Low Fat High Banana Bread
makes 1 loaf

Chocolate Coffee Banana Bread

Winter fruit selection is often depressing at best, so imagine my dismay when our dining hall ran out of oranges and decided to make do with mushy bananas. I'm okay with yellow bananas, but mushy is just beyond me.

Except, of course, in banana bread. So I did all of the other eaters a favor, and grabbed as many mushy bananas as I could without seeming too ridiculous. (Honestly, I think the staff are used to me doing ridiculous things at this point, like asking for a veggie omelet without the eggs.)

I made both regular and chocolate coffee banana bread in one morning.

Then, I began the quest for a suitable banana bread recipe. I had my mom's recipe tucked away in my email, but with the amount of butter it called for, it was much closer to cake. I needed something that wouldn't use up D's single dessert quota for the day.

After opening about 30 tabs worth of lowfat banana bread recipes in Safari, almost all of which called for margarine or applesauce, I finally found one. Ok, the original calls for applesauce, but I just used milk. 

Now, this is an incredible banana bread recipe, perfect just on its own. But when you run out of chocolate chips, and chocolate, the only solution is to take perfectly good banana bread, and add cocoa powder... and then eat said chocolate banana bread for breakfast the next day. And what is better than chocolate? Chocolate and coffee.. so I did it.

Once reinforcements arrived in the form of a care package, I realized I had to make this again, but with chocolate chips and cappuccino chips. Yes, I still ate it for breakfast.

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Chocolate Coffee Banana Bread

makes 1 large loaf

Equipment

loaf pan

2 mixing bowls + mixing instrument(s)

kitchen scale (optional)

measuring cups

butter melting device

oven

Pumpkin Muffins Take 5: Almost Perfect

I say almost, because I'm sure they could be better, but these are spectacular. They're moist, fluffy and tender, with a great balance between pumpkin and spice. Everything you could ever want in a pumpkin muffin! And they've come a long way since the first round of pumpkin muffins!

I made these by adapting a banana bread recipe, and substituting pumpkin for banana. They ended up a bit too wet the first time I made them, so I increased the rest of the ingredients and used a second egg in place of more milk. I liked the banana bread recipe because it used so much banana, but still used a bit of butter to give it just enough fat and richness.

Post about banana bread is coming soon (it's the best I've ever tasted!) but for now, you'll have to live with pumpkin muffins. How awful.

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Pumpkin Muffins Take 5
makes 18 large muffins

Absolutely DELICIOUS Muffins

I can't believe it's taken me so long to post about these muffins. I have made them at least 15 times, and they've been delicious almost every time. (I tried a strawberry/balsamic version.. not delicious.) The problem with these muffins is that they always disappear too quickly for me to get a picture of them! Usually they're gone about 2 hours after we make them--my dormmates often find themselves drawn to the kitchen by the scent of these baking and how can I possibly deny them delicious muffins??

Cranberry walnut version

I made a similar muffin with cranberries a while back, but I've updated and perfected the recipe a bit, so I'd like to share it with you in its new improved form. I had applesauce on hand the first time I made this, so it was convenient to use. Most people don't keep homemade applesauce stocked, though. I decided to substitute the applesauce with milk, and I adjusted the balance of baking soda and baking powder to compensate for the change in acidity. It turned out quite well.

Apple rosemary version

I also decided to sacrifice the one-bowl appeal and use a pot for these as well. Although back in the dorm I'll probably go for the one-bowl method, if you have access to a heavy-bottomed pan and a stovetop, the rich, complex flavors from the browned butter really fill out the muffin.

The 400°F I used originally seemed a bit too high for these muffins. They tended to get very crisp outsides, before the muffin was fully set. I've dropped the temperature and increased baking time. If you're in a hurry, they'll still turn out at 400°F.

Finally, in addition to generalizing the fillings, I've also included an alternative for the milk—thoroughly mashed bananas. Use this whenever you have banana as filling!

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Whole Wheat Muffin Base
makes 12 large muffins


Equipment
Mixing bowl
Saucepan + butter stirrer
Stovetop, oven
Muffin tin + liners


Ingredients
0.75c unsalted butter
1c packed brown sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
0.5c milk (***or well-mashed banana, see notes)
1.5c white whole wheat flour
1.75t baking powder
0.25t baking soda
1c chopped nuts
2c filling*** (really, you can add up to 4c)

A Breakfast Treat

If you happen to have cinnamon swirl bread on hand, this is a great way to get rid of bananas. (You shouldn't need help getting rid of your cinnamon swirl bread.) It's also a great way to surprise a sleepy cinnamon-loving man in bed.

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Broiled Bananas on Toast

Equipment:
Baking tray
Broiler
Knife
Tongs OR heat-proof finger skin

Ingredients:
slices of cinnamon swirl bread
banana (sliced lengthwise)
cinnamon sugar

(Almost Vegan) Banana Bread

I was so excited for this to be vegan.. but then I used honey. Oops. I have some ideas for future honey replacement, so expect to see an updated, actually vegan version of this in the future.

For now, if you're an ok-with-honey vegan, give it a shot. (Or replace the honey with either agave or malt syrup! Although honey works as an emulsifier, which you need if you're leaving out the eggs, so this may not work very well. If you do this, you may want to consider using egg replacer instead of flaxseed meal.)

Also, coconut in banana bread is a great idea. Do it.

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Almost Vegan Banana Bread
makes one loaf

Equipment
kitchen scale (although I've included approximate measurements!)
measuring cups
bowl
loaf pan (or muffin tins)
fork/spoon

Ingredients

2T flaxseed meal

3.8oz soy milk (7T + 2t)

3.2 oz vegetable oil (6T)
3.75 oz brown sugar (0.5c)
1t vanilla extract
0.75t baking soda
0.5t salt
3 super ripe bananas (about 15 ounces without peels)
3oz. honey (6T)
8oz whole wheat flour (about 1.75c)
2oz chopped nuts (about 0.5c)
handful of unsweetened, shredded coconut (optional)

Cinnamon Swirl Bread/Homemade Bagels

Cinnamon Swirl Bread with the Bread Baker's Apprentice open in the background.

I've been slowly working on baking my way through Peter Reinhardt's Bread Baker's Apprentice. I definitely haven't been going in order, nor have I made much progress, but the recipes I have made have been delicious.

Since Valentine's day is coming up, I decided I better make some of D's favorite foods. I'd say his two favorite ingredients are probably garlic and cinnamon, so I decided to make one goodie with each.

He recently bought me two brand spanking new loaf pans, so those were obviously going to factor into the equation. Since cinnamon + loaf pan = cinnamon bread, I knew exactly where to start. I don't want to reprint the recipe, because you should really check out the book but here are the basics:
1. Make a lightly enriched white bread dough (some eggs, sugar, fat, etc. but not a lot), with about a teaspoon of cinnamon in the dough. (Too much cinnamon will slow down the yeast. Don't worry, there's plenty more in this recipe.) Knead in chopped nuts in the last two minutes if you want. (Reinhardt's recipe calls for raisins, but really, who likes raisins???)
2. To form the loaf, roll the dough into a rectangle a few inches narrower than your loaf pans and fairly long (12-16 inches long). Sprinkle the topside with cinnamon sugar and then roll the dough tightly, pinching the end shut to create a seal.
3. Bake as instructed. When the loaves come out of the oven, brush the tops with about 1T melted butter per 2 loaves, and sprinkle with any leftover cinnamon sugar to make a nice delicious crust.

That's an awesome bread knife in the foreground. I'll post on knives soon.

Yum!! We finished about a third of a loaf as an evening snack.

Yes, all of those slices (and more) went into our belly immediately after this photo was taken.

Next task: garlic.

Lots of Training and Whole Wheat Apple Pastries

We're starting to transition into shorter pieces in preparation for the spring season. We've spent the fall and winter working mostly on our aerobic base, doing 80+ minutes of low heart rate work on a regular basis, with a few shorter (~45 minutes total work) stints at faster paces.

Our training now is phasing into 20 minutes or less of total work at much faster paces. It's really fun to see all our hard work translate into the faster pieces, without ever training these speeds.

We've also been lifting a lot. If you've never lifted before, it's time to start! Look out for an upcoming post on lifting basics.

I've been an athlete for most of my life, but I remember for most of it feel very out of shape. I got tired walking to the tops of stairs, couldn't run very far (or very fast) and just generally wasn't very energetic. This year that totally changed. I'm sure losing weight has helped, but we're also doing some incredible training this year.

We bought a bunch of apples from the 'soup bin' at our local grocery store, and have been collecting apples from the dining halls as well. I had originally intended to make my one bowl muffins (I have a post waiting, it just needs some good pictures.. they always seem to disappear before I can take pictures).

I then quickly remembered that I was trying to branch out and try new, different things. Quick breads and muffins are fairly straightforward, as are cakes and cupcakes. Instead, I thought I'd try pastries. I tried to make mini pumpkin pies with homemade crust over winter break and was sorely disappointed. I figured I'd give it another go.

I'd been wanting to try poptarts for a while, so I found a recipe. I also have an excess of whole wheat flour right now, that needs to be used ASAP. (Did you know that whole wheat flour goes rancid quickly?) I decided to sub whole wheat for the all-purpose flour and see what happened.

They were crumbly, not flaky, and the whole wheat gave these a great nutty flavor that went well with the apples.

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Whole Wheat Apple Pastries
makes 6-8 small pastries

Ingredients
Filling:
1 tart apple, peeled, cored and chopped into small pieces
0.25c brown sugar
1T cinnamon
0.5t ground ginger (optional)

Crust:
1.25c whole wheat flour
1 stick (0.5c) butter, cold, cut into small cubes
2T really cold water
1T sugar
0.5t salt

Energy Bars Take Two

Last week, I went on a training trip with my team to Austin, Texas.

Training trip = (Sleep + Eat + Row + Eat + Sleep + Eat + Row + Eat) * (Numbers of days in trip)

It was exhausting, but really, really fun. We also made a lot of great strides as a team, both physically and technically. While I'm glad to be back home with D, I'm also really glad we took the trip.

As you can see, I ate a lot during my training. Most mornings before practice, I ate a bar, because they were easy to eat, kept me going through practice, and were light enough that I could do the warmup run without getting cramps.

For a while I've been trying to find bars that give me energy and make me feel good. I tried a lot of different bars, from the FiberOne bars, to Clif bars to Nutrigrain. Finally I settled on Larabars. I really like that they only have a few relatively simple ingredients, they fill me up, and I can exercise right after eating them.

Wholesome, delicious ingredients.

I don't like how expensive they are, how difficult they are to find, or that I didn't make them myself! So I started to look for recipes. There were a lot of recipes for homemade Larabars, but lack of food processor basically took all of those out of the equations.

Before we left on our training trip, I tried to make a batch of energy bars. The recipe I used claimed to not taste as healthy as the input ingredients. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case--they tasted awful. I rarely throw away food, but these were that bad. Granted, I think I burned them a little bit, but there wasn't much goodness to begin with.

Over the course of the trip, I looked for more recipes, and found two that I liked. One of them is called "oatmeal crispies" and is basically oats, flour, butter and sugar baked into bar shape. I may try these in the future, but the other recipe sounded more like what I wanted: oats, nut butter and honey, with a whole bunch of yummy add ins.

It was really, really snowy here.

So today, D and I ventured through the snow in search of missing ingredients. We came home, mixed these up, and immediately devoured way too many of them. They're incredible!!! The rest I have wrapped up in my fridge ready to take to practice or as an afternoon snack. I'd also like to try making different versions of these.

Below, I have the general version of the recipe, which you can customize to taste however you want. I've also included our version at the very bottom (because it's that delicious) and the version I'd like to try next!

We both had these for dessert, that's how good they are.

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Customizable Energy Bars
adapted from (never_home)maker
makes approximately 20 bars


Ingredients:

1.5c nut butter

1c honey (or other liquid sweetener, like sugar syrup or agave)

1t vanilla

0.75c water 

2.5c quick cooking grains
0.5c powder (e.g. protein/cocoa/milk)
1c coconut flakes (you could probably replace this with more grains)
1.5c nuts (chopped) and seeds
1.5c dried fruit, chocolate chips, etc.
2c fresh fruit, chopped into small pieces
1c crunchy, salty stuff

like a kid on Christmas...

Oops.

Bridge Creek Heavenly Hots

When I was a kid, my dad made these for us on the rare Saturday morning. Other pancakes have never lived up to these wonderfully light silver dollar pancakes. I made these for D and his parents this morning. They were a huge hit.

These little pancakes are light, fluffy and delicious.

The banana slice gives you an idea of just how small these pancakes are.
This slice is from the very end of the banana, so it's a small slice.

Of course, my dad has made a few updates to the original recipe. It makes them a little bit easier to work with. Even so, they're pretty easy to mess up.. my first attempt was fairly unsuccessful. I've tried to add as many tips as possible, so read the recipe all the way through twice before you make them.

Also, before I share this recipe, you have to promise me that you'll try them plain before you put anything on them. We used to eat them with my mom's homemade jam. Whatever you do, don't ruin them with that fake pancake syrup made of high fructose corn syrup and caramel color.

Pumpkin Muffins Take 4: Epic Fail

Apparently the great pumpkin shortage of 2009 has continued to impact this years availability. After an epic journey to acquire pumpkin, we only found pumpkin pie mix and sweet potato puree. I decided to try the pumpkin pie mix, and adjust my recipe accordingly.

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Epic Fail Pumpkin Muffins (Take 4)
makes 24 muffins

Ingredients
1 28 oz. can of pumpkin pie mix
6 eggs
0.25c milk
2.25c whole wheat flour
2.25c white flour
5t baking powder
1t baking soda
2T cinnamon
2t nutmeg
1t ginger
0.5t cloves

Directions
1. Mix all ingredients together in a bowl
2. Bake for 25 minutes at 350°F
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The muffins were chewy, instead of crumbly, like the cranberry walnut muffins. I think that was partly because I used King Arthur AP flour, which has more gluten, and therefore gives the muffins closer to a bread texture. They were lighter than the last round, and I think next time I'll switch to all whole wheat.

The pumpkin pie mix had sugar in it, so I left out the sugar. Next time, I think I would add some additional brown sugar to make these a bit sweeter.

The spices I used were a little bit old (staying at somebody else's house... should have bought fresh spices), so they ended up making the muffins taste dry. The spices kind of sucked the moisture off your tongue.. unpleasant.

The extra baking soda and baking powder definitely helped the muffins get lighter, but I think next time I'll try a little bit less of each. I may also use a little bit less flour and leave out the milk. I couldn't taste the pumpkin as much as I would have liked.
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Just tuning in? Check out the rest of the pumpkin muffin saga, including more recent recipes!

a holiday baking extravaganza

I went home for the holidays and suddenly had easy access to an oven and lots of ingredients, as well as several extra mouths. So I went a little crazy, and made two types of muffins and gluten free cookies, all in two days.

the giant (super cheap) squash

We got a giant squash from the grocery store, so I roasted it and substituted it for pumpkin in my pumpkin muffins (with various other modifications). They weren't very good, so I'll refrain from sharing the recipe. Turns out, pumpkin recipes don't get ALL of their flavor from the spices. My dad likes them, though, and snacks on them after he works out.

Pumpkin Muffins: Take Three

A few weeks ago, I did a comparison of my original pumpkin muffin recipe and a new, low fat version. The low fat version blew the original recipe out of the water.. so much so that even if you were trying to gain weight, I'd recommend putting butter on the low fat version instead of eating the original.

The new recipe still wasn't perfect, though. It wasn't as tender as I'd like them, and still needed a little bit more oomph. In this iteration on the recipe, I've fixed the tenderness. I still need something to make the flavor out of this world amazing, but I think I trip to get more spices will help. (Right now I've only got cinnamon and nutmeg; I think I need some ginger.)

The changes: I replaced the white sugar with brown sugar; I added back in one more whole egg, replacing two egg whites; I used milk instead of carrots; and I decreased the baking time.

What I'd do next time: Use milk and carrots, but increase the amount of flour by .25 cup to compensate; bake at a lower temp for longer; add ginger to the spices.

Just tuning in? Check out the rest of the pumpkin muffin saga, including more recent recipes!

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Pumpkin Muffins
12 muffins

Slow cooker oatmeal

Brown sugar, cranberries, and oats, waiting to enter the slow cooker.

Seeing as it's finally getting cold and rainy out, it seemed just about time to switch from cold morning cereal to hot morning cereal (at least for a bit).

Our first attempt at oats was an absolute failure. We used what we thought were steel cut oats but were actually quick cooking steel-cut oats. After 8 hours in the slow cooker, we ended up with soup. After it cooled, it solidified into something oat-like, but we decided it probably wasn't worth eating.

We learned a valuable lesson from that experiment, though. We put dried cranberries in the night before (with extra water to make up for them!), hoping they would rehydrate overnight. They sure did rehydrate, and I can tell you now that I prefer my cranberries dehydrated.

Breakfast the next morning. Yum.

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Slow cooker oatmeal
Serves 4

Ingredients:
1.5 cups of steel cut oats
4 cups of water
1 cup of half and half

cinnamon
brown sugar
cranberries
banana