It’s heeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrreeeeeeee!!!!!!!

Green Monster Muffins batch #1 came out dry, but this time I think I’ve got it!

As a reminder, I loved the idea of using a vegetable in sweet muffins/breads when I made zucchini bread recently. What other veggie is often used in sweet recipes? Spinach – the main ingredient in the very popular Green Monster smoothies! Inspired by the Cooking Light zucchini bread, I worked hard to develop a recipe that would work with spinach.

Here are a couple things to note with the recipe.

#1 – when you measure the cup of packed spinach, make sure you pack the spinach is real good. I mean press down on it really hard in your measuring cup. You want it to be about 1 cup after you process it, not before.

In fact, my spinach was bursting out of the top just a bit.

#2 – when you process your spinach it will start out looking like quite a bit of spinach.

See – after you process it, it reduces in size quite a bit. And pretty much you process it till the food processor stops chopping the spinach. At some point, the blade really doesn’t chop the spinach any more size the volume is so reduced.

And in case you’re curious, here’s about what the texture of the spinach looks like when it’s done processing.

#3 – Don’t skip the lemon zest (unless you just don’t like the flavor of lemon)! I feel like I often skip zest on recipes because I don’t think you’ll be able to taste it, but you totally do and the zest adds great flavor!

In my recipe, I suggest stirring walnuts into the batter, but since I had someone with a walnut allergy taste-testing later I only added some to the top of half my muffins.

Pre-baking

Post-baking

Last time, the muffin was dry, but this time it was quite most! I may tinker with adding a wee bit more flour to see what happens, but I’m happy enough with it to share the recipe this time.

PS Next up I’m going to work on vegan and gluten-free versions so everyone can try them!

Green Monster Muffins

Most spinach muffins are savory but these are sweet!

Makes 12 muffins

Dry Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup oat flour (note: you could probably sub flours of do 1 1/2 cups total of a single flour, instead of 2, if you’d like)
• 3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp baking soda

Wet Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 single serving applesauce (or 1/2 cup)
• 1 cup PACKED, triple washed baby spinach, chopped by food processor into small bits (see photos above)
• 3 tbsp canola oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 – 1 tsp lemon zest (depending on how lemon-y you want it)

Optional ingredient: 1/4 cup chopped walnuts, plus extra for topping

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F and prepare a 12 cup muffin tin with non-stick spray.
2. Add dry ingredients into a medium bowl and whisk together.
3. Whisk to beat egg and sugar together till light (I did this by hand for just a couple minutes).
4. Whisk in the rest of the wet ingredients.
5. Pour dry ingredient mixture into the wet ingredient mixture, add 1/4 cup walnuts if desired, and stir gently just to combine – do not over-mix.
6. Pour muffin batter into muffin tin cups – about 3/4 full each. If using walnuts, sprinkle walnuts on top of each muffin.
7. Bake for 14-17 minutes until centers set or a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.
8. Cool at least 10-15 minutes before serving.

Enjoy!

Sneaky way to get the kids to eat their greens, no?

I actually think these muffins look really pretty because of the vibrant green color

Plus, these would be super festive for either Halloween or St. Patrick’s Day!!

I had to leave work early for a dentist appointment.

I stopped by home first…and snacked on another piece of homemade zucchini bread. I love the pretty little specks of green!

You know what else is green that is often made sweet? SPINACH! I think I need to develop a recipe for Spinach muffins! I need to get on that one.

Luckily I had no cavities! Hazzah!

I had two, that’s right TWO, fabulous hours of zumba tonight! It’s been awhile since I’ve done 2 hours back to back of zumba, but I pushed my way through whenever I started to feel tired.

I had a Chocolate Coconut Chew Larabar for a post-workout snack. It only had 5g of protein, so wasn’t really the best choice, but I figured it was better than nothing?

***

Post class, after 2 hours of exercise, I was RAVENOUS!

Someone said something about Chick Fil A in class and for the first time in a long time, that sounded really good. I considered picking up some fast food and getting french fries, but then I remembered that I had HOMEMADE zucchini muffins waiting to be eaten at home. The thought of homemade food won out over the idea of fast food. I’m finally starting to get to the point where I think that I can cook better food at home than most restaurants. Not so much that my cooking is better than a 5 star restaurant (let’s be reasonable!) but that I can control what I eat, how healthy it is and how customized the eats are to me and hubby.

I decided to make use of what I had on hand – a mini bell pepper from the farmers market and cherry tomatoes from my own garden. Dinner’s theme = breakfast for dinner.

I did a sloppy scramble with the green peppers.

I added the tomatoes just long enough to heat them through.

Fresh-Baked Taste Tidbit: To make the muffins taste fresh baked, I microwaved 3 for about 30 seconds to warm the inside. Then I baked them in the oven at 300 degrees F for about 3-5 minutes (don’t overcook or your muffins will get hard and we don’t want hard muffins).

The meal actually looked really pretty: egg scramble, zucchini muffins, and fresh green pepper spears (I didn’t want to have more pepper than eggs in my scramble so I reserved some to nosh on).

I topped the eggs with fresh basil from my garden. Not sure I loved the combo of the tomatoes with the eggs, but aren’t eggs the easiest (and quickest) protein sometimes?

And the muffins were the star of the show for me – they are soo freakin good. If you’re looking for a good zucchini bread recipe (and an easy one too! ooh and it’s healthy!), then you must try this Cooking Light recipe. The muffins don’t take nearly the same baking time as the bread, and they’re wonderful little bites of zucchini deliciousness. I did one loaf and 10 muffins, but either one works. It’s the FLAVOR that I really love! I think it may be the lemon zest that adds extra deliciousness.

PS I definitely had a fourth muffin. Whew!

So glad I made this instead of getting fast food!

Do you prefer eating in or out? Why?

So…about that baking project I was talking about earlier…

Last weekend, at my family’s house, I spotted a recipe on their desk for zucchini bread. It sounded fabulous and my parents had plenty of zucchini in their garden. They gave me 2 large zucchini to take home and make bread the next weekend.

I got to try my food processors cutting blades for the first time. I definitely had to pull out my instruction manual (thank goodness I put all of those in a single shoebox so it was easy to find) for the project.

So yea…this photo from the last post – this is shredded zucchini!

One of my twitter friends suggested I check out the Cooking Light recipe, so I went for that one (after seeing good reviews online). There were a couple different versions online but I ended up using this zucchini bread recipe by Cooking Light (click).

Substitutions:

• 2 eggs for the egg substitute
• 1 cup oat flour
• 2 cups white-wheat flour
• extra walnuts
• plus walnuts sprinkled on top

And I made one loaf of zucchini bread and 10 muffins.

Everything smelled fabulous baking up and looked so pretty when it was all done!

I had to dig into one for an afternoon snack.

Check out the difference the background makes to my photos:

Which one do you like best?

***

I did a play on my Shrimp Gumb-ole for dinner Sunday night.

I also dug into my purple okra (organic), which I picked up from the market Saturday.

Isn’t it neat looking?! It’s bright purple on the outside and white-green on the inside.

The shrimp were from the market too!

Everything was totally delicious served over brown rice.

I split that mini cake, from our World Cup party, with hubby for tonight’s dessert.

Nomalicious!

***

Post dinner it was clean up and chillax time.

I cleaned and air-dried the majority of the organic blueberries I got from the market on Saturday. I’m going to be so sad when blueberry season is over, but buying extra and freezing for later seems like a great way preserve some of my summer berries.

Berries were pretty much dry about 30 minutes ago so they’re now freezing away. Wheee!

Can’t wait to dig into my zucchini bread for breakfast tomorrow. Don’t you just love having a breakfast to look forward to?

***

This time next week I’ll be at the lake on a mini vacay! Yippee!

What do you like to do when you go on a lake vacation? Or if you don’t do lakes, what about one of those vacations where you’re mostly hanging out at a vacation home (not playing tourist sight-seeing etc)?

I’m making a list of things I want to do but never seem to have time to do:

• Read books
• Paint my nails
• Work on a puzzle
• Cook (something that takes a nice, long time to prepare)
• Bake (something that takes a nice, long time to prepare)
• Craft – knit/crochet, make jewelry, etc.
• Be Lazy
• more to come…

You?

Sis emailed me the other day asking if I thought Mom would like a non-dairy milk since she’s lactose intolerant. I said…sure!

We picked up some vanilla almond milk at TJ’s, but she hasn’t gotten into it much yet. I decided to whip up some oats using the almond milk to see if she’d like it more that way.

Unfortunately, they only had 1 Minute Oats, which I figured would have to do. I’m more of an old-fashioned oats kinda girl.

I made 4 bowls for the fam to test out.

Cooked in: oats, 1/2 vanilla almond milk, 1/2 water, dash salt, cocoa powder, chopped dates

On Top: fresh-ground flaxseeds, more dates, almonds

The verdict – everyone loved it! Win for the oatmeal!

***

Later sis got started on another baking experiment – pretzels!

Before

After!

They were lovely and tender with nice, crunchy salt on top. A reminder I should bake more.

Does your family have a baking specialty? What is it?

I got to test something out today:

One of my Chic Energy Bars (Pre-Workout). Ok, so this was my first attempt at this experiment, so I didn’t expect it to be too fantabulous…it wasn’t. It was just ok.

Observations:

• I wanted these bars to be a bit more cake-y than oat-y but also vegan (thanks for correcting me readers!) vegan-able – as in easy to make vegan (I think it’s easier to sub a vegan sweetener for honey than to sub something for eggs). Alas, they were a bit on the dry side. I wonder if baking powder may help get more air into the bars?
• Also, I used some local honey, which is great, but very flavorful…in a…whoa…that’s a lotta flavor kind of way. I don’t want the bar to be overshadowed by one of the ingredients. Perhaps brown rice syrup would also help bind the bar more?
• The dates were ok chopped, but since I was trying to let the dates be one of the sweeteners in addition to being a fruit, I think I may need to run the bar through the food processor to get it more evenly distributed.

Back to the drawing board!

Post work, it was time to get my ZUMBA on! I led Blue Jeans tonight and messed up on my cueing, but luckily the song is easy and the participants are rock stars. It was all gravy.

***

Better Replacements

Hubby has asked me before why some things I used to eat are not preferred/ok to eat any more (think . I say the difference is education. I don’t mean I went to school recently, but I’ve learned a lot more about foods and what to eat and what not to eat (I don’t have many “no” foods, but there are definitely some) just from reading the news, magazines, and books. I think that it’s great to keep an open mind and an open ear. I prefer to be ready to learn something new and will often times apply learnings in the form of lifestyle changes – beyond just food choices.

Here are some better replacements/changes I’ve made recently and strive to make:

• Store-bought bread for Great Harvest bread – GH is a bit more expensive but free of the chemicals, preservatives and other bogus ingredients in the grocery store stuff. Do I want to eat bread made with 20 ingredients or 5? I think I’ll go 5. Not to mention – they grind their own wheat! How cool is that? This is a great buy as I try to eat closer to the source.
• Local grocery store for farmers market – many products at the grocery store are shipped in from afar – from different states and even different countries. Think about how someone had to harvest your fruits/veggies/etc., pack it, ship it, and unpack it at the store. Nutrients are lost after fruits/veggies are picked. Farmer’s market produce is often picked the day before the market or even the same day! Plus, I like to support my local businesses by shopping local.
• Aluminum foil for parchment paper – there aren’t really any studies showing aluminum foil is bad for you, but parchment seems like a more natural product. Plus, if you use parchment paper, you don’t have to use non-stick spray. Score!
• Saran wrap for plates – ever heard that story about how if saran wrap touches your food while it’s cooking in the microwave that chemicals will seep into your food? Yea, I heard that one, too ,but I’m not sure if it’s true. Either way, I’m not taking chances. Especially since I can just as easily cover a bowl of soup with a plate instead. No plastic required!
• Bottled water for a reusable bottle – not only is this more eco-friendly, but it’s MUCH more cost-effective. Sure, some water bottles are expensive, but at $1-2 per bottled water, you’ll easily make your money back in a month or less. Plus, you can ensure you get a safer, BPA-free bottle if you get the reusable version.
• Standard bags for reusable totes – so eco-friendly. This is a no-brainer.
• Conventional meats for free-range/grass-fed meats – choose the latter and chances are good the animal had a better life and will also provide more nutritious, higher quality product.
• Conventional for Organic – there are many arguments for why organic is better than conventional. Mostly, I think organic foods are more nutritious, don’t have the icky pesticides and are more earth-friendly in general.
• Fake Sweeteners for more natural sweeteners – Here are some “no foods” for me: aspartame, sucralose, and other crazy-fake sweeteners. I avoid them as much as possible. There are too many great, much more natural products: honey, maple syrup, agave, sucanat…
• Bleached/processed flours for healthier flours – there’s a reason I’ve been playing with different flours outside of all-purpose: spelt, oat, brown rice, teff – they are often more nutritious and definitely interesting to try out.

In general, I guess I’d just rather have less of something and a higher quality, and I’d rather be as eco-friendly as possible.

Other things catching my attention:

• Canned food – have you seen this study? Scary stuff! Alternatives – I think I’m going to lean more heavily on frozen foods and try cooking my beans from scratch. Now…where can I find a good pressure cooker?
• Organic clothes – need to do more research. Seems like a good idea.
• Plastic containers – besides BPA, plastics are not good for re-heating food. I think I’m going to lean more towards using class or Pyrex type stuff. I wish Pyrex would bring back some of their vintage goodies.

What are some changes you’ve made recently or are in the process of making?