Healthy + Delicious Muffins. For Real.

Rachel here.

We've got a finicky eater on our hand. By finicky I mean that someone in this household who is only about yay high has issued a moratorium on trying new things. And by new things I include hot chocolate. No matter the deliciousness, Miss M simply refuses to let anything new cross her lips. Thank god we'd gotten a few super nutrients over the threshold before the embargo settled in. The fact that she will eat interesting and strongly flavored foods (such as garlic and ginger), though, makes her refusal to continue adventuring all the more frustrating. John and I both offer her things to try with confidence that she'll like them, only to find our spoons butting against her cheek instead of her open mouth.

We're getting pretty good, though, at tricking her into eating things without knowing it. We put silken tofu in yogurt and oatmeal; John minces vegetables and adds them to pasta sauce. And the other day I whipped up some muffins that are brimming with carrots and unsweetened coconut, flax and organic whole wheat flour. Evidently, putting things in muffin form moves them into the acceptable category for Miss M. Just don't put a carrot on her plate.

Anyway, these muffins were surprisingly tasty. I used demarara sugar which is one of the least-sweet sugars around. I used just enough to cut the tang of the wheat flour and the muffins are just ever-so-slightly sweetened. These are hearty little lumps, excellent with a smear of cream cheese on top. Though generated for M, we've all been eating them.

I adapted this recipe from this old hippy tome.


According to my marginalia, I've made these muffins before in a different variation (I used apples and agave and such in that endeavor). I always mark my differences, and pretty soon my marginalia is going to crowd out the original recipe. Maybe next time I should try them the way the cookbook suggests...




Oh, you mis-measured the milk? And just poured it in anyway? And now your batter's too runny? Yeah, I did that, too. I just added handfuls of flax meal until things returned to a nice, gooey consistency again. And then I patted myself on the back for upping the health ante.


Voila! Don't these suckers look extra healthy next to the heaping basket of produce our sweet hippy neighbors dropped off?


They hold up all right on their own, though, too. I think perhaps part of tricking a saucy toddler into eating healthy muffins is putting them in cute polka dotted wrappers.


It's hard to wait for muffins to cool, but somebody's gotta do it.

A Rice Pudding-ish Breakfast

Rachel here.

Back in the day (because we've been blogging for a while now so, you know, we can say things like that) we used to write about breakfast here with some regularity. My mom had S in the house still and M hadn't risen to her benevolent dictatorship yet and we had breakfast on the brain. Since S left for college, though, and M arrived, breakfast has received short shrift around these parts. Today, I rectify this problem by offering up this little recipe I concocted this morning.

There are days when M eats whatever we put in front of her and then there are days where she rejects the very same food she inhaled two days prior. The only real constant that we've found is brown rice. The kid, quite simply, loves it. Handfuls at a time, she smacks it to her gaping mouth, delighting in munching on the pieces that get in and marveling at gravity's work on the pieces that don't. Brilliantly, John thought to make a ton of brown rice over the weekend. We, quite literally, have tupperware after tupperware brimming with the stuff in our refrigerator. It's made life that much simpler and, you know, simple can be spectacular.

We've been instructed to help M pack on the pounds which has led us towards whole milk yogurt. Ugh--it's so creamy and so tangy and so, so delicious.

So here's what I whipped up today for M. Much to my delight, she rejected it and I got to eat the whole plate. I'm officially adding it to my breakfast/lunch/snack/whenever repertoire because it was absolutely delicious in addition to being super healthy.

I mashed 4 super ripe blackberries and half a banana together before sprinkling a tablespoon or so of flax meal over the fruit and then tossing in a handful of cold, cooked brown rice. I covered everything with yogurt, mixed until it was the fabulous pink that blackberries stain things and then, as soon as M refused it, devoured every last drop.

SO. GOOD.

And that, my friends, is a rice pudding-ish breakfast for you.