Muffins! [Banana Soy with Chocolate Chips]

As promised, here is my recipe for delicious and relatively healthy (minus the chocolate, but that's good for the soul, so I think it's healthy in its own way!) banana soy muffins. To make these muffins, I modified a Soy-Banana Bread recipe from one of my favourite cookbooks - More-with-Less Cookbook: suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world's limited food resources by Doris Janzen Longacre. My mom had this cookbook when I was growing up and made many delicious foods from it. Now I own my own 25th anniversary edition, thanks to my mom giving it to me for my 23rd birthday several (8!!) years ago. If you want a great, down-to-earth cookbook with scores of great recipes, that also educates you on how to be a conscientious and responsible eater, this one's for you. It's worth its weight in gold. Anyhow, back to the muffins. Here they are:

Banana Soy Muffins with Chocolate Chips

Ingredients

1 cup soy flour

1 cup spelt or whole-wheat flour

1/4 cup all-purpose white flour

1/4 cup ground flaxseed meal

2 3/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 cup sugar

1/3 cup dry milk powder

1 cup mashed banana (2-3 bananas)

1/4 cup melted butter

1 egg, beaten

1/3 - 1/2 cup water

1/2-1 cup chocolate chips or chopped walnuts (optional)

Method

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Combine all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl. You could use a stand mixer to make these, but I like making muffins by hand. They usually turn out better because they require very little mixing to combine the wet and dry ingredients; too much mixing makes dense dough and consequently, tough muffins.

Side note 1: As the More-with-Less cookbook says, "Soy flour is expensive among flours, but not as a source of protein". If you make 12 muffins with this recipe, each muffin will have about 6.5 grams of protein in it. I buy Bob's Red Mill Soy Flour from Safeway, but I'm sure you can buy it bulk at many health food or organic stores. I also buy Bob's Red Mill Flaxseed Meal at Safeway and the Spelt Flour from Costco. I'm very happy with the price and quality of all of the Bob's Red Mill products that I've used.

In a separate medium bowl, mash your bananas. I use a waffle-style potato masher for this as it is easy and efficient and ensures there aren't any large chunks of bananas, but you can use any kind of masher or even just a fork. As you probably know, brown, over-ripe bananas make the best banana baked goods. You can also freeze the bananas before you use them. When my bananas begin to get too ripe for me to enjoy eating them, and I'm not in the mood to bake banana bread or muffins, I just peel the bananas, put them in a ziploc bag, and pop them in the freezer. Then I just take them out of the freezer a couple hours before I'm ready to use them. They're brown and slimy and generally disgusting looking, but they make fantastic muffins!

Melt the butter in a mug in the microwave and add that to the banana as well. Then use the mug to beat the egg before adding it to the mashed banana as well. Finally, add the water to the liquids and stir to combine. I often find that 1/3 cup isn't enough, but you may want to start with that, then sprinkle a bit more water into your muffin mix if it seems to dry when you're combining the dry ingredients with the wet.

Side note 2: Ever start baking and then realize you don't have any eggs? That's what happened to me this time around. Thankfully, there are several options for egg substitutes, including using apple puree or tofu, but my favourite, which has worked every time I've tried it, is ground flaxseed. Mix 2 1/2 tbsp of flaxseed meal with 3 tbsp of water and let sit for a few minutes until it gels up, then add to your ingredients as you would an egg. It works like a charm.

I usually add the chocolate chips and/or walnuts to the dry ingredients before adding the wet ingredients, but again, these are optional. My husband prefers chocolate chips in his (it's about the only way I can get him to eat muffins) and I, surprisingly, considering how much I like chocolate, usually prefer walnuts or nothing at all. Then I'll make half of the batch plain and add the chocolate chips to the batter once I've scooped half of it into the muffin tins.

As you're adding the wet ingredients to the dry, remember to add them all at once and to stir gently while you're combining. Don't over-mix. This batter is great because it kind of "fluffs" up and has a nice airy texture; if you over-mix you'll ruin that and have denser, tougher muffins.

Once you've scooped the batter into 12 greased (if necessary) muffins tins, pop them in the oven for about 20 minutes, until they're raised and golden brown on top. Enjoy hot right out of the oven, slathered with lots of butter. Now that's a delicious breakfast. Or snack. Or anytime food. These also taste great cold, and they reheat and freeze well too.

Side note 3: If you prefer banana bread to banana muffins, you can just pour all of the batter into a 9x5x3" loaf pan (greased) and bake for 50 minutes rather than 20. This should also be eaten hot out of the oven and leftover slices taste amazing toasted. I just pop them in the toaster, slather with butter, and enjoy.

Muffins! [Blueberry Oatmeal with Kefir]

I love muffins. They're fun to make and delicious to eat. The only thing I don't like about muffins is cleaning the muffin pan. I have a stoneware muffin pan which makes great muffins but it has to be hand-washed and it's a pain in the rear. Although it's slightly embarrassing to admit, the muffin pan often sits in the sink for a couple days after I make muffins because I hate cleaning it so much. Regardless, this does not deter me from baking these little treasures on a regular basis. Last week I tried a new recipe: Blueberry Oatmeal with Kefir and this morning I made my husband's favourite, Banana Soy with Chocolate Chips. The recipe for the oatmeal muffins is below for your reading and/or baking pleasure, and the recipe for the banana muffins will be posted soon!

Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins with Kefir

I've been hearing a lot about kefir lately and I think I'd like to try growing my own at home. However, I decided I should try it first, so I bought it for the first time a few weeks ago. Of course, as these things go, it then sat in my fridge until nearly its expiration date. So I needed to do something with it and thought: muffins! I imagine that baking it takes away some of its nutritional/beneficial qualities, but it sure makes great muffins. I used this recipe as my starting point, but here is exactly what I did:

Ingredients

1 cup oats

1 cup kefir

1 cup spelt flour

1/4 cup flaxseed meal

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tbsp vinegar

1 egg, beaten

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup olive oil, vegetable oil, or melted butter

1/4 cup apple sauce

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen

Method

Preheat oven to 400°F.

Combine the oats with the kefir in a large bowl and set aside. If you are using anything other than quick oats, you should soak them for at least 10 minutes. (I used quick oats and the muffins turned out great, but I'd like to try them with a more nutritious option, like steel cut oats.)

In a medium bowl, combine flour, flaxseed meal, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon. (I like a bit more salt in my muffins to help bring out the flavours, but if you are sodium conscious, you can reduce the amount to half a teaspoon.)

Once the oats have soaked for an appropriate amount of time, add the vinegar, egg, brown sugar, oil or butter, applesauce, and vanilla to the oats and kefir mixture. If adding vinegar seems odd to you, I totally understand, because I was confused about that as well (it's an ingredient in the recipe I used as a starting point), and the online research I did to find out why produced no results. If you know why, please fill me in! Whatever the case, the finished muffins had no vinegary smell or taste so I'd add it again, not knowing what would change if I didn't. I used regular vinegar, but apparently apple cider vinegar is a good option as well. Also, if you don't have applesauce, just use all oil or butter. I often buy unsweetened Mott's Fruitsations, so for this recipe I used the blueberry one - seemed appropriate. Finally, I like the flavour that vanilla adds to muffins - makes them a bit more cake-like - but if you don't prefer that, you can skip the vanilla all together.

When you have the wet and dry ingredients prepared separately, add your fresh or frozen blueberries to the dry ingredients and stir gently to coat them. Immediately add the wet ingredients (especially important if you're using frozen blueberries to prevent them from bleeding colour into the batter) and fold ingredients together until just combined. Lumpy batter is fine - actually preferable - and over-stirring muffin batter will affect the fluffiness of the finished muffins.

Now you can scoop your batter into 12 prepared muffins cups and bake for 18-20 minutes. Enjoy hot with some butter or let them cool first and eat them whole. They are delicious either way and freeze very well too. I think this may be my new favourite oatmeal blueberry muffin recipe.