Sweet Breakfast Muffins

The thrill of owning muffin tins hasn’t worn off yet. After the success of the savory breakfast muffins in our freezer I decided to whip up some sweet breakfast muffins to eat as snacks or grab and go for breakfast. Also, this recipe was posted on pinterest by Ellen, yes THE Ellen. The muffins are vegan (like Ellen and Portia) and have no added sugar.

This recipe is very simple, and doesn’t take long to bake. It’s also easily adaptable to any fresh or dried fruit you’d like to add to the batter.

What you’ll need:

2 cups oats
2 cups orange juice
1 cup apple sauce
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
2 cups flour
2 cups fruit, I used a mix of raspberries and blackberries. You can chose to use fresh or frozen fruit depending on what’s available.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Place the oats and orange juice in a bowl and let it sit for 15 minutes. After the oats have soaked, add the other ingredients and stir well. The recipe makes 18 muffins. My muffin tin only holds a dozen, so I mixed in some chocolate chips to the leftover batter and made them into cookies. Bake for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Enjoy the muffins warm and serve with yogurt.

Savory Breakfast Muffins

A labor day weekend trip to Maine created a perfect storm to bring me to this recipe. First, we were away for four days of the week, so we hadn’t made a dent in our weekly egg share. Second, we picked up some farm fresh bacon and sunflower seed bread at a favorite farm stand in Maine. And third, I bought our apartment it’s very first muffin tin. So I was basically forced to make these toast, egg, bacon cups.

These cups are seriously the cutest thing I have ever seen. But they also pack a hearty punch for breakfast, and can be frozen and reheated individually.

What you’ll need to make a dozen:

12 slices of bread

12 eggs

12 strips of bacon

Salt, pepper and hot sauce (I used Frank’s red hot) to taste

Olive oil

Muffin tin

Preheat your oven to 375. Oil your muffin tin. Slice whatever bread you are going to use and cut out rounds with the top of a glass and mush these into the bottoms of the muffin tins. The bread I picked up from the farm stand was very soft which made it easy to stuff into the tins. Cook your bacon on a skillet. Make sure it is cooked all the way through, but make it softer than you ultimately like your bacon. Once you have taken it out of the skillet wait for it to cool for a few minutes before you attempt to fashion it into circles in the muffin tins (learned that one the hard way). Then crack a single egg into the center of your bread/bacon creation. Add salt, pepper, and hot sauce to taste and cook for 25 minutes.

What to do with scraps?

This recipe creates two by-products that I decided to save for later. First, you will have scraps of bread from cutting circles out of your rectangular-ish slices. I took these bread scraps and plopped them in my food processor to make home-made bread crumbs. These are now stored in my fridge in mason jars, and I’m hoping to use them in upcoming meatballs and/or mac and cheese creations.

Secondly, bacon creates a lot of excess grease that wasn’t necessary for this recipe. I carefully poured this into a mason jar as well and am storing in the back of the fridge. I like to use salvaged bacon grease when I cook collards or other greens to add a smokey meaty flavor. Saving food in these situations makes me feel a lot better about food that is inevitably wasted in our kitchen.

Fancy Pasta with Meatballs

I’m a firm believer in creating meals from what is already in the house. It’s a fun challenge to piece together a meal from what you have in the fridge, not necessarily what a recipe calls for. This meal is a success story of this throw-the-cookbook-out-the-window approach to dinner.

What you will need:

Box of cooked pasta. I used gemelli for me, and at her request, gluten free pasta for Kerrie.

Olive oil

One sliced onion

Quartered cherry tomatoes

1/2 cup red wine

Capers

Salt, pepper, and sriracha to taste

Meatballs:

Ground beef. We used 1.5 pounds of ground beef from our farm share, but I would try this again with ground turkey.

1/3 cups grated cheese. I had a pre-grated mix of parmesan, asiago, and romano.

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

2 teaspoons minced garlic

1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce

Start by putting your water on to boil. Cook your pasta to al dente according to the instructions on the box.

Throw cut onions into olive oil in a large skillet. While they are cooking mix all the ingredients for the meatballs in a large bowl. Most meatball recipes call for egg and/or breadcrumbs, but I had neither. In the future I may experiment with adding these ingredients, but I was perfectly pleased with the end result.

Shape your meat concoction into balls and place into the skillet with onions. After browning lightly on one side I turned the balls and added in the quartered cherry tomatoes and some capers. I then gave one more turn, threw half of the contents of my wine glass (red) into the skillet and covered it for about 7 minutes.

Your meatballs should be cooked all the way through but there will still be sauce in the skillet. Kerrie, a fan of the saucy, supplemented the meatballs, capers, and tomatoes with some store-bought pasta sauce, but I was pleased with my sauce-to-pasta ratio.

I was particularly impressed with how fancy this dish tasted. The capers definitely elevate the flavor palate above your typical spaghetti and meatballs.

PB Banana Oatmeal Bars

 

In the past few days there has been a touch of fall in the air. The temperatures have dropped and baking is finally appealing. This recipe was also a good chance to use up the overripe banana we had stuck in the freezer instead of the trash. At the time it seemed like it would end up in the trash eventually, but it was actually perfect for these bars. Instead of mashing a banana, I stuck the frozen fruit and peel into the microwave. When I took it out it had naturally turned to mush and fell right out of the browned peel.

If you don’t have bananas in your freezer I would just wait until you have a surplus and then whip up these bars. They are quick to make, and you will likely already have all the ingredients in your house.

What you will need:

1 and 1/2 cups quick cooking oats
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup milk (I used soy)
1 egg
1 banana, mashed
1/4 cup peanut butter

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Mix all of the ingredients in a large bowl. Pour into a greased 8 by 8 pan and flatten the batter with a spatula until even. Cook for 20 minutes. Enjoy instantly with tea, or save some  to eat for breakfast or bring to work as a snack. 

Eggplant Pizza

In the summer I try to avoid turning on the oven as much as possible. Unfortunately this does not correlate with a decreased desire for pizza. This is why I was so happy when I discovered stove top pizza. Last time I made one with eggs and arugula. This time I tried eggplant.

What you will need:

Pizza dough. I buy mine from Trader Joe’s, but I don’t see why you couldn’t make it from scratch. I prefer whole wheat dough as a compliment to the eggplant.

Pizza sauce. Trader Joe’s sells this as well, or you can opt for an open can of pasta sauce in your fridge.

Chèvre goat cheese

Eggplant

Olive oil

Basil

Minced garlic

Oregano

Sriracha

Slice the eggplant as thin as you can and cook in a skillet with olive oil and basil.When our farm share over loaded us with basil I stuck some excess in the freezer in olive oil. This was a perfect occasion to use the frozen olive oil and basil chunks. When the eggplant strips are soaked in oil and nicely browned remove them from the heat.

Heat a fresh batch of olive oil in the skillet. Toss in some minced garlic and brown in the pan. Stretch out the pizza dough and place into the skillet. When the first side is browned  flip over. The browned garlic should be stuck into the side of the dough like the top of a garlic bagel. Spoon on your sauce, sprinkle basil and oregano, and add your cheese. Layer with eggplant and top with sriracha.

Brownie for One

Do you ever wish you could have just one brownie fresh out of the oven? Or maybe a better question is do you ever not want one brownie fresh out of the oven? Thanks to the time suck of pinterest I discovered that it’s actually quite easy to make a single serving brownie. In the spirit of being lazy and needing comfort food while alone in the apartment this weekend, I whipped up a monster brownie for one.

What you’ll need:

4 tablespoons brownie mix

2 tablespoons water

Combine the brownie mix and water in a mug, whisk with a fork, and microwave for one minute. The result is a moist, cake-textured brownie.

You can modify this recipe to make it as decedent as you like. I added chocolate chips, walnuts, and dried cranberries to this brownie and then topped with vanilla yogurt. In the future I would like to try a whipped cream or ice cream garnish.

Granted, this doesn’t taste like a “real” brownie. But what it lacks in authenticity it makes up for in the instant gratification of having a treat less than five minutes after you’ve decided you need one.

Goat cheese pasta with fresh veggies

Kerrie is visiting her family this weekend and I’m alone in the apartment for the first time since we moved in. Somehow cooking and cleaning up for one feels like a monumental and unnecessary task. Can I live on toast for a weekend? Wait until she comes back and then do all the dirty dishes? Unfortunately the adult in my head tells me “no.”

I was, however, stuck with this dilemma: how do I eat comfort food while still making a dent in our farm share? The answer is this recipe for goat cheese pasta with veggies.

Yes, that is a heart shaped wooden spoon. Yes, it does say made with love.

Here’s what you will need:

Box of spiral pasta cooked to al dente. You can use any shape, you just want to maximize the surface area of the pasta for efficient goat cheese consumption.

5 ounces chèvre goat cheese

1/4 cup olive oil

1/4 lemon juice

1 large chopped tomato

Raw sweet corn kernels from two ears of corn

1/2 cup sliced chives

Salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, garlic powder to taste

In the bottom of a large serving bowl mix the olive oil, lemon juice, and goat cheese until creamy. Immediately after draining the pasta dump into the bowl and mix until it is evenly coated. Incorporate your cut veggies, chives, and seasoning.

This dish did its job in the comfort department, and since I had no one to share it with I was able to eat it for my next two meals. I have a sneaking suspicious this goat cheese sauce may become as ubiquitous as sriracha in our house. I also like that any veggies we have could be added to the pasta, because what doesn’t go with goat cheese? In the fall I will try it with asparagus that is steamed with the pasta. Hopefully Kerrie will be home for that one.