Pirate Bakery #1: Apple Oat Muffins

In my attempt to avoid my endless assignment work (yes it really is endless) I took a muffin break. I’m really been working on healthifying some of my favourite muffins recipes. I have become a healthy pirate on the seas of deliciousness - stealing my favourite recipes and making them healthier and dare I say better than they were before. My muffiny skull and crossed wooden spoon Jolly Roger warns on comers that tasty things are coming. (yes I have been working too much...humour me).

I have done it again - scrumptious moist muffins and they're about 135 calories each…really low in fat and full of good things. A perfect snack. The only way I could improve these even more would be to swap out sugar for maple syrup, but I have no maple syrup around what can ya do…and the banana was just because I had a ripe banana…you could leave it out if you don't have one. I think it helped.

We are the Pirate Bakery. These are our muffins. Enjoy.

1 small apple peeled and chopped up

2 L brown eggs

1/2 c unsweetened apple sauce

~2T oil (a "glodge" worth. You could leave it out but it seems to add a real richness)

1 ripe banana mashed up smooth

1 c whole wheat flour

1 c white flour

2/3 c brown sugar (could cut to 1/2 if you like. I like this amount)

1 ¼ c 1% milk

1 T vanilla

1 T cinnamin

½ c wild oatmeal

1 well rounded T baking powder

½ t salt

Put oats and milk in a bowl and let sit 5 minutes. Then add everything except the flour and baking powder and mix up well with a whisk. Mix flour and b.powder together and sprinkle over top evenly, then mix until just mixed (Don't overmix or you get chewy muffins) and fill up muffin papers in the pan to the top…these don't rise too much so don't worry about overflow. I had enough for probably 13 muffins, but what can ya do? J just ate the rest of the batter. Problem solved :)

Bake for ~18-20 minutes at 375, until the tops bounce back when you tap them. Do not overbake them or you will be sad. Noone wants to be sad. Use a toothpick to check if they're done if you aren't sure - it will come out clean. And lately I usually don't do muffin papers, but for low fat muffins like this break down, swallow your environmentyness and use muffin papers…otherwise they're a real bitch to get out of the pan whole…

There you go - enjoy. I did.

Delish and good for ya.

Old lady salad rocks!

I am so glad my husband loves what everyone else seems to think of as granny salad. It's so easy and yummy. Not too bad for you either. I make it all the time...

It's this easy:
Grate or finely chop up ~2 c green cabbage and throw in 1 diced apple & a handful of chopped nuts (almonds, pumpkiin seeds or walnuts are great). You can even add in 1/2 c seedless grapes cut in half add to this (or add them instead of the apple OR cabbage). Add ~ 1/3c low-fat mayo (just enough to cover/ coat things) and stir together. Let it sit about 15 minutes for the natural sugars to seep out of the fruit and there you go - simple easy delicious coleslaw/old lady salad.

Love it. I'm toying with replacing some mayo with fat free sour cream to see if it tastes the same to cut out some fat. I'll report on the results :)

Cauliflower and apples? Together in a soup? You're Mad! MAD I tell you!

I love soup. My mum made it almost every day when I was growing up and she makes the best homemade soup. To me, in the winter a big bowl of thick soup is the perfect thing to make you feel content. The January issue of Vegetarian Times had a bunch of great cream-free thick & yummy soup recipes in it. I've already made the Kabocha soup from this issue and it was insanely good, so I thought I'd try another one:

Curried Cauliflower Soup

Hey! Where are you going?
Stop sneaking off - come back here...it really is fantastic. It's also super easy to make, low fat and healthy too-even gluten free! Honest...try it out and you'll see.

Here's all you need:
2 T olive oil
1 small onion chopped (~1 cup)
1 medium Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored and coarsely chopped (~1 cup)
1T curry powder
1 or 2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 large head of cauliflower, chopped into 1 inch pieces (~ 6 cups)
4 c low sodium vegetable broth (I use McCormick's vegetable bullion cubes - they rock)
1 t honey (or agave nectar if you have it)
1 t rice wine vinegar (apple cider vinegar will do in a pinch)
Pinch of salt (if you think it needs it)

In a large pot, over medium-high heat, heat oil and saute onions 5-7 minutes until soft and turning golden. Don't burn them...the slow browning adds flavour. Stir in apple, curry, garlic and cook 2 more minutes. Add vegetable broth and cauliflower and bring to a strong simmer, stirring all the yumminess off the bottom of the pot. Cover, reduce heat and simmer 20 minutes. Cool 20 minutes.
Blend soup in food processor in batches until it is smooth. Add the honey and vinegar and a pinch of salt. Enjoy.

This soup grows in flavour as it sits, so it's even better the next day.
The first time I made it I didn't quite puree the soup enough, so it almost had the consistency of cream of wheat, but man...it still tasted delicious!
Try this out - it's a bit unconventional, but it's amazing, and a pot makes enough soup for 3 or 4 lunches - how perfect is that? I had yummy soup for lunch all week. Score!

Another Mad Invention - Apple Gjetost Pie

Now that Magnus has explained the oddity that is gjetost, let me fill you in on our pie experiment. Magnus left a phone message about this whole pie combo a few weeks ago and since then I've been waiting for a time to have a few hours to try it out. First time we were thwarted by a lack of gjetost (tragic) at the local cheese emporium, but finally Magnus could find the cheese and I had a rainy sunday afternoon free...so it was, indeed, time for pie.

Well, I've always liked toffee and butterscotch, but have an aversion to overly sweet things...gjetost is brilliant in that it taste like toffee or some sort of caramel...minus the sweetness. It has the consistency of hard cream cheese, and is delicious in little nibbly quantities. How it melted? We had no idea...which made it more intriguing. As a kid I liked toffee apples...I just couldn't eat a whole one from all the sugar...this seemed like a perfect combination. Cheese and pie? Well, I've seen and tried the cheddar apple pie combo, and it never really was my thing...like too many pickles on a sandwich, the cheddar was overpowering and, in my opinion, detracted from a perfectly good pie...and cheese. Any cheddar apple recipes I found called for grated cheese in the crust itself or melted on the top crust, so I had to improvise...mad science indeed.
I did a bit more piesearch before starting, looking in my trusty Joy of Cooking for a good apple pie recipe (this book has *never* let me down and has tonnes of references on methods of cookery). I found a good recipe, and (as usual) cut back the sugar a bit, to let the flavour of the fruit shine through. I also decided to not make the pie deep dish, as I usually do, as I wanted the ratio of apples to gjetost to be one that would allow the flavour of both to shine through.

I used my favourite pie crust recipe (same as in the peach pie post below). I made the recipe, divided it into 4 balls, as it is for 4 pies, froze 3 of them, and rolled out the remaining ball for crust. I rolled out the bottom crust and pressed it into the pie pan. Then I got to the apple filling, a variation on the Apple Pie I recipe from Joy of Cooking:

-6 peeled thinly sliced gala apples
-1T lemon juice
-1/2 c white sugar (less than the 3/4 c called for in the original recipe)
-1/2 t cinnamon
-2 T flour

I mixed this all together and spread evenly in the crust. Apples shrink when you bake them, so I filled it 1 1/3 times full to get a decently thick pie. Then I sliced the gjetost about 1/8 inch thick and laid it evenly over the top of the fruit...like so:We had a brick of gjetost about 3 inches by 2 inches by 1 inch and used 3/4 of it...the rest of it went in our bellies while we waited. Yum. Then I layered the top crust over it all, wetting and pinching the sides with a fork and cutting some slits in the top.

Then it went in a 425° oven for 30 minutes, after which I turned down the heat to 350° and baked it another 20-25 minutes until the crust was golden and the filling was starting to bubble out the crust slits.
Not to shabby eh? We were excited...it looked delicious. We managed to distract ourselves for 15 minutes to let the pie cool and sit a bit before having some...with vanilla ice cream of course.

THE VERDICT:

As it turns out, gjetost and apples go brilliantly together in a pie. the caramel flavour of the cheese enhances the fruit flavour, but isn't overwhelming, and the usual sugary sweetness of caramel was absent, making for a rich creamy flavour. Decadent.
The gjetost didn't melt as much as it softened...it sort of fused to the crust and went a bit soft, like low fat cheese does when you broil it on toast. I give it two thumbs up. I will definitely make this again...and I highly recommend you give it a try, if you can hunt down some gjetost from your local exotic cheese shop.

I love being a mad scientist...:)