Baked Oatmeal Cups

I’m sure you’ve all heard the old adage “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” For most of my life, I ate little or nothing for breakfast, especially when I was in college and couldn’t be bothered to drag my butt out of bed and to the dining hall early in the morning. As I got older, and especially now that I’m a regular working stiff, I can’t possibly make it through the morning without eating something substantial. However, this is tempered by the fact that I am still a lazy bum and want my breakfast to take as little time as possible. Usually I eat cereal with bananas, but in the winter it’s always comforting and satisfying to eat something hot. These baked oatmeal cups can be stored in the fridge and/or freezer, allowing you to make a big batch ahead of time and pull one out each morning. They are best served warm and are a great way to start the day!

Baked Oatmeal Cups (adapted from here)

What You’ll Need

• 3 eggs
• 2 ½ cups skim milk
• 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1 banana, sliced
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 5 cups old fashioned oats
• 1 cup brown sugar, packed
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup fresh/frozen fruit or chocolate chips

What To Do

Preheat your oven to 350°F. In a large bowl, combine the eggs, applesauce, and vanilla.

After these are well-blended, add the brown sugar and banana. If you are using another fruit as your filling, add it at this step. If you are using chocolate chips, add them last.

Mix until the sugar is uniformly combined with the egg mixture. I will say that it seemed odd to me to leave the bananas in slices, but the original recipe did not call for them to get mashed or otherwise worked into the liquid, so I left them as is. The final product tasted great so I think this is more of a personal preference than anything, but I will probably mash them the next time around.

In a separate large bowl, mix the oats, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt.

(I forgot to take a picture. It looked suspiciously like oats in a bowl.)

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture, and stir until blended. Add your chocolate chips if you are using them.

The original recipe tells you to add the milk AFTER you have mixed the wet and dry ingredients together. I completely glossed over the fact that milk was not included in the list of wet ingredients, and had added it when making the egg mixture. I don’t think it made a lick of difference.

Spray 2 12-cup muffin tins with cooking spray, or line with cupcake liners. Note: the original recipe also tells you this makes 18 muffins, which is a dirty lie. I used a 6-cup and a 12-cup muffin tin and had a bunch left over, so go with the 24 cup total. Scoop the mixture evenly into the cups, and bake for 35-40 minutes.

The muffins are done when a knife or toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.  After removing from the oven, let them cool for 15-20 minutes. They may be eaten while warm or stored in the freezer in freezer bags until future use.

My hubby thought these were for dessert, and honestly they could easily be a healthy dessert alternative. We had them for breakfast the morning after I made them, and they were absolutely delicious. I heated mine for 1 minute in the microwave, then topped with some vanilla almond milk, and I just about thought I’d died and gone to heaven. The one pictured in the ramekin above is about twice the size of the actual muffins (it was made from the extra mixture), and I was stuffed after eating it. I had a single muffin this morning and remained full straight through to lunchtime. It’s easy to forget that these little guys pack a potent punch of fiber because you’ll feel so decadent eating one with chocolate chips for breakfast. Next time I plan on trying these with blueberries, mango, or cranberries. Breakfast really can be exciting!

Go Bananas!

I’ve always loved bananas, even though for years all those crazy nutrition people gave them a bad rap for being starchy.  News flash: ALL FRUITS CONTAIN CARBS. Obviously, if you eat 7 bananas a day, you might get a wee bit pudgy.  But let’s be honest – eating bananas is way better than eating, say, a bacon egg and cheese sandwich. I prefer my bananas on the less ripe side, with the peels still a light yellow and no black spots.  Sometimes I get a little overenthusiastic in my banana buying and I can’t eat them quickly enough, so the dreaded black spots appear.  I now have the perfect solution – a quick, easy, and delicious banana bread that specifically calls for the mushy, overripe bananas you never want to eat plain.  This recipe was given to Eric by a customer who used to own a bakery.  When she sold it, she also sold the rights to all of her recipes except for this one. After she heard about this blog, she graciously offered to share this recipe, and I’m very glad she did – let’s all give a big shout-out of thanks to Mary!

Banana Bread

What You’ll Need

• 3 overripe bananas, well mashed (*If using frozen bananas, use 4 [see note])
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 2 cups flour
• ¾ cup sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda

*Note: If you often have extra ripe/overripe bananas laying around, stick them in the freezer until you’re ready to use them. The skins will get very dark brown, but they’re perfect for smoothies or banana bread.  When you take them out of the freezer, let them thaw on the counter for an hour. After you peel them, the banana will slide out of the skin and straight into the bowl!

These offenders were purposely left to reach a mushy state for about 4 or 5 days past their prime. It got to a point where I was a)terrified of getting fruit flies (when you’ve worked in academic science labs your whole life and have experienced Drosophila fruit fly clouds migrating through the vents into your lab from another lab, you’ll understand my hatred. THEY NEVER DIE.) and b) impatient to eat some damn banana bread.

I popped them out of the peels, removed all the stringy bits, and mashed them into a thick but uniform pulp with a fork.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.  While it’s getting toasty, beat the eggs in a small bowl, then add them to the bananas and mix well. Add all of the dry ingredients and mix until you have a smooth batter.  Even though I have a Kitchenaid mixer, I for some reason have made this by hand both times I’ve made it.  It’s a good workout for your upper arms, and the final product doesn’t seem to be affected by my wimpy biceps.

Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan and bake for 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.  For some reason, even though we have established that my oven resides on the island of Sucktastica, the edges of my bread were almost overdone after 1 hour.  I tried 57 minutes the second time I made this and it was perfect.

This bread is absolutely delicious – it’s moist, chewy, and has that fabulous banana flavor that simply cannot be replicated by the fake flavoring crap used in most “banana” foods.  The original recipe suggests adding ½ cup of dark chocolate chips or chopped nuts, both of which would be great additions.  I actually like the plain version of this so much I’m hesitant to mess with it. Plus, I’ve been taking a piece to eat in the car on the way to work as my breakfast in the morning, so it feels a lot less decadent when it doesn’t contain chocolate.  I’m going to try it with the chocolate chips as a healthy alternative to dessert.  What can I say…I’m bananas for this bread!

Southwestern Eggs for Two

Hi intra-web world. This is my first post as both an aspiring chef and blogger. As you'll see with my posts, I'm delightfully self-depricating and usually will call it as I see it. I want to be able to share with you my triumphs and epic defeats so we can all laugh, learn and enjoy. This post is definitely the latter, so enjoy my FAIL and learn!


Southwestern Eggs for Two

What You'll Need:

½ cup of corn
½ cup of black beans
¼ cup cut green bell pepper
Handful of pepper jack cheese (to top eggs)
Salsa (I prefer the spicier the better!)
1 Pocketless pita
4 Eggs


What To Do:

Okay, so I’m sure that most of the people reading this have A) made eggs a ton of times before and B) will probably do a much better job than I did. The purpose of this entry is to learn from my mistakes and sit back, enjoy and laugh with me at my bumbledness…if that even is a word. Probably a more correct title would be “What not to do”, but I digress...so without further ado:

What I like to do first is to grease the pan, put it on low heat and get the ingredients out and prepared.

While the pan gets hot, I open the cans of black beans and corn and drain them. I then combine them into 1 Tupperware (why not, black beans and corn go great together!) and then I chop the pepper, about ½ inches by a ¼ of an inch.

OKAY! Ingredients prepared - now let’s crack the eggs! SPLAT!

Now, you’ll see this later - if you’re making this recipe it’s best to either use 4 eggs with a far bigger pan than I did, or just individually make 2 omelets with 2 eggs each. Learn from my fail!

I added my ½ cup of black beans, my ½ cup of corn, and my ¼ cup of green peppers, combined them into the egg batter and poured that baby into the pan like so:

So my initial thought was "Wow, this looks like it’s going to be really good!" And why shouldn’t it be, when we have all these yummy things together in a pan with more yummy things to come......but suddenly I realized that as I’m scraping the edges down and allowing the batter to run under the cooked part of the omelet, I’d created the omelet version of Frankenstein and alas, I could not control it on the flame.But, I’m no quitter, so I did my best to flip this gargantuan beast of an omelet...and ultimately, I got this...

FAIL

It turned into some scrambled egg mess - and a not very appetizing mess I might add. But try as I might, I was going to ameliorate this situation … and I began thinking what could I do to fix this mess...thinking...thinking...thinking...thinking...thinking...

CHEESE!

Yes, cheese fixes everything...let’s try thatI laid the pepper jack cheese on top of the scrambled egg mess mocking me in the pan …

And already I started to feel a bit better. What else could be done with this?



I dumped some salsa on top of the eggs. Now it looked like I had planned this whole mess out. While the cheese was melting, I turned the oven on (I usually have it going at 350F) and heated up my pita. Nothing says home like a warm pillowy pita.

I thought it might all be okay at this point, but who wouldn’t feel that way in the sight of a heavenly, glowing warm piece of pita bread? Once the pita was warm, I removed it from the oven. I cut the "omelet" in half and placed it on the pita, which looked like so:

Now, after all that, this thing tasted awesome...it was even man-approved by my roommate who graciously ate the other half.

We can all learn from my fail though! In the future I’d say use no more than 2 eggs, ¼ cup total of beans and corn, and 1/8 cup of green pepper, then heat it slowly and pray to God that the omelet doesn’t break when you try to flip it.

If anyone else tries this recipe, which is both fairly quick and cheap to make, please let me know how it comes out!