Banana Nut Oat Muffins Recipe

These Banana Nut Oat muffins are some of the best muffins I've ever made.I got out of the habit of baking when my stove was replaced. I use my bread machine and my Breville Smart Oven but it's too small for many things. Fortunately I have a muffin pan that makes 6 muffins that fits in it perfectly. And you know what? Making 6 muffins is much better than making a dozen!  Muffins, like cupcakes are really good when they're fresh, but they get dry and stale quickly. So making smaller batches more frequently makes good sense. These muffins use lots of healthy ingredients like oatmeal, oat bran, bananas, walnuts and a little bit of olive oil so you can feel good about eating them. I used extra virgin olive oil because it's what I have on hand but you could use any olive oil you like. Olive oil is great for baking, especially in muffins and quick breads. The muffins are moist, with a little crunch from the nuts, a little chew from the oats, and have that buttery te......

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Peanut Butter & Banana Sandwich: Recipe

There's no getting around it. If you want to eat cheap and healthy food, peanut butter is a natural choice. I know some people can't stand the stuff, but I rather like it. What I don't really like are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This year during the Hunger Challenge I didn't buy any jam, but I did splurge on some bananas at about 30¢ a piece. Because they are large, I only needed a half a banana to make this sandwich. I like it open face, but you could easily slap another piece of bread on it. The good thing about eating something like this is that it's tasty, filling and nutritious, but also well under budget, allowing more money for other meals. But this like almost all my meals is starchy and while it might satiate my hunger it doesn't give me as much energy as I would like. Living on a limited budget is all about making choices. It's not terrible, but left to my own devices I might choose this sandwich no more than once a year. Last year I ......

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Healthy Banana Bread: Recipe

In my continuing effort to eat more whole grains, I have been using King Arthur's organic white whole wheat flour. Let me just say right off the bat, this stuff is amazing! It has a milder flavor and lighter more delicate texture than traditional whole wheat flour which makes it it terrific for baking. It's milled from high protein, hard white spring flour. King Arthur Flour suggests you replace 1/3 all purpose flour with white whole wheat in your baking, but I've found in most quick breads and cookies I can replace half the all purpose flour with white whole wheat and barely notice a difference in taste or texture of the finished baked goods. I wouldn't use it for something super delicate, like a pie crust or angel food cake, but experiment for yourself. I was looking for a recipe for a cake made with fresh guava, and read that you can actually substitute guava for banana in banana bread. I've now tried this bread with guavas and with a combination of guavas a......

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Mocha Banana Bread: Recipe

I read recipes like a scientist would, imagining the results in my head. Like a scientist I also tweak the ingredients and techniques to come up with different results. I rarely follow recipes word for word anymore. Perhaps I'm a mad scientist since I start with solid recipes then I veer off in my own direction. I guess this also means my kitchen is really my lab. Reader comments (that I find with recipes on the internet) allow me to be historian in addition to scientist, to see where things went well, where they didn't and make changes accordingly. The only problem is, I don't always know those making the comments well enough to trust their comments. Is it possible they didn't follow the directions? Do they have radically different tastes than my own? Who are these people passing judgment on someone else's recipes? In looking to develop my own version of banana bread, I started with some cookbooks then moved on to the internet. I found that banana breads are f......

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Banana Walnut Pancakes Recipe

Did you ever buy some ingredient that you thought was good for you? You know what I'm talking about. Oat bran, flax, amaranth, wheat germ, teff, spelt, millet. It sounded like a good idea when you purchased it. You might even have bought it for a specific recipe. But then the inevitable. It sits in your pantry or fridge or maybe even the freezer. Then one day you are cleaning out the shelves and you come upon it. If you're lucky, it still has the label on it. Otherwise out it goes! My weakness seems to be flax meal. I have bought it several times. I don't use it very often so I forget that I have it and I buy it again. Oops. Fortunately flax is pretty easy to use if you put your mind to it. Flax is a seed that can be ground into meal for better digestion. It is very healthy, containing calcium, niacin, iron, phosphorus, and vitamin E. It is also rich in fiber, antioxidant lignans and Omega-3 fatty acids. It has a pleasant nutty flavor and a mucilaginous texture akin to......

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Tropical Muffins Recipe

Have you discovered cocoa nibs? If you've been on the Shafffen Berger chocolate factory tour then you probably tried them and maybe even purchased some. But if you're like me, you probably haven't had many good ideas of what to do with them. Cocoa nibs are the tiny bits of roasted cocoa beans that are used to make chocolate. They are ground into a paste with sugar to make chocolate bars and confections. But when in the nib form they are unsweetened, crunchy, nutty and chocolate-y without being too bitter. The are great in recipes that call for nuts. So far I have only used them in some biscotti I made a while back. Coming home from Hawaii I thought about making some recipes using the kinds of tropical flavors that I enjoyed in baked goods over there, especially bananas and coconut. But then it occurred to me to use vanilla and coco nibs which are grown in the tropics too. These muffins are deliciously tropical and at the same time fairly healthy. Pureeing the banana......

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