Easy Fruit (Your Choice!) Muffins

It's the last week before school resumes. While my boys finished the last few pages of their Summer Bridge workbooks, I thought I'd whip up a tasty snack.  It felt like a muffin day.  I knew I had some frozen fruit and wanted a healthy recipe to compliment it, so I Googled 'berry muffins' and zeroed in on the Berry Rich Muffins recipe from Eating Well.   It's a super recipe on its own, but I modified it to suit our tastes and produced this new recipe (below).

The recipe accommodates a range of choices of ingredients.   It's also not too sweet and is very fluffy.  My kids loved these muffins (below) right out of the oven, sliced open, with a touch of butter.

In these muffins, I used cherries.

Ingredients
1/4 cup grapeseed oil* or canola oil
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon sugar
1 egg
1 egg white
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup buttermilk - or - 1 cup regular milk with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice mixed in*
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
2 tablespoons ground flax seed 
2 cups flour (white, wheat or a combination*, depending on how healthy you want them to be)
1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen fruit (defrosted) (blueberries, halved raspberries, pitted/quartered cherries, mashed bananas and chopped strawberries all would work well individually or in your favorite combination)

*my preferences

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. In a stand mixer on medium speed, combine:
oil, brown sugar, egg, egg white, vanilla & buttermilk or milk/lemon juice combo
3. Add: salt, baking powder, baking soda, ground flax seed.  Mix thoroughly. (Though it's not commonly done, I add these to the "wet" mixture before adding flour so I'm sure they're evenly distributed.)
4. Add: flour.  Mix thoroughly.
5. Reduce speed and gently add: fruit. 
6. Pour the mixture into 12 lined cupcake cups.  Sprinkle tops with sugar.
7. Bake until springy (don't overcook!) - probably about 15 minutes, but cook times vary depending on the oven used.
8. Enjoy.

As an aside: Have you ever wondered what purposes baking soda and baking powder serve in cooking?  Read here for a great explanation.

Spring Themed Sugar Cookies

Have I mentioned how happy I am to be back East?  It's glorious to see the explosion of life and color here in Arlington, Virginia.  Tulips and daffodils are everywhere and I was so envious of folks who'd planted bulbs last fall, I decided to buy a few dozen daffodil bulbs that were 50% off at a local garden center and planted them a few weeks ago as an experiment.  I did not have high hopes they'd bloom this spring, but lo and behold, I am beginning to see daffodils!

I can't tell you how wonderful it is to see this.  I celebrated by pulling out my cookie and cake decorating box, selecting some pastel colored decorating sugars and mixing up a batch of sugar cookie dough.  (This made my boys happy about spring, too.)  Here is the recipe I remember from childhood, modified to suit my tastes. 

Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup organic lightly salted butter, softened (don't melt it in the microwave - just let it sit out until it's soft)
1 1/2 cups organic sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or maybe a touch more depending on your taste)
1 organic egg
2 3/4 cups of organic all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
colored decorating sugar

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350F.  In a stand mixer, combine butter and sugar and blend until smooth.  Add egg and vanilla and blend until incorporated.
2. In a separate bowl, thoroughly mix together the flour, baking soda and baking powder.

3. While the stand mixer is running, slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and blend until fully mixed.
4. Roll the dough into balls roughly 1 inch in diameter.  Dip the top of each ball in some colored sugar and place the ball sugar-side up on an ungreased baking sheet.  Bake approximately 8 minutes until the bottom of the cookie turns golden brown. (If you wait until the top is golden brown, the bottom will be dark brown and the cookie will taste burned.)

Makes about 48 sugar cookies.  If you want to use a cookie cutter rather than dough balls, chill the dough first for 30 minutes, then roll out.  The dough also freezes well, so you can make a few cookies at a time, fresh for dessert.

Enjoy!

All Natural Electrolyte Drink Recipes

My older son just broke his 7.5 year no-stomach-bug streak.  He's 7.5 years old, so we had a perfect record until now.  Very sad.  Truly.

We're on day two of the massive north-south ailment and the worst appears to be over, but he still has a fever and has been lethargic.  While he's been drinking regularly and well throughout, it's time for some electrolytes.  My very kind sister brought over some unflavored Pedialyte, which was immediately put to use.

As he polished it off, I had to ask, how could I make my own homemade version?  Because while Pedialyte is a great emergency resource, if I'm the sort of person who might try to make her own mascara, I'm likely to also make my own sick-day drink - or ice pops. 

e·lec·tro·lyte/iˈlektrəˌlīt/

Noun:

A liquid or gel that contains ions and can be decomposed by electrolysis, e.g., that present in a battery. The ionized or ionizable constituents of a living cell, blood, or other organic matter.

Rather than "regurgitate" everything I learned through my Googling, let me just give you a few good links for recipes (you might want to skip the Kool-Aid, though):

Natural Electrolyte Replacement Drink Recipes

Another Electrolyte Replacement Drink Recipe

Homemade Pedialyte Pops

Stay well!

5 Great Green Apps

The other day, as I scoured the web for good ideas for a home project we’re doing, it occurred to me that the process was far easier this time than the last time we collected ideas.  Why?  Because I’m using Pinterest to do it. I can pin any photo I find on the web to my Home Design bulletin board on Pinterest.  No more going through magazines, cutting them up, sticking the cut-out photos in a file, jotting notes on post-its to better explain what I liked about the images, etc.  That kitchen tile I liked in the photo I found on Houzz.com?  I can show the photo of the tile via the Pinterest app on my iPhone to my tile guy and he can help me find it.  That got me thinking about other apps I regularly use that help me to be less wasteful - and more efficient. 

Here are the five “Green Apps” I use most regularly:

1.     Pinterest: for the reasons indicated above.

2.     JotNot Scanner: take a photo with your smart phone of anything and fax or email it directly from there.  Now if you could only get other people to stop sending you faxes...

 

3.     iRecycle: hop on to www.earth911.com‘s app, iRecycle, and find out where the nearest place is to recycle your (hopefully) now redundant fax machine – or virtually anything else, for that matter!

4.     iRewardChart: set up paperless reward charts for your kids.  Award points for achieving certain goals and set up rewards your kids can earn using those points.  It’s helpful to be able to award points as they are earned (such as right after you leave a church service during which your child did not melt down), to really drive home the praise.  Similarly, if I’m in the checkout at the supermarket, I sometimes find it helpful to hold my cell phone up and calmly say to my four-year-old “if you ask me again for another candy bar before we leave this store, you’ll lose two ‘cooperation points’.  You do want to go on that camping trip worth sixty points, don’t you?”  Works like a charm.

5.     Evernote: whenever I need to create a grocery shopping list, I do it on Evernote.  I can create the list either on my desktop or on my cell phone and the two devices will sync up.  When I’m in the store, I just click the button next to the item to note that it’s already in my cart.  This is just one of many ways to use this great app.  It helps me use less paper and create less waste, helps me save money by NOT buying things that aren’t on my list, and my seven-year-old actually enjoys grocery shopping with me when he can check things off as we find them.

 You might also want to check out Light Bulb Finder and Hootroot – two apps that won the EPA's Apps for the Environment Challenge.

What are your favorite green apps?