Some news and some muffins.

Well, I guess it is about time that I 'fess up and tell my lovely readers that I am 20 weeks pregnant, and expecting a baby boy around Thanksgiving this year. This may explain my complete absence from food blogging during the month of April, and half of May, as I popped anti-nausea meds, avoided the grocery store like the plague (nausea trigger for newly pregnant ladies), slept whenever my toddler let me, and quit cooking.

Obviously, I'm back at it, but the phase will be short lived. I already quit entertaining for the duration of this pregnancy. No one likes a grumpy hostess and cooking nice sit-down meals really just results in a backache and complaints.

Around September, I expect this will be a blog about cooking things you can freeze, and then December and January will pass in a haze of eating those freezer meals and relying on the generosity of anyone who will feed me. We did this once before and life will start to get more under control around March... or April. 

Speaking of babies, I had a friend who recently had her second. I am watching and learning in awe for what my life is going to look like in a mere matter of months. I signed up to bring her and her family dinner and breakfast this weekend, so I made muffins this week and froze them.

This is the best muffin recipe I've ever come across because it is so simple, and you can substitute like crazy and it still comes out great. I found it in a cookbook my mother gave me and helped create and edit when my family was living in the Philippines. Sometimes those funny random cookbooks have the best little gems in them. Someone called Kathleen Ricci contributed this one, and I think she is a genius.

Glorious Morning Muffins
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups grated carrots
1/2 cup of pecans
1/2 cup of unsweetened dessicated coconut
1 apple, peeled and grated
3 eggs
1 cup of vegetable oil*
2 tsp vanilla extract

*For a muffin lower in fat the 1 cup oil may be substituted with 1/2 cup of applesauce and 1/2 cup of oil. 

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease a 12 section muffin pan. In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon and salt together. Add the carrots, pecans, coconut and apple. Mix well.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, oil and vanilla extract and mix until blended. Spoon the mixture into the muffin pan and bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes.

Okay, and here are all of the ways I change it.

1) 2 cups of flour - I use whole wheat, oat flour, brown rice flour, and any combo of the above.
2) 2 cups of carrots - I use grated zucchini or carrots, and both taste great.
3) 1/2 cup of pecans - sometimes I use walnuts, sometimes I use pecans, most recently I ran out of both and used granola. True story.
4) 1/2 cup of coconut - I don't like coconut. Bye bye coconut.

So, you can make these muffins as healthy or as not healthy as you would like. Yes, they still have sugar but you can make a lot of adjustments to sneak your veggies in and remove the white flour.

It also helps to have a trusty assistant.

She wanted to watch me cook. Don't worry, she is strapped in, despite what it appears in this photo. Also, she LOVED watching dinner prep.