Healthier banana muffins

I can't tell you how many calories my recipe has because I have no way of measuring calories, but you can be fairly certain that these muffins have less than the up-to-740 calories (!!) in the offenders on this list of "Top 12 Dangerous Muffins".  

And it's not just muffins that are our present culture's sugar-bomb offenders.  WHAT IN THE SAM HOUSTON IS THE MATTER WITH PEOPLE SUCH THAT THEY'D ACTUALLY PUT CRAP LIKE THESE DRINKS INTO THEIR MOUTHS?!

Screengrabbed from this source.  

Physical depictions of sugar equivalents have become very popular since "The Weight of the Nation" was released by HBO (they were one of the first to make this kind of presentation to people).  Read on to see an analogous sugar-in-a-bag depiction for my muffins.

Screengrabbed from this site.  

Seriously, I don't know what the hell goes through peoples' minds when they consume crap that is so obscenely chock full of refined sugars.  It does not take an aggregate IQ over 85 to know by common sense that sugar-heavy drinks and sugar-heavy muffins are extremely unhealthy.  As in, poison yourself unhealthy.

There are no analogous sugar-bag depictions for muffins, just calorie summaries.  This is the standard ridiculous Google return for 'muffin sugar', although obviously muffins will vary tremendously in calories.  

Big Mac, just for comparison.  Both screengrabbed from Google.  

Anyway, here's my ingredient list and I will follow with step-by-step pics of the preparation process.  All dry measures are heaping measures except for the sugar.  

Ingredients:

• 3.5 large bananas, aged
• About 0.5 cup brown sugar (or less)
• Dollop of molasses (1 tablespoon)
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 0.5 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 0.5 cup Teff flour (if available, else substitute white or wheat)
• About 3 tablespoons of ground flax meal
• 0.3 cup light olive oil
• 0.5 to 0.75 cups ground almonds (depending on taste)

Procedure:  

Start by preheating your oven to 350 degrees.  As it is warming up, combine ingredients thusly:  

Bananas should be mushy but not rotten.  

Combine dry ingredients EXCEPT for brown sugar in a sifter.  That's the heaping cup of whole wheat flour in the background and my favorite other flour, teff, in the foreground.  Teff is no longer available locally - Whole Foods used to carry it but now it must be ordered over the internet.  It ain't cheap, but neither are cancer and diabetes.    

Sift to the extent possible.  Obviously the flax meal won't go through the sifter, but get as much of the material through as possible and then just dump the remainder on top.  

In a separate bowl, combine eggs, olive oil, molasses, and brown sugar.  Mix coarsely - do not homogenize.  

By the way, this is what my brown sugar looked like in the obligatory plastic sack.  This is not for one muffin - this is for TWELVE large muffins. And I used less than depicted here.  Obviously the muffins also get some natural sugars from the bananas, but my point is, this recipe is not overflowing with refined sugars.   

Ah yes, the bananas.  Peel them and mash them on a plate.  They should be nice and soft.  

Mix the bananas in with the other wet ingredients.  I do not like homogeneous banana bread or banana muffins, so I leave mine lumpy.  Not as extremely lumpy as pictured here, but visibly lumpy.  

Fold together the wet and dry ingredients, again, not making the mix too homogeneous.  You MIGHT have to add a couple of tablespoons of water, depending on how dry your mix turns out to be.  If it looks like this above, you should be OK.  

Once you've got it mostly mixed, throw the almonds in and continue to stir.

This is what my almonds looked like.  You'll notice that the volume of my almonds exceeds that of my brown sugar.  Almonds are good for you.  Refined sugar is not.  

Spoon into a muffin tin.  I like to use muffin papers.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes.  

Voila.  

You'll notice that my muffins are a little muffin-toppy-saggy.  I don't have much gluten in this combination of two flours (whole wheat and teff), so they don't rise all puffy like higher-glycemic muffins.  No matter - they are light enough so that you won't notice anything wrong with the texture, and they taste great.  Try 'em.  And for God's sake, stay the hell away from sugary drinks.  

Post-polar vortex paleo plateful

After the weather we've had during the past two days, you might think that we've been transported back to the close of the Paleolithic Period, specifically the last ice age.

Idyllic garden scenes like this will not be recurring in my yard for the next several weeks.  Although I was able to save most of my cultivars, there were multiple casualties, especially among more mature plants which were harder to protect due to their size and the fact that we had so much below-freezing wind. 

He might produce, but he's definitely frost-damaged.  No matter.  Occasional losses are expected with an activity like gardening.  We are lucky in greater Houston to have an 11+ month growing season most of the time.    

A few of his younger cousins fared better because I tented them and heated with warming lights. 

I mentioned in this recent post that the broccoflower shown above weighed in at 3.5 pounds, and that I used one pound of it in making a batch of green chili chicken stew. 

This stuff.  Yummy. 

Well, what about the other 2.5 pounds?  For much of that, I modified this "Broccoflower with Spicy Italian Sausage" recipe published by blogger Paleo Spirit. 

I'll show my version of the recipe below, but first this handy info graphic which is a partial screengrab from this FriendsEAT blog site which, in turn, credits this commercial site from which the graphic now appears to be missing.  That's why we bloggers are constantly screengrabbing content - not because we want to claim it for ourselves, but because the shelf life of any given internet item is often shorter than the shelf life for my hefty broccoflower pictured above. 

The Paleo diet is like every other relatively new eating idea to come along - not without a great deal of opposition, confusion, and controversy, including recent controversy (e.g., this unfavorable CNN article published just yesterday). 

This part I largely agree with, within limits.  I eat only whole grains, but not an enormous amount of them, certainly nowhere near the quantity that had been originally recommended on the USDA Food Pyramid. 

Op. cit.

Anyway, as I've mentioned in previous blog posts, you can't just grow edible stuff in your suburban or urban back yard and anticipate a successful lifestyle modification on that basis alone.  You have to follow through and execute a plan to put your fruits and vegetables to uses that you will enjoy, and you have to be able to do it within the timeframe of each micro-harvest (you can plant according to locally-specified planning guides, and most cultivars are sold with published expected maturation dates, but vegetables are like babies - they pop into the world on their own schedule, not yours).

So with that in mind, here's how I adapted Paleo Spirit's recipe.

This is the sausage we use most frequently.  Pederson's Natural Farms is located roughly between Austin and Dallas, and their products are available at Whole Foods.  Due to the distances and time involved, I only manage to get to Whole Foods once every one to two months, but I stock up on products like this and keep them in our massive freezer. 

Half of that sausage chopped up, with minced garlic. My husband and child are both garlic freaks.  And I have to live with them.  

Adding chopped red bell pepper and green onions, because I have those growing in my garden (I covered them with a plastic bucket to protect from the aforesaid polar vortex). 

There's about a cup of loose green onions and three quarters of a cup of red pepper here.  The ratios are not critically important. You can add different vegetables to your taste.  

Paleo Spirit's recipe version indicates that the broccoflower should be food-processed into fine pieces, but I didn't do that.  I don't harvest my cauliflower or broccoflower until the heads start to loosen a bit, so it becomes easier to chop than a store-bought head.  I chopped it like this, and then chopped it more finely again.  

Adding to the other fried ingredients, about a cup and a half. 

Like pretty much every sausage, this one is very high in fat (about 80% per the manufacturer's label).  Furthermore, a good fraction of that is saturated fat. 

The way I deal with the issue of fat is to make the sausage into a minor proportion of the overall meal. 

After cooking the dish with the broccoflower mixed in for about ten minutes, turn off the heat and add a fistful of chopped parsley.  The remaining heat will be enough to cook the parsley slightly, without totally killing it. 

Here's where I depart from paleo preference and mix in a bit of grain.  In this case, it's Forbidden rice, a trademarked term for a Chinese black rice which is higher in certain nutrients than conventional white rice. 

If your sausage is 80% fat but only ends up comprising 30% of the ingredients, then your total meal ends up being 24% fat, which is not obscene in my books.  My husband and child preferred the same dish with black beans and brown rice on the side, so their total fat content was probably around 15%. 

Anyway, we decided that this recipe is definitely a keeper.  The sausage balances out the intensely primal taste of the broccoflower really well.  I know what you're thinking - I could stir-fry strips of cardboard with a high-quality sausage, and it would still turn out well, because that's what sausage does - it makes stuff taste good.  You're probably right, but I don't give it too much thought.  This recipe gives me one more means of mainstreaming my voluminous annual cruciferous harvest, and that's good enough for me.

Avatar aside, last year when I had this cruciferous windfall, I ended up giving a lot of it to several sets of neighbors because I couldn't make productive use of it all at once. 

Squash those gardening fears

I meet sooo many folks who would love to garden, but then faced with the idea of actually doing it, they get this wistful look on their faces and conclude that it's not possible for them. 

Yellow will be my theme color today.

Microsoft clip art.

My advice if you fall into this category: Start very small and see if it really does become a practice that you feel motivated to integrate into your lifestyle.  One of my neighbors did this last year, growing just a few fruits and vegetables.  This year, he had five cubic yards of soil delivered to his house (that's a lot, by the way), so that he could expand his personal gardening empire.  "All these years we've been married, I never knew he was like this," his wife said to me, shaking her head in disbelief and wonder at his newly-manifesting passion. 

If you fall into this category of gardening uncertainty, understand that, on the upper Texas coast, the top two obstacles to overcome are poor soil quality and the need for a strict (almost daily) watering regime, especially during the mean season (i.e., summer). 

There's also a third obstacle that daunts many suburban would-be gardeners, and the nature of that obstacle can take folks by surprise: what to do with the vegetables once they are harvested.  Mainstream America has moved so far in the direction of consuming mostly-processed foods that many people no longer know how to prepare an arm-load of fresh vegetables.  With this in mind, I'm going to show you an example of what to do in this fun photo series below.

In this post from last month, I talked about overcoming the soil obstacle, and I showed this stock tank with its newly-amended soils and newly-planted seedlings, including that squash plant out in front.  This was my first attempt at growing squash. 

Fast forward about six weeks: 

There's the same view a few days ago.  The good news is that my first ever squash plant "took".  The bad news is that it "took" to an extreme of becoming six feet in diameter, squashing every other seedling in the tank, but let me not get onto that tangent. 

Awwww, how cute!!  Squash blossoms are beautiful, but what they produce is even better. 

Incidentally, HCMG has reported some pollination problems with local squash and other vegetables (screengrab from their Facebook timeline), due to an apparent problem with bee shortages.  We have observed no shortages of bees in Centerpointe - in fact, quite the opposite, and my squash pollinated nicely, as this pic shows:

This is what became of that same flower - but what to do with such a strange looking object??  It looks like a giant yellow tektite or something. (Humorous factoid: Blogger knows how to auto-correct the spelling of the profoundly obscure word "tektite".  That's impressive.)

It's not a tektite - it's a crook-neck squash, but when hanging over the side of a stock tank, it will grow straight under its own weight, rather than having a crooked neck. 

Any seasoned gardeners looking at this particular photo will be thinking, "Ya screwed up, girlie!" but I will get to that in a minute. 

Here's another one with more conventional form.  Incidentally, those ants streaming into the adjacent blossom weren't doing any harm to the plant.  They just wanted the sweet nectar. 

So here's the first two harvested squash.  I named them Fat Man and Little Boy, a reference that some folks might not appreciate as objectively as I do.  Little Boy is actually not "little" compared to Fat Man, but he's more skinny, which is why the comparison seemed to fit, at least in a relative sense. 

OK, so now it's time to do something with these squash.  And anything to do with vegetables usually begins with a base layer of onions. 

In another stock tank, I grow a couple of onion varieties  in abundance.  If you grow these, you have to consume them (or at least cut them back) on an ongoing basis, or they'll just grow to take over the place and will also get tough and useless in the process. 

So I hacked off a couple of handfuls of onions...

"Let's put 'im in a pot" to cop the famous line from the movie Cold Mountain, a line from the breathtaking performance that won an Academy Award for fellow Houstonian Renee Zellweger. 

The "pot" in my case is always a 14-inch flat-bottomed wok, the rationale for which you can read here. 

Meanwhile, as the onions were cooking, I peeled and chopped Fat Man, and he turned out to be perfect, as non-nuclear squash go. 

"Ya screwed up, girlie!"

Yeah, I did, but it was my first attempt at growing squash, so I was unsure of when to harvest them.  Fat Man was great, but Little Boy proved to be already too old to use productively.  Squash toughen with advanced age, and them's not good eatin'.  See the hard outer rind around the outside, and the well-formed seeds inside?  This one had to go into the compost pile. 

But that was OK because I just went out and harvested three more baby squash from that massive plant, and they were tender and good. 

Now, I would be thrilled to use humanely-raised pork in a dish like this, but buying that on short notice in Clear Lake is near impossible.  So this is just mainstream tenderloin that I used instead. 

That goes in next (diced first), for browning. 

This is a crucial step: I know of no other spice that will work in this dish as well as Spice Lady's Mexican Mix.  She still doesn't seem to have a web site, but her stuff is sold at Clear Lake Shores Farmers Market and her address is listed as 609 Bradford Avenue #104, Kemah Texas and phone 832-563-6908. 

You'll notice that I'm not using measurements here.  You can look at the wok and deduce the ratios for the most part - the ingredient proportions don't have to be precise.  I was making a large volume of this dish, so I probably used four tablespoons of Mexican Mix.

I also added a dash of chipotle pepper and another dash of ground cumin and about two tablespoons of salt. 

After the meat got a bit browned, I threw in two diced potatoes. 

Then Fat Man and his three young siblings. 

Then I added 1.5 small cans of organic diced tomatoes. 

I also peeled and diced a few of this kind of squash which is generally referred to as "calabaza" or Mexican squash.  The dish would have been fine without it, but I had it in my refrigerator, so might as well use it. 

This dish I'm presenting here is a variant on a traditional Mexican stew that I've heard called "calabaza y puerco" or "calabaza con puerco", which basically just means pork and squash. 

Cover and simmer for about a half an hour, stirring every five to ten minutes so that the vegetables cook evenly. 

The tomatoes and squash will de-water with cooking, combining with the pork juices and spices to create a fantastic broth.  Brothy dishes usually freeze well because the broth excludes the air pockets that can lead to degradation (for more info on that, see this post titled "Healthy freezer-based diet management strategy"). 

Serve with pinto beans and corn tortillas. 

The moment of truth.  This stuff was fan-freakin'-tastic!!!

And look at the nutrition:  lean pork loin, with very little fat on it.  I used a bit of olive oil to sauté the green onions, so only healthy fat there.  And really, the balance of this meal is grains, legumes, and vegetables.  Pretty healthy stuff. 

So there's one idea for using back-yard squash harvested before they reach a tektite stage of toughness.  Happy eatin'!