Baked Oatmeal Revisited

Another of my favorite breakfast-on-the-go recipes–Baked Oatmeal.

I’m not sure really what to call it–it’s not a quick bread, it’s not a cookie, it’s not a muffin–there’s no flour, so its consistency is really just that of, well, oatmeal.  Except cool and in bar or muffin form.

The basic original recipe I put up here a while ago; this time I varied it a bit to see if this would work. So:

Baked Oatmeal Recipe, Banana Variation

mix together:

• 1.5 cups oatmeal
• 1/8 cup oat bran (optional)
• 1 tbs. brown sugar
• 1 mashed banana
• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• pinch salt
• Few shakes cinnamon, ginger, and/or nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (opt)
• 1/2 cup (or more!) dried fruit, like cranberries, currants, raisins, blueberries, whatever (add last)

Spread in 8×8 greased baking dish. (or 9×9, because that’s what I have, it’s just a little thinner) or divide into 12 portions in a muffin tin. (They will be only about an inch thick.)

Bake at 375 for 30-35 minutes in a baking pan or 20 minutes in muffin tins.  Let cool. Cut into squares, or remove from muffin tins. Store in fridge if it’s not going to be gone within a day or two.

VERDICT: Delicious.  Honestly, even too sweet with the little bit of brown sugar added, because of the banana; next time I’d just leave it out.  I wonder what this would be like with a little peanut butter…or with 1/2 cup pumpkin puree in place of the banana, and maybe a little orange juice in place of some of the milk…seriously, any of the funky variations to which we treat oatmeal could be applied here as well…

Pumpkin Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies: lightened and health-ened

It’s fall, which means pumpkin starts to sound just YUMMY.

So I went looking for a recipe for pumpkin-oatmeal cookies, the hope being that this could be a breakfast-cookie kind of thing I could munch on the go or have as a desk-drawer snack here and there.

The original recipe was found here, and it looks absolutely delicious…but that cup of butter and 1 1/2 cups of sugar thing had to go.  So  played around with it.

So here’s what I tried:

Guiltless Pumpkin Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies (makes about 2 dozen)

Just so you know what I did–I substituted nonfat yogurt for about half the butter, and stevia for about half the sugar. I used whole wheat flour instead of white.

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 1/3 cups old fashioned oats
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• ½ tsp stevia
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• ½ tsp each nutmeg and ginger
• ¼ tsp cloves and cardamom
• ½   cup (1  stick) unsalted butter – softened
• ¼  cup plain yogurt
• ½  cup dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 cup pumpkin puree
• 1 large egg
• 1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup currants, raisins, or other dried fruit of choice (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and prepare cookie sheets with foil or parchment paper (I used parchment)

Combine flour, oats, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, stevia, salt, and spices in one bowl. (Or skip this step, which I always do…you just have to be more careful when combining them with the wet ingredients so you don’t get all your baking powder in one little lump in the cookie to the front of the baking sheet…)

Cream butter and sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Add honey, yogurt,  pumpkin, egg and vanilla – mix well.

Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Add dried fruit; mix again. Do not over mix. Chill dough for 30 minutes.

Drop cookie dough onto baking sheets by spoonful, depending on how big you want them; remember larger cookies will take a little longer.  I sort of made each one golf-ball-sized and then flattened them a little.

Bake 20 minutes for this size cookies, or a little longer for bigger ones. Cool on baking sheets for a couple minutes and then transfer to wire cooling rack.

VERDICT: A keeper;  I like them a lot.  It should be noted that they definitely taste more breakfast-y than dessert-y–soft and cakey, rather than crunchy. Husband and son sort of squinted and said, “It’s okay.” Daughter, “Delicious! But I don’t want any more.” Which also means she’s not bowled over. I think they are very good, though, and this means I just don’t have to share them.  I made some with currants and some without; the ones with currants are definitely better.  I can very faintly taste the stevia-aftertaste, but mixed with real sugar in the recipe it is almost invisible. Next time I might leave it out all together and throw a mashed banana in there for extra sweetness. Someone wiser than I would have to do calorie calculations on this–but there’s really not much to complain about in this ingredient list.

Breakfast on the go.  A good thing.

UPDATED VERDICT: unfortunately, these don’t taste anywhere near as good the second…or third…day.  They get sort of gluey and dry.  I think the currants or other dried fruit would need to be upgraded from “optional” to “necessary” to make them a decent thing to keep on the list…

Mission: Joyful Healthy Eating

Okay, I’ve finally decided (and if you read my Green Phone Booth post last week, you probably knew this was coming) it’s time to start really holding myself accountable for the line between wholesome unprocessed unhealthy foods and wholesom unprocessed healthy foods. The line between real food and faux-food has not been all that difficult for me, but separating the real-healthy from the real-full-of-empty-calories-this-is-why-I’m-carrying-around-this-butt continues to be a substantive challenge.

The early steps are being fairly straightforward–just suck it up and eat less, cut all empty foods, especially refined sugars and flours, from my diet for the first full week and keeping them extremely low for the following or so, and stop snacking.  Straightforward, but difficult. I allowed  myself one teaspoon of sugar for my one morning cup of coffee, and I allowed myself to suck on hard candies especially in the afternoon when I feel like I Just Have To Eat Something, and I allowed myself one inch-diameter very dark chocolate piece per day; if even that doesn’t serve to break the sugar addiction, I’ll go farther, but it’s seeming okay.  I’m making friends with stevia. (A post for another day, once I’ve played with it more.) I’m cooking a small portion of the whole wheat pasta I can’t sell the family on on pasta night, and eating mine with large amounts of veggies instead of a small amount of sauce.  I’m asking my husband, if he must eat ice cream, to do it when I’m not in the room, because that’ll kill me.  When we eat pizza on naan bread, I’m sprinkling about 2 tbs. of grated cheese on mine instead of the 1/3 cup I might have done before.

What’s interesting so far: my cheese addiction appears to be, for the moment, broken.  Cheese has been my biggest calorie-suck downfall, especially fresh mozzarella.  I just love it, and can’t get enough, but I haven’t caught myself thinking of it longingly in the past couple of days, and yesterday I even tried one of the little samples of this delicious artisan Italian hard cheese and, while I enjoyed it, I didn’t feel even remotely tempted to buy it.  I did feel more than remotely tempted to snitch another cube, but resistance was fairly easy.  This is a good thing.

On the coffee front: For the first few days I was supplementing the meager spoonful of sugar with a sprinkle of stevia; by the end of the week the spoonful was plenty and the coffee tastes abundantly sweet with less sugar than I used to want.  Also a good thing.

I’m making friends with fruit–yes, I know, higher sugar and calorie than veggies–as my go-to snack when I want something sweet, and carrots or cauliflower pieces when I want something not sweet.  Fortunately, it’s Honeycrisp season, so delicious fruit is easy to come by.

And now I’m looking at recipes, trying to find things I can cook for myself or bring as healthy snacks at work for the days when the Oreos and Fritos my office mate has around for the teens who frequently hold meetings in our office space suddenly mysteriously grow voices and begin to call to me…those will be posts for hopefully the next few days.

The result of this experiment will honestly not be measurable, at least by bloggy empirical standards.  I have not stepped onto a scale, and do not plan to.  I will get a sense of clothing and its fit, but since it’s shift-t0-fall-clothes time anyway it won’t be much of a measurement either.  I just want to see if I can be happy eating less food, and less still of the stuff I love that really isn’t good for me.  The goal isn’t skinny, it’s happier and healthier–so we’ll see where this leads.

Meatless Monday: The Tabula Rasa that is a Baked Potato

It has been my lot in life to always be several steps behind the popular kids.  This has not changed…so, now just as the Green Phone Booth is hanging up its Meatless Monday feature for the time being (which I never in all its months got my butt in gear to contribute to), I’m getting all these Meatless Monday ideas.  So for the record, if you want lots more, check out their archives!

I do most of my reading these days on the internet through Google Reader, I have a Newsweek subscription for my Kindle, and I get the Mother Earth News (and the Choral Journal, of course, but that’s more like “work”:-)) in paper magazine form…most of my “women’s magazines” have fallen by the wayside, except for my old faithful Cooking Light.  They get a little more hung up on Nutrition Science than I do, but they have some really good articles and recipes…

The October issue featured a two-page spread on the humble baked potato and what to top it with.  This got me thinking…I need to give this a try.  Serious nutritional goodness in a compact but filling package that keeps a long time in your pantry.

(By the way–store potatoes in cool darkness somewhere–this is important, since as a member of the nightshade family when they are exposed to the sun they will start to turn green in their flesh, and then you can get seriously sick. Don’t eat green potatoes. Apparently if it sprouts a little and the flesh isn’t green yet, you’re still okay. At least that’s what I’ve read.  Do your own homework. Standard-disclaimer-I-am-not-a-doc-or-nutritionist-don’t-take-my-advice-and-then-blame-me-if-you-get-sick.)

They are easy to bake–scrub them well, poke them with a fork a few times so they don’t explode, and bake them in your oven at 400 degrees for 45 minutes or so. You can reduce the temperature of the oven and extend baking time–they are wonderfully forgiving.  They are “done” when you can lightly squeeze them (umm…use a potholder, okay?) and they feel sort of soft all the way through. If you don’t mind more of a “steamed” than “baked” potato, you can also do them in your Crockpot or the microwave. I generally won’t turn on the oven just to bake a couple of potatoes, but if I’m making bread or cake, or roasting a chicken or something, it’s really easy to toss a few potatoes into the oven around the edges and take advantage of the energy I’m already using.

(Okay, y’all got that when I said “toss” the potatoes into the oven I wasn’t being literal, right?)

Once cooked, you can split them down the middle and fill them with all manner of yummy things:

• steamed broccoli with red pepper flakes and cheddar cheese, melted in the microwave
• black or pinto beans warmed with a little cumin and garlic powder, with a dollop of sour cream or greek yogurt on top.  And/or some fresh salsa.
• Speaking of greek yogurt–try mixing 1/4 cup greek yogurt with 1 tbs. prepared pesto sauce and dollop in there
• Also speaking of greek yogurt–mix with some crumbled feta cheese and pitted chopped kalamata olives, or a spoonful of olive tapenade.
• That Tupperware Container of leftover vegetables from the other night, especially with one of the above two yogurt sauces
• Caponata
• Leftover chili, with a little cheese on top if you want–it only counts as Meatless Monday if you use veggie chili, you get that, right? (But you could use chili with meat on Tuesday if you wanted, I guess. )

This, of course, not intended to rule out the standard sour-cream-chives-butter-green-onions kind of toppings, though if we’re gonna be meatless you’d have to forego the crumbled bacon.

Sweet potatoes, too, make really good baked potato dinners–you can do what I love, and just put a little butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar into it, or you can actually be sorta virtuous and avoid the fats and sugars a bit…I haven’t tried it yet, but I have this idea that baking sweet potatoes and filling them with a sort of diced-tomato-garbanzo-bean-onions-peppers-squash-whatever-curry-spice mixture would be really yummy. Dollop of greek yogurt on top, of course.  I’ll post it if I ever give it a try; if any of you beat me to it, let me know how it went!

What are your favorite potato fillings? Either that you’ve already tried, or that you think you might like to someday?

Can we now blame obesity on BPA?

Check this out, over at MNN–

Is BPA Making you Fat?

(First of all, can I just request that the blogging community, especially on higher profile blogs, please learn the difference between “affect” and “effect”? Both are verbs, both are nouns, and both have very specific usages in each context and make grammar snobs wince and want to take you less seriously when you mis-use them.  Thank you.)

Okay, while I as much as the next person would love to blame anything for my extra 25 lbs. than the fact that I just plain eat too much, I admit this is both a) interesting and b) skepticism-inducing.

On the one hand–we are hearing more and more about these “endocrine disruptors”–chemicals that affect how the body processes and stores fat cells. (Or you could say, they effect a change in how the body processes and stores fat cells…or, they have an effect on how the body processes and stores fat cells. Note the subtle differences in the affect of each alternative sentence choice?)  And I do buy it–It makes sense, you know? We put all this weird chemically stuff into our bodies with no idea what affect if will have on our bodies, so if they are now discovering, “wow! this stuff causes our bodies to behave differently!” I don’t guess we should be shocked.

On the other hand, as one who admittedly eats more than I should even of the really nice whole-foody non-endocrine-disrupting stuff, I suspect there’s more to the obesity epidemic than the stuff that lines our cans. Big Gulps and supersizes, for example…white flour in everything…HFCS, I mean “Corn Sugar”, hidden in all kinds of places you wouldn’t expect to find it?

If nothing else, this does speak to the interconnectedness (and thus absence of magic bullet solutions) of our myriad problems…

Oh. My. God. This is just…bad. Couldn’t the Bottled Water industry do better?

Good Lord.

Bottled Water Strikes Back on YouTube–and comes up dry.

This is just awful…couldn’t they have managed better than this? Is this the best production values they could come up with? (Do they just not have enough money to afford better advertising?) (The rest of their battalion of commercials can be found here, though I am loath to do anything to drive traffic to their site…it’s comic relief, people!)

If nothing else, this convinces me, somewhat gleefully, that the business which relies on putting un-tested tap water into bottles and re-selling to people what is already free from their own faucets, is on its way out.

Embarrassed Illinois Citizen

(as opposed to all those Illinoisians who are proud to claim Blago The Clown as our former governor)…

I am embarrased to admit that up to now  my only real familiarity with our current governor, Pat Quinn, has been “the guy who Thank God replaced Blago That $%^&*-ing   $&^-hole.”

It took reading this Grist article to actually wake me up and pay attention to what Quinn’s already been up to (in support of greentech, wind energy, and incentives for businesses to install solar panels), and what his competitor Bill Brady (who seems loath to spend for public transit and uses phrases like “clean coal”) will most likely prioritize if he wins the gubernatorial race in November.  This is sort of sad; I should have known.

But I know now.

Is it just me, or does this commercial go a little too far?

Um…okay, in principle I pretty much am right in line with the ethos of this commercial…but it makes me feel all squicky nonetheless. (At least there wasn’t a toe tag…)

Go Ozone!

Hey, this is happy!

Ozone Layer Depletion has Stopped, Scientists Say

As with everything, I guess a little healthy skepticism here wouldn’t hurt, but the idea that by changing our behavior we have been able to undo something bad we did to the planet is…well, encouraging, to say the least…

Now if only we could get folks to believe in global warming…

Remember that joke gift, where you put a tiny gift in a huge box?

Well, in case you haven’t noticed…it’s not so much a joke any more, at least where buying electronics is concerned.

Beth over at Fake Plastic Fish just bought a webcam. A 4.3 oz camera with 4.4 oz. packaging and a box more than 10 times the volume of the camera itself.  She is, understandably, aghast.

But we see it all the time, don’t we? Any mom whose kid has a party has struggled with those damn toy packages with the pieces and the plastic back-thingies and the twisty-ties, you know what I’m talking about.  Or when the one book from Amazon comes in the 3x bigger box, with a few of those weird air-pillow things. Or when you buy your nice sleek laptop computer or smartphone and it comes in this huge box…or even the nice overstock backpack I just bought for my nice sleep little laptop, which came in its own huge box. (It needed to be that big, I guess, because I also bought a couple of pairs of socks in the same order.  Take up more space. Right? er….right?)

It’s one of the things I get a kick out of, shopping from ebay as much as I do.  So many of the sellers there have the packing thing down to an art, and they will use envelopes (or double envelopes), or pack a buttload of stuff into one of those single-price shipping boxes,  and its incredibly efficient.  Or they will use a larger box, if its all they have, and you can totally tell they didn’t go out and buy NEW shipping materials,  and stuff it with old bubble wrap from their closet or newspapers from the recycling bin or those weird air-pillows from Amazon.

The bigger companies…they could learn something from these ebay moms, that’s all I gotta say.