I'm learning to love to cook again. Yay! A few nights ago, I found a really easy recipe for Alfredo sauce ( http://allrecipes.com/recipe/quick-and-easy-alfredo-sauce/detail.aspx) and it was a hit with all 3 of the Leprechauns and my hubby. Tonight, I set a small amount aside and blended it with a little bit of spinach. I used canned because that's what I had but would have preferred fresh. It was pretty good but, because of the color and consistency, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was eating baby food. Next time, I'll play around with the fresh stuff until I get it right.
I had a good bit of spinach left over and didn't want to freeze it and play the "what's this?" game in a few weeks so I decided to make chocolate muffins with it. I know some slightly well known comedian who had a little show in the 80s' wife has a book about the same thing but I'm older than her and lots of moms have been sneaking stuff into spaghetti sauce, meatloaf and muffins for quite a while now. I found a recipe, (http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chocolate-muffins/detail.aspx) that had a lot of positive comments, read and noted the comments, and got to work. I put a little too much cocoa in them for my taste but with a little Nutella, I think my kids will eat some of it...
I'm begining to think you can only put so much nutrition into one muffin. I hoped the extra cocoa would mask the spinach and it did- a little. So I'm going to reduce the spinach in the recipe and the cocoa because it's really too chocolate-y (yes, I think maybe there is such a thing). I traded the 1 cup of sour cream for 1 cup of plain yogurt and the all purpose flour for whole wheat flour and some oats that I ground finely. Since I didn't have enough white sugar, I substituted some brown sugar. In all, they weren't bad. The whole wheat flour isn't as fine as the white so there's a little grainy feel and, again, too much cocoa made them not as sweet as my kids might like. But the yogurt didn't make them taste weird and the whole grains didn't make them dense. since my kids have ADD and protein in the morning has been shown to be beneficial (and lots of other reasons- like stabilizing blood sugar), I want to experiment with replacing some of the wheat flour with soy flour
Here's the recipe I ended up using
1/2C ground oats
1 1/4 C Whole wheat flour
3/4 C cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 C white sugar
3/4 C brown sugar (do I have to tell you to pack it?)
1/2 C chocolate chips (because my kids would eat dirt if I told them it had CCs in it)
Mix all this into a bowl
3 eggs, beaten
~1/2 C spinach, pureed (don't lick your fingers if you get any on them)
1 C plain yogurt
1/2 C water
1/2 C milk
mix this in with the dry ingredients. bake at 325 for about 20 minutes.
Serve with milk, because that's what you eat with chocolate cake.
I'm sure if anybody reads this, they're going to have some comments about their perfect nutritional habits. To them I say. "So?" If this isn't something you'd eat, Move on. My kids have developed bad eating habits over the years,largely while I was working 12 hour night shifts and my husband was commuting 2 hours one way to school (and STILL pulling the highest GPA in his class while trying to raise our 3 younger kids while I was at work) and I'm trying to improve them. I was a little bummed I couldn't fit a whole serving of veggies and protein into one muffin but I realized I was still getting a little extra veggie, whole grains, protein and calcium in. And a little bit here and there is better than none at all. This fits in to two philosophies that I really love but tend to neglect. The first being "Baby steps", whereby you accomplish great things one small step at a time. The second is "good enough mothering". I heard the concept ( the Good Enough Mother) a few years ago but never read the book so I'm probably way off from the author's original concept but I don't care. It's my life, I'll do what I want. Anyway, I remind myself that everything doesn't have to be perfect all the time and I don't have to do everything that all the other moms are doing. If it doesn't work for my family, it's not good for us. Enough said. Life is too long to stress about every little detail. If the fate of the free world doesn't hang in the balance, then do a good enough job and move on. When you're old, you'll wish you'd played tag on that sunny day instead of cleaning the carpet.
This all seems so familiar.... :)
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