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I love baking with oats, as this site will continue to reveal. I eat oatmeal for breakfast almost every day, just for how awesome it is. Transfer that into a muffin, and I’m sold. Step aside, Wheaties. So how could you go wrong with having walnuts and honey in there as well? These are a fantastic hearty wholesome muffin to start the day off with. I gravitate towards using large muffin tins, but you could do 12 regular instead of 6 large. Just reduce the baking time by about 5-10 minutes, depending on your oven.

The honey really stands out in this muffin, which I enjoy a lot. I don’t like that taste in everything, but LOVE it in these muffins. When putting this together, a lot of it came from the thought of turning my bowl of oatmeal into a muffin. granted, we eat some pretty awesome oatmeal around here, so that serves as a good base.

For almost anything with nuts, I enjoy using the mortar and pestle. You can get such a great mix between finely ground that adds flavor, and larger pieces for texture/flavor. Anything to get the pieces to where you want them will work, but anytime you see nuts crushed up in a recipe on this site, more often than not, that is how it was done.

Just a great way to start the day, maybe a fruit smoothie to go with. Do we need a post on making killer smoothies? Summer’s not over yet, I’m sure we can make time for this soon.

Ingredients

2 Cup Unbleached All Purpose Flour
1/4 Cup Granulated Sugar
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Salt

1 Egg
1/4 Cup Honey
1/4 Cup Canola Oil
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
2 Cup Rice Milk

3/4 Cup Old Fashioned Rolled Oats
1/2 Cup Crushed Walnuts

Instructions

· Preheat oven to 375 F.
· In a large bowl, mix together flour, granulated sugar, baking powder and salt.
· In a medium bowl, beat egg, add honey and beat together. Add in oil, vanilla and rice milk.
· Add in baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
· Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients.
· Fold in oats and walnuts.
· Grease or spray large muffin tin.
· Fill each of the 6 tins about 3/4 of the way, this should use all the batter.
· Remove any excess spray and batter from around the top of the muffin tin (gotta take care of your muffin tins!).

· Bake for 20-24 minutes.
Enjoy and repeat as needed.

Keep living the daydream!

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I heart oatmeal, I think is the correct expression. I may just stop writing there. Oats are a wonderful grain and fit into breakfast, cookies, everything, etc. Groats, steel-cut, or rolled, they are amazingly fulfilling, enjoyable to eat, and fit into even the, “I just moved to New York and am sharing a closet as a room with a friend” budget. Regular oatmeal is great on its own, but lately we have been going nuts over baked oatmeal.

We have had baked oatmeal nearly every day while fine tuning this one. Even my four-year old, who had forgotten that he liked oatmeal for two years, has been lining up for this. Truly, this is not a hard sell.

I have seen recipes for baked oatmeal that call for eggs. Now, I eat eggs, but usually not in my oatmeal. I do, however, love flax seed in my oatmeal. And since I regularly use flax seed in place of egg, this was the easiest decision I made all day. With the flax seed, the more ground the better, if you have flax flour, awesome; we have a Baby Bullet from when we were making baby food for our youngest, and this works great.  If you do want to do the eggs, this converts over as 2 eggs in place of the flax seed and water.

I swear I am trying to space out the blueberry recipes, but when they are in season, pretty much goes in everything for a while. To balance that out, we’ll have two versions of this.

The other top contender in this area has been Apple Cranberry Walnut. There’s raisins in there too, but you have to stop the name somewhere, right? Both of these go quick, so be prepared for that. Recipes as they stand are roughly 2.5 servings. I am sure in some homes this is actually 3 servings, but for us, 2.5 is already stretching it.

Peach Blueberry Baked Oatmeal

Ingredients

2.5 TBSP Ground Flax Seed
7 TBSP Warm Water

1 Cup Blueberries
2 or 3 Whole Ripe Peaches

1/4 Cup Brown Sugar
1.5 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt

2 Cups Rice Milk
2 Cups Old Fashioned Rolled Oats

Steps

· Preheat oven to 325 F
· In a large mixing bowl, combine ground flax seed and water, set aside.
· If you are using frozen blueberries, place in a small colander and rinse thoroughly.
· Peel and cut up peaches, set aside
· In the large mixing bowl, add cinnamon, baking powder, brown sugar, and salt. Whisk these together.
· Mix in oats and rice milk.
· If you are using frozen blueberries, rinse again.
· Fold in the peaches and blueberries

· Pour into an oven-safe 2 QT dish
· Bake for 50 minutes

Apple Cranberry Walnut Baked Oatmeal

Ingredients

2.5 TBSP Ground Flax Seed
7 TBSP Warm Water

1 or 2 Apples

1/3 Cup Brown Sugar
1.5 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 Cup Walnut pieces
1/4 Cup dried Cranberries

2 Cups Rice Milk
2 Cups Old Fashioned Rolled Oats
1/2 Cup Water

Steps

· Preheat oven to 325 F
· In a large mixing bowl, combine ground flax seed and water, set aside.
· Cut up apple, put in oven safe 2 QT dish and put in oven while preheating.
· In the large mixing bowl, add cinnamon, baking powder, brown sugar, and salt. Whisk these together.
· Mix in oats and rice milk.
· Fold in the walnut, cranberries and raisins.

· Carefully remove dish from oven. Pour remaining ingredients into oven-safe 2 QT dish.

· Bake for 50 minutes
Enjoy and repeat as needed.

Keep living the daydream!

Continue reading »]]> “Buttermilkless” Blueberry Pancakes

OK, so I’m a dad. There seems to be an unwritten rule that dads make pancakes on the weekends. I don’t know if this has to do with dads being at work Monday to Friday and moms getting a break from preparing every meal throughout the week; I didn’t write this rule, I just revel in it. My dad made pancakes when we were growing up, and he still loves making pancakes for family gatherings;  Uncle Paul’s Pancakes are kinda world-famous, for us.

Translating over pancakes into a dairy free recipe is fairly straight forward. You are substituting out the milk, and then adjusting for the change in consistency. One other option we are going to do to aim just a bit further by mimicking the acidity of buttermilk. The reason buttermilk pancakes are so popular, is how the acid from the buttermilk reacts with the baking soda to increase the leavening that happens. We can recreate this by adding a small amount of vinegar to the rice milk and letting this sit for several minutes while we get the dry ingredients prepared. I could not believe how much difference this made; lighter, fluffier, and gone quick!

And yeah, so its blueberry season (if I can get this posted before apple season, that is), so what better thing to do to your pancakes than add blueberries. Fresh is of course best for this recipe, but frozen thawed berries work great as well. Timing the thawing is important, though, as too long and they may get mushy before you get them on the griddle, and not enough time to thaw and they will be too frozen when you put them in, interfering with how the pancakes cook. When using frozen, bring them out as the first step before you start putting the batter together, and this should give them the right amount of time.

I use a counter top plug-in griddle set to 300 F, and Pam baking spray on the griddle. I have tried others, but some of the other sprays do not do well with the heat of the griddle, so I keep coming back to the baking spray.

Ok, technique tip, very important. You want to let the pancake cook on the one side as long as you can before flipping it, this makes all the difference in that light n fluffy awesomeness that you want in the pancake.

Ok, technique tip, very important. You want to let the pancake cook on the one side as long as you can before flipping it, this makes all the difference in that light n fluffy awesomeness that you want in the pancake. The two pictures below are to highlight what you are looking for. First, notice how the blueberries are disappearing, yeah, that’s a good sign that we got our acidity right for the leavening. Next, the bubbles have come up, and popping along the outer edges. At that point you have waited as long as you want to wait, flip ‘em now!

Great sign that you timed it right, golden brown all the way across.

Once they are done, the bottom sides will have that same golden brown – “let’s get a plate and syrup and some buttery dairy-free spread” look to them, and you know you’re ready for breakfast.

Ingredients 

3/4 to 1 Cup Blueberries (fresh or frozen)

1 tsp White Vinegar
1 Cup Rice Milk (or soy, almond, etc)

1 Cup Flour
1 TBSP Granulated Sugar
1 TBSP Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

1 Egg
2 TBSP Canola Oil

Steps

• If using a griddle, set to 300 F.
• If you are using frozen blueberries, place in a small colander and rinse thoroughly.
• Mix the vinegar and the rice milk in a medium bowl and set aside.
• If you are using frozen blueberries, rinse again.
• In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour,/ sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
• Beat egg and add egg and canola oil to rice milk mix.
• Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix. If you are using frozen blueberries, rinse again.
• Once cooking surface is heated, apply non-stick spray to area before adding batter.
• Pour 1/3 C of batter onto surface, repeat as surface area permits.
• Add several blueberries to each pancake on the cooking area.
• When bubbles along edges begin to pop (see image above), flip pancakes.
• Second side will take less time than the first, and is dependent on how hot your surface is.
• When the second side is done, remove and serve, adding your favorite buttery non-dairy spread and real maple syrup.

Enjoy and repeat as needed.

Keep living the daydream!