in the kitchen

Yesterday in the kitchen was all about bananas. The day previous, I had been buying our groceries and our local store had bananas on sale for 29 cents a pound. I scooped up a scary amount of bananas with great plans in my mind. 


First of all, we love smoothies here in our home. We find it the easiest and most effective way to get a massive amount of veggies into our bodies without having to eat plateful after plateful of greens (although, I enjoy that also.) I sweeten our smoothies with bananas so my initial plan was to cut up most of the bananas into slices, freeze the slices, and then use them in our smoothies over the next several weeks.

But while cutting all of those bananas up, I decided that we needed a double batch of a simple, healthy treat that my family absolutely loves ~ oatmeal banana muffins.

These are quite fabulously one of the simplest homemade snacks to made as all of the prep is done in your food processor, and since a reader had recently asked me if I could share some healthy snack recipes, I figured that this would be a good one to post. 

So here we go...

Oatmeal Banana Muffins

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups old fashioned oats (not the quick cooking)
1 cup plain yogurt
2 eggs
1/2 cup sweetener (I personally use the powdered Stevia)
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 bananas

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Oil your muffin tin well (like, really, really well because these will stick really bad if you don't because they don't contain flour!) with oil.
         
NOTE: I use coconut oil. You could also use a light olive oil. I don't use the non-stick cooking spray in the can because it's not a healthy option.

2. Place ALL of the ingredients into your food processor or blender, and blend until the oats are smooth. (I included a picture of how that should look.)



3. Divide batter among the muffin wells. Bake 20-25 minutes for regular sized muffins and 12-15 minutes for mini muffins (I always make the minis.)

4. Cool and enjoy!


I will say that I personally cannot have these since I can't eat dairy. I've been making these muffins for years and for some reason the thought just occurred to me yesterday that I should try substituting applesauce for the yogurt. I will do that next time and see if they turn out.

Also, another thing to note, this recipe does not work well with cupcake liners. I tried it the first time I made them, trying to avoid having to clean a messy muffin tin, and the muffin sticks like ridiculous to the liners.