More muffins and the Monthly Mingle

More muffins, more muffins, I say!

Afterall, with Marvin now a teenager, I can!


So these muffins were both an experiment, a clean up and a teaching tool. Apple cinnamon muffins, made by replacing all the oil in the muffins with unsweetened apple sauce, with chopped, unpeeled apple and cinnamon added in, and a sprinkling of sugar on top. That was the experiment and clean up part, replacing the oil, and the apple sauce and apples were available. On the teaching part I learned two things: sour dough muffin batter sticks, so you really do need to spray even the papers the batter will be going into, and putting your batter into the papers 20 minutes before you bake them is a good way to make a batch of muffin tops, as NOTHING is going to come off those papers!

Either way, they were tasty. Apple flavor not as noticable as I thought it would be, but they were moist and made a good addition to the kids lunches.

Now this scrumptious muffin I made last night and enjoyed a few minutes ago for breakfast. (I still need to have my smoothie, which I've had every day since Christmas, but my blender is in the dishwasher!) Banana muffins!

For these I reduced the amount of starter by 1/8 cup, since I was adding two smushed up, very ripe bananas. The batter was not as thick as it has been, but I crossed my fingers and waited to see what would happen. What happed is the best banana muffins I have had in a long, long time! They were wonderful!

I admit, I had considered adding chocolate chips to these muffins, but I'm glad I didn't. They are just perfect all on their own.

Now to the Mingle.

I often try to get to Metta's Mingle, regardless of the theme. Last months' theme of Drop in and Decorate appealed to me, but though I was able to have the cookies, and all the fixings for them, friends and family were swamped and I ended up decorating cookies on my own. Heck, I didn't even end up doing it with my children - they ate them, but didn't help decorate.

So when this month's theme was announced as Comfort Foods, I knew I could do this one, regardless of the schedules of everyone else. And this last few weeks, those schedules have been hectic! We have needed the comfort!


My choice for this was one of my families favorite meals, spaghetti. I'm sure I've posted about spaghetti before, probably with my meat sauce, but this time I made it as a tomato sauce with chicken meatballs. The meatballs simmered in the sauce, so they were tender and had soaked up some of the sauce. The grated parmessan cheese that I used to bind the meatballs together added to the moist flavor.

One little giggle to this meal - I use whole wheat spaghetti with my family. This time I had bought a box of spaghettini, which is slightly smaller than regular spaghetti. When I poured the box of pasta into my well salted, boiling water, out came whole wheat spaghetti, but with it came regular, non-whole wheat spaghetti. From the same box. So if you are looking at the picture above, and notice the different sizes of the pasta below the sauce, thats why.

One thing to note - for me the comfort part of this meal is feeding my family something healthy, that they love, and the bread. I'd have been even more comforted if I'd have paid attention and made it into garlic bread. Now that's what I call comfort food!


***Edit***

I started this post several days ago, and am only now getting back to it. Rather than keep on, I'm just going to publish this as is, and try something new in a day or two. I've got lots of good cooking and photos lined up for then!