On Mondays, Kristen Swensson of Cheap, Healthy, Good swings by these parts to share a healthy, delicious, and budget-conscious recipe with us. Today, a recipe perfect for pumpkin season.
On occasion, to make a low-calorie recipe palatable, it becomes necessary to increase the calories. It can't be helped. Food needs flavor, see, and all too often, homemade diet goods lack that key element.
Case in point: the original incarnation of these pumpkin muffins. The recipe, lifted from a website called Half My Size, clocked in at a glorious 128 calories and 1 gram of fat per serving. Sadly, you could tell. A half-cocked smattering of pralines gave each muffin some oomph, but couldn't compensate for the ... well, for the nothing. There wasn't really a whole lot going on.
Still, with a few alterations, I thought the dish could be saved. So, I doubled the spice, increased the brown sugar by a few tablespoons, and switched out the praline topping for a straight-up streusel. It added about 40 calories and 1 gram of fat per muffin, but the difference in taste was massive. Warm, moist, sweet, and a little chewy, they had quite suddenly become acceptable breakfast muffins - something I would serve to guests, or even my sister (a.k.a. The Pickiest Person Alive). If and when I make them again, I'll probably add a cup of chopped apples to the batter, just to mess around with the texture.
Just one note if you'd like to try 'em yourself: oat bran is the second listed ingredient. I tend not to have any hanging around the house, but a little research showed that mulching some rolled oats in a food processor creates a suitable stand-in. (2/3 cup rolled oats makes 1/2 cups oat bran substitute). It worked beautifully, so fear not.
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