Peanut butter banana oatmeal muffins

Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal Muffins
Makes ~16 large muffins
(Adapted from Delicious in a DASH)

Ingredients:

   Dry Ingredients:

1 and ¼ cups of all-purpose flour

¾ cup of old fashioned oats

1 tablespoon +1 tsp baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon of cinnamon

   Wet Ingredients:

¾ cup peanut butter (I used Natural Chunky Peanut Butter)

1.5 cups mashed really ripe bananas or two large ripe bananas

2 large eggs

½ cup dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon of vanilla flavoring powder or liquid

1/4 cup nonfat plain yogurt (in place of oil)

1 cups milk (I used skim)

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F

In a large bowl, mix the dry ingredients and set aside.

In another large bowl, mix the wet ingredients and stir until blended.

Add the mixed wet ingredients to the bowl containing the dry ingredients and stir until JUST combined (otherwise your muffins will become tough). Batter might be lumpy, but don’t worry about it, they’ll cook out.

Fill prepared muffin cups with batter and bake for 18-20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

We all enjoyed them!!!!

  

   

Quinoa patties with spinach and cheese

Hola! 

   So, I’m not the best at posting the greatest blogs (I’m not a writer), but I can cook J That’s a plus. Anyway, I do my best to give my kids the necessary nutrients for their little bodies to be healthy and to hopefully grow taller than me someday. Here is today’s “healthy” recipe. And I say “healthy” because of the amount of cheese I used. Probably didn’t need as much, but hey, cheese is yummy. J

 

Quinoa patties with spinach and cheese

Makes ~11

2 cups cooked quinoa, cooled (otherwise you’ll prematurely cook your egg)

1 cup grated cheese (I used a garlic cheddar because it had to be used)

3 tablespoons AP flour

1 small package of frozen chopped spinach, thawed and wringed dry.

1 egg

2 Tablespoons Brewers Yeast (aka Nutritional Yeast)

1 tsp Salt

Place all ingredients into a mixing bowl and stir together with your hands, (cause its funner) until well combined. Allow the mixture to sit for ~5 minutes.

Spray some pam on to a  sauté pan or griddle of choice and place over medium heat.

I used a #20 disher that makes ¼ cup patties. Place patties on a heated sauté pan or griddle or cast iron comal. I had room for 4 patties at a time. I also used a small egg ring to make them perfectly round, and squished them down into the ring with a spatula to make them flat on top for even cooking.

Cook quinoa cakes for about 3-5 minutes on each side. Repeat with the remaining patties until all of the cakes have been cooked. I only had to spray the pan once because the cheese (as it cooked) oiled the pan up enough for continued cooking.

My kids ate them with ketchup for dipping.  I had them with tapatio.  YUM!!!

On a sewing roll...

  I have been on a sewing binge the past few weeks. Among the major projects i've been working on, I started a small side business. I call it "handmade by eve" and I make and sell custom baby shoes. Just in case, here's my facebook page link: https://www.facebook.com/handmadebyeveyoungberg
If you happen to want some custom baby shoes, just message my page there. :)

ANYWAY. I've also been making other things like dresses for my baby girl, a couple pants for my boy, and a dress for the little girl of a friend of mine. Here's a bunch of pics. The credit for the original design of these dresses goes to the Craftiness is not optional website located here. It's her "Let's go fly a kite" sundress. I love her tutorials!!!

This is a size 2T flannel dress I made for my friends' little girl.

12m fleece dress with a white crochet rose.

12m little dress for church

12m little dress for my baby girls' birthday

And the hair clippie that goes with the birthday dress. 

My new venture!

I've started up a small business! I'm so excited about it! I just saved my new business cards in Word so that I can print them tomorrow morning (our printer is ridiculously loud!). I've had SO many people messaging me with questions and orders! I'm so blessed!
  So, if you don't know this about me already, I'll fill you in. I'm a "crafter". I craft  A LOT! I love to sew, cook, bake, make cards, and a lot of stuff. Since the birth of my baby girl last October, I had to give up my craft room so that she would have a place to live. It was more of musical "chairs" since we ended up moving our son into what was my craft room so that our new baby could have his old room. And just like musical chairs... I lost my spot. So, until we build a new house or move into something a little bigger, I now get a little space in my husbands office. Maybe it's not as little as I'm portraying it to be though. My husband made enough room for me to put my table and my little chest of drawers that is filled with my fabric. Since I was getting downsized from a whole bedroom to a now 5'x5' space, I had to choose what craft I was going to stick with for a while. I chose to sew. The kids will always need clothes taken in or repaired or made, and my husband will too. I had to choose the one "craft" that would be more useful. I guess now, I've made the best of it!
  If you're interested to see my new site I made on facebook for my small business, here you go: https://www.facebook.com/handmadebyeveyoungberg

I am learning as I go. I am especially excited though because my husband took me shopping for supplies the other day! I got some sales order tablets, a small organizer to hold my sales tablet (which also has a little spot to hold my business cards I'm printing off tomorrow!), an expandable file for filled orders, some thumb tacks, some pens, and blank business cards. It totally made me feel like I was going back to school! I remember getting a super fun/excited feeling every year before school started. I would get super organized and figure out what pens go where in my new back pack and what paper would go where in my Lisa Frank binder. Ah... good times. Unfortunately, the feeling would pass as soon as I would get home on that first day of school with a bunch of homework. Oh well. This time (now that I'm older) the feeling doesn't pass. I'm so excited because I'm doing what I really enjoy!
Well, I better get to bed... the benadryl is putting me to sleep, but at least my nose is clear : )

Here's a couple of pics of the shoes I've made:

Lemon-Zucchini Loaf with lemon glaze

I've been doing my best to cut out a lot of the excess fat out our diets for the past few months. We've been doing great so far, except when it comes to sweets. I LOVE sweets. I'm sure i'm permanently addicted to sugar. However, thanks to Pinterest, I came across a pin of baking substitutions. One that I've been experimenting with lately is substituting oil with yogurt. After a week of trying to get the proportion correct, and a few mushy/delicious failures, I finally made a recipe that works!!

For the original recipe (which i'm sure is delicious), look here.

Here's my recipe for it:

LEMON-ZUCCHINI LOAF WITH LEMON GLAZE by Eve Youngberg 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour 
3 teaspoons baking powder 
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/4 cup non-fat yogurt
2/3 cup sugar or sweetener
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 tablespoons lemon juice Zest of 1 lemon 
1 cup grated zucchini 

The directions are the same as the original recipe. So, if you'd like to make it this way, open the link.
I put the lemon glaze on while it was cooling and when it was FINALLY done cooling, I sliced myself a piece and it was DELICIOUS!!!! 

If you cut it in 12 slices, it amounts to about 115 calories per slice. So... PERFECT!!! And if you want to cut out even more calories, leave off the lemon glaze. It's amazing how many calories are in powdered sugar. Maybe next time i'll leave off the glaze, but for now, i'm totally enjoying the deliciousness that is my lower calorie sweet bread.

Mmmm... doughnuts...

      I can't believe (again) how fast the time passes! I have been busy doing a lot of things since the 4th of July and there are no signs of stopping. There are the occasional moments when I find myself alone in a quiet house. That's the time between my husband going to work and the kids getting up for the day; I get one whole hour. I have been debating whether I should use that time for exercise or not, but I realize that I have MANY other things that I love to do, but have had no time to do it in. Writing is one example. So many hobbies and so little time to do it in. I have a lot of sewing patterns for the kids that are still waiting to be opened and laid out on the new fabric that has yet to have a pre-washing. At least the temptation to throw everything out the window and make cards has waned considerably since half of my stuff is getting babysat by a good friend right now. I know that someday i'll get a craft room again, but not in the near future.

      Aside from exercising, sewing, and crafting, my passion for cooking has rekindled over the past few months. I looked back at the past few years and realized that my cooking episodes had gotten really boring. I know that I would look in the fridge and stare ate a pile of good cooking fodder and think to myself, "What in the world am I supposed to do with any of this stuff?!" I am telling you right now that it's a good thing that we live too far away for any pizza delivery service (I tried bribing every pizza place when I was pregnant). Since I started my body/eating transformation this April, I have been eating almost every sort of vegetable I see in the produce section. And if you have not seen 'Good Eats' on Food Network, YOU SHOULD! I had seen all the episodes already, but my mind was not ready for such amazing preparation and cooking instruction. Since April, I have seen them all over again... twice. I'm not sure exactly how my husband feels about me cooking so much all the time, but he has yet to refuse anything new. 

      Of all the new cooking skills that I am improving, baking is still intimidating. However, my severe need (or want) of sweet desserts got the best of me last night and I made donuts. I first saw this recipe on The Chew when it aired a few months ago on Hulu. I thought the doughnut itself looked delicious, but the preparation of it seemed a little too hard for me. But last night, the thought of a freshly made warm, fluffy doughnut with a slight crunch on the outside and a thick, smooth, sweet pastry cream on the inside totally got the best of me. My mouth is watering!!! I pulled up my big girl pants and gave it a try. It was surprisingly easy! It reminded me of an episode of Good Eats where the host Alton Brown made a creme puff dough recipe (totally want to try making that now!). After the half hour it took to prepare and bake the doughnuts, my husband and I were in doughnut heaven! I found that I was getting too tired to make a pastry cream, so I made some instant vanilla pudding instead. 

      I realize how fattening donuts and pudding sound, however I worked the recipe down to the least calories possible. I substituted a no-calorie baking sweetener for the sugar, used only 1 tablespoon of oil needed, I did not glaze the doughnuts, and I used a sugar-free/fat-free vanilla pudding mix with homemade almond milk that has 30 calories per cup of milk. It also helps that the doughnuts are not fried, they're baked. I should warn you that in the end it does not matter how few calories are in this dessert when you end up eating all of the doughnuts and all of the pudding in one sitting. Self-control is something I have yet to master. I did have an accomplice though; my husband loved them too. : )  

     Should you feel the need to see how easy and delicious these doughnuts are, here's the link to the recipe after the picture. Let me know how they turn out for you!!

Baked Donuts and Coconut creme

P.S. You don't need a mini doughnut pan to make these. I used a mini muffin pan instead. And next time (tonight), I'm going to free hand them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. : )

My new self

It's the 4th of July already! Had some fun plans scheduled for the day but we all ended up with a cold. So now, we get to hang out at home together. That's okay though. We were going to all be together anyway. My husband has been training for a long bike ride that is coming up next week, so he left this morning at 4:30 am to get in a 60 mile ride! I can't believe his dedication! I know how much i'm looking forward to my first big ride, but I have plenty of time to train since it's in May of next year.

I seriously never thought I would enjoy exercising. The thought of sweating and getting up and moving around just made me feel more tired and lazy. If I wanted to lose weight I would simply stop eating so much and watch the poundage slowly go down. But it's harder now. I'm almost thirty year old, and eating what I want isn't working out as well as it used to. I can't remember exactly what it was that initially motivated me to start moving, but I do remember thinking that I was tired of feeling big. I was tired of putting on every pair of pants trying to find the one that fit and that would zip up without causing the "muffin-top". I just felt fat. It was mid April, and I decided to do something about it. I searched for an app for weight loss and the first one I saw I downloaded. Turns out that it worked for me! I really can't believe i'm back down to my high school weight. My husband looked at me and realized that this is what I looked like when he first met me in college. Now i'm kicking myself because I donated all of my "skinny" clothes thinking that I would never again be thin. Well, nuts. Oh well. I guess I get to go shopping.
When I started my journey back in April, I decided to start jogging. It couldn't possibly be too hard, and I was really motivated to start moving. For the first two weeks, I was jogging 2 miles per day. I got some new jogging shoes and was really going for it. But I had to stop due to some serious pain building up in my knees.  I asked my husband if he could put my mountain bike together again and put it on the trainer so that I could at least ride my bike on the back porch until my knees felt better. And he did! I guess he was so excited that I wanted to get back on my bike that he put it back together that night! He had been using my bike for parts for the past 4-5 years since I never rode it anyway. Ever since, I have been riding up to 3 hours per day and 30 minutes on the really busy days. But not a day goes by without some form of exercise. The coolest thing is that I get to log breastfeeding as an exercise too! The best kind of exercise is the kind you can do without getting up and moving. LOL!
I had told my husband that I was really getting excited about riding my bike and that I wanted to start training for the 'Reach the Beach' ride that is in May of next year. I only had one bike, and it's definitely not a road bike. It's really heavy compared to any good road bike, and it's just not built for that length of ride. My husband had a surprise for me though. For Father's day, he wanted us all to go to the bike shop in Portland so he could get a deal on their Father's day sales. I didn't know that he had slipped the bike rack in the back of the 4runner that morning. He had to work that day, so the kids and I picked him up and we all went down to the store together. As we were looking at all their bikes, my husband said that I should try out a road bike to see what would suit me. For those who don't know me, I am really short. About five feet tall on good days, and just under that on bad days. : )  Anyway, it took a while to find a bike with a small enough frame for me. The moment I got on that bike, I knew it was for me! It felt so good pedaling that bike! It was so smooth, I felt as though I was gliding on air! After test-riding it, I told my husband that this would be the kind of bike that I would go for when it came time for me to get a road bike. That's all it took. He then told me that he had snuck the bike rack into the car and that he was hoping that I would find a road bike to start my training on. I'm such a lucky girl! Since then, I've been training on my new road bike that fits me like a glove. I am really enjoying every minute of it, and most of all, i'm healthier now too.  It really does feel better to be moving and making the most of my days. I'm back to the weight i'm comfortable at, and I'm feeling so much better about myself! I really couldn't have done this with out the support of my amazing husband and especially God. Every time I felt like stopping, I would pray for the support to take one more step... just one more.