{bake more, yes indeed!}

So this year I had three food related goals:

• Bake more at home, buy less Oreos.
• Plan bet­ter meals. Plan meals ahead instead of at the last hour.
• Drink more milk.

I have been bak­ing more already– actu­ally for the past few months, and have some favorite go to recipes. I have real­ized that if a recipe calls for beat­ing– I prob­a­bly wont make it too often. Pulling out the big mixer in our small kitchen and clean­ing every­thing up after that– leads to pro­cras­ti­na­tion. The best kind of baked good in my house are made with my happy helper, a mix­ing bowl and a big wooden spoon

My all time favorite thing to bake– Banana Oat Wal­nut Muffins. I always have a few left­over bananas going over­ripe and this is the per­fect way to use them up…

recipe: In a large bowl mix 1 cup milk+ 1/2 cup canola oil+ 1tbsp sour cream+ 2 eggs+ 1tsp vanilla extract+ two large mashed bananas. Fold in 2/3 cup of sugar+ 2 tsp bak­ing pow­der+ 1/2 tsp bak­ing soda+ pinch of salt. Now alter­nate 1 1/2 cups of reg­u­lar rolled oats and 2 cups of all pur­pose flour. Stir gen­tly. Add 1/2 cups of chopped wal­nuts if you like. The bat­ter will be lumpy, dont over­mix. Pour into lightly greased muf­fin pans. Pre­pare a top­ping of 1tbsp melted but­ter +1tbsp brown sugar+ 1/2 cup finely chopped wal­nuts in a bowl. add a lit­tle bit of top­ping onto each muf­fin. Bake for 25 min­utes in a 375F oven. Makes 12 muffins.

I usu­ally make only 6  muffins (half the recipe ingre­di­ents) and some­times use a mini muf­fin pan along with the reg­u­lar muf­fin pan. The lit­tle girls snack on the mini muffins– they fit per­fectly in their hand. I also dont add wal­nuts in the bat­ter these days, only adding them as a top­ping for a few muffins for me and the hubs. I still pre­pare the top­ping — with just but­ter and brown sugar– coz this gives an amaz­ing crust!

Another favorite go to muf­fin recipe for me is– The Pio­neer Woman’s’ Blue­berry Muffins. These sim­ply melt into your mouth. We rarely have any muffins left till lunch!

We also recently bought a bread­maker– and bake a lot of fresh home­made bread. I also love mak­ing Banana bread in the bread­maker, talk about easy cleanup! The recipe I use can be found here (scroll down to page 30), but you prob­a­bly want to use the recipe that comes with your brand of breadmaker.

We have tried mak­ing blue­berry jam (Scroll down to page 82) in our bread­maker too! Easy peasy and tastes yum!

And before I leave, I wanted to share this amaz­ing Triple choco­late cookie recipe I tried. Its by Bobby Flay and the instruc­tions are very well writ­ten. Another new favorite!!

Care to share your favorite recipes with me today? Leave me a link in the com­ment sec­tion below!