weekly cookbook project: oatmeal raisin muffins

I'd said at the beginning of the year that I was going to commit to making one recipe per week from one of my cookbooks; I have a bunch of them and I never really use them.  I was going fine up until my tummy tuck surgery at the end of February. I knew there would be a few weeks where I was out of commission, but I didn't think it would take me almost three months to get back into the swing of things. To be fair, my incision opened up a bit and was quite sensitive for many weeks, my dad died, and then I was sick for over two weeks. So, here I am. It's almost the end of May and I haven't cooked much at all in the last few months.

I was aiming for a recipe for which I had all the ingredients, or nearly all of them. And I wanted a recipe that would make use of a few ingredients that I've had on hand for awhile and just haven't used. In this case it was rolled oats and raisins. I flipped through my King Arthur Flour's Baker's Companion book and found a recipe for oatmeal muffins--raisins optional. It looked really easy and the only thing I needed to buy was buttermilk. And I HATE buying buttermilk. It always seems way overpriced and the carton is way bigger than what I need and will use. But I went for it anyway. Luckily I found a quart container for $1.69, which was a bargain compared to some others I've seen. And if I had to dump the rest, I wouldn't feel like I'd wasted a bunch of money. Worse comes to worse, I can make banana cupcakes or buttermilk pancakes and freeze them.

So, this recipe was super simple. You just put the rolled oats and buttermilk in a container to soak overnight and then the next day you dump in all the other ingredients, stir, fill the muffin pan and bake for 18-20 minutes.  The recipe stated a yield of "12 generous-sized muffins." That tells me nothing. My muffin pans are all standard size, but they certainly didn't look like they would yield a "generous-sized muffin," So, I checked the back of the book, which has a "Tools" chapter. It mentioned the depth of the wells in the muffin pan and according to what it said, the recipe would be too much for my pans. No big deal--I simply got 17 smaller muffins instead of 12 bigger ones. And, actually, that worked out better for me. The smaller size meant I could eat a whole muffin without making me feel stuffed or overloading me with sugar.

I like these muffins. The texture is a little on the chewier side, which I actually like. I can taste the buttermilk and the raisins are very plump, although they pretty much settled at the bottom for the most part.  My only complaint is that I couldn't detect the pieces of oatmeal. I tasted it, but the oats themselves disappeared. If I make these again, I plan to soak the oatmeal for a shorter period of time. Maybe I'll put them in to soak in the morning and then cook them in the early afternoon.

The nutritional content is as follows based on the number of muffins I got out of it (17):  112 calories, 13g sugar, 4g fat, 19g carbs, and 2g protein. Bigger muffins would have been about 160 calories. Obviously these will be tough to eat for someone who can't have a lot of sugar, but they fall right in the sweet spot (no pun intended!) for me. No, I shouldn't be eating them, but this is how I live post-WLS life--in moderation and including treats now and then.