yoga muffins. om.

I surprised Jake today with my favorite kind of gift -- the non-material kind (foodstuffs excepted). He's been working on applications and studying for finals and taking me out to dinners and movies and museums, so I thought he could use a little alignment and balance and downward dog. So I set up a private yoga class for him taught by our favorite instructor. We love this teacher. A lot. He's got this great calm energy and makes everything in the world a little bit easier. I obviously couldn't let Jake do this sort of thing on his own, so I came to class, too. We sweat and breathed and talked and put our feet up the wall and jumped around for two hours. It was awesome.
I had an earth mother vision of myself giving our teacher some homemade muffins as an extra thank you after class (the other thank yous being the approximately 20 hugs I gave him), so this morning after doing some work I whipped up a batch. My other vision was of the healthy variety, since there was a good chance that, as a yoga instructor, my gift recipient could be vegan. I perused a few vegan muffin recipes but nothing without butter was sounding very good to me, so I settled on oats as a healthy, vegan-y type of thing and made (in record time I might add -- I didn't want to be one of two students late for class) a dozen cinnamon-oatmeal-golden-raisin-banana muffins. It was kind of an invention, but after sampling a muffin after class I think it was a successful invention.


here's what I used:

1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup skim milk
1 large egg, beaten lightly
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 stick unsalted butter, soft
3 tablespoons greek yogurt (le fage, 5%)
1 cup flour (1/2 whole wheat, 1/2 white)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup dried currants
1 banana, sliced and halved
1+ cup of golden raisins

here's what I did:

Preheat oven to 400°F and put muffin liners in the muffin tin.

Combine the oats and milk in a big bowl and let them hang out for while (for up to 1 hr, but I only had about 10minutes)

Add egg, sugar, and butter, and yogurt to oat mixture, stirring until just combined.

In another bowl, sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon and add to oat mixture, stirring until just combined.

Fold in banana slices and raisins.

Divide batter evenly among muffin tins. Bake muffins in middle of oven until golden and a tester comes out clean, about 15 minutes.

Makes 12.