Jill Can Cook: Healthy Zucchini Muffins

I've really wanted to add more vegetables into my life. I started this quest many months ago with zucchini and after cooking it a couple different way without ever enjoying it, I gave up on adding zucchini into my life.

That is, until Joe's grandmother served homemade zucchini bread at a get together not too long ago and it reinvigorated me. I liked it in the bread with all the spices, so that counts as adding zucchini to "the foods I will eat" list, doesn't it? I mean, it's going to take some more tries before it fully counts, but it's there in theory.

For my first attempt at delicious zucchini, I decided to turn it into muffins. Kids like muffins and I'd need them to eat at least half of these. They also REALLY wanted to help, so here goes!

Healthy Zucchini Muffins

Adapted from: Gimme Some Oven

Ingredients:

I photographed a lot of zucchini, but I only used 2 of them.

• 1 2/3 cups white whole wheat flour (or all-purpose flour)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 cup milk (almond milk, 2% milk, or whatever you prefer)
• 1/4 cup melted coconut oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups grated fresh zucchini
• 1/3 cups old-fashioned oats (uncooked), plus extra for sprinkling

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350°F.  Prepare a 12-cup muffin pan by either greasing it with cooking spray or lining the cups with paper liners.  Set aside.
2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt until combined.  Set aside.
3. In a separate mixing bowl, whisk together egg, maple syrup, milk, coconut oil and vanilla extract until combined.  Pour this mixture into the dry ingredient mixture, and stir with a spoon until just combined.  (Do not overmix.)  Stir in the zucchini and oats until just combined.
4. Portion the batter evenly between 12 baking cups.  Then sprinkle extra oats on top of each, if desired.  Bake for 18-20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the muffin comes out clean.  Transfer pan to a cooling rack, then serve the muffins warm.  Or let cool to room temperature, then store in a sealed container for up to 2 days, or freeze.

My kids always want to help, but there aren't that many things that they can do. This recipe is mostly just dumping ingredients in a bowl and mixing. So, I let them dump the ingredients and mix them. They weren't very impressed.

Bored kid alert!

The wet ingredients and the dry ingredients. And a bonus shot of my foot!

OK, this is where it gets good, folks! I had to make the zucchini really small, so I grabbed our tiny grater. I bought it for a dollar at the dollar store. It took forever to grate the zucchini, so I switched over to the larger grater.

And then I took  a really awful picture of myself using it.

See the small pieces on the right? Those are from the small grater.

After I compared the the zucchini pieces from both of the graters, I realized that I should've stuck with the smaller grater, even though it took 5 years to grate a teaspoon of zucchini. I really feel like the texture would've been better for the muffins. 

Anyway, I decided to just use what I had and hope for the best.

Off to the oven!! (I made these around Christmas hence the themed muffin cups)

I threw them into the oven and cleaned/played with the kids until the timer went off.

I proceeded to not take any pictures of them out of the oven because I forget important stuff like that sometimes.

Luckily, I took a few pictures of the kids partaking.

Mitchell shoved half the muffin in his mouth right away!

Quinn stared at the muffin for about 10 minutes before she took a bite.

Her first bite! And she liked it! They both did

Cuties!

As far as I was concerned, they came out all right. Not as good as Joe's grandmothers, but good enough to eat. Joe made sure to eat one or two every day for as long as they lasted. I never got Quinn to eat more than the one showed in the pictures. 

I can't wait to make these again using a different recipe to see if I can get them to taste a little better! I also like that this is a veggie dish without being a veggies dish and I hope to find more recipes like this with other veggies.  

Final grade: B+. They might not have been fantastic but they were still good.