weekend meal and pepita meal

Do we call this “lunch” when I ate it at 4:00?

So as not to sound like a total crazy person, in my defense I ate breakfast at 10:30 after feeling a certain reluctance to get out of my warm toasty bed with my awesome Ian McEwan book. And then I kind of wasted time all morning (and waited for the rain to stop, which it did! Score) and then went to the gym and on a serious Trader Joe’s expedition.

Thus… “lunch” at 4. We’ll call it “weekend meal”.

Actually, my friend Liz freshman year had what she called “Sunday meal”. We’d stay out late on Saturday, making excessively poor decisions, and then Sunday sleep til… late. Kind of get it together in our rooms, frantically start doing the homework we blew off, and then… Sunday Meal. At about 4:00 on a Sunday. All your meals in a day in one, emphasis on carbs and cheese and all those lovely foods that would help ease the pangs of what looked suspiciously like hangovers… good times.

Anyway, back to my weekend meal:

FAB salad. I planned this in my head on the way back from Trader Joe’s: broccoli slaw, carrots, apple, and smoked turkey. Dressed with oil, apple cider vinegar, and mustard. YUM.

  And a killer diller combination: plain yogurt with a crumbled Lemon Zest Luna bar on top. Trust me, try it. Your taste buds will thank you.

And now for my project for the rest of the afternoon…

I know I made muffins just the other day, but can one really have enough muffins? Plus, I got creative!

Due to my current abundance of squash, I have an abundance of pepitas, adorable squash seeds that I have taken to roasting. However, one can only sprinkle them on so many soups, bowls of oats, etc. Soooo I thought “I should make a butter with them, like sunflower seed butter!”

But my blender couldn’t totally handle it, so I thought “hey, this looks like flaxseed meal! I should try using it in baked goods, flax-style!” Which I subsequently did.

Banana Pepita Muffins (so many cute words in 1 name!)

1/2 cup quick oats

2 T boiling water

1/4 cup flour (I used all purpose)

3/8 cup pepita meal, flax meal, seed meal, whatever (I ground up about 1/2 cup plus 1 T seeds, which yielded a little less than 1/2 cup meal)

1/2 t baking soda

1/2 t baking powder

1/4 t cinnamon

2 T vegetable oil

2 T milk

2 T plain yogurt

2 T sugar

1 ripe mashed banana

Pour water over oats. Stir, and set aside. Combine dry ingredients (flour through cinnamon). Combine wet ingredients (vegetable oil through mashed banana). Make a well in the dry ingredients, and add the oats (break up clumps first) and wet ingredients. Stir to combine, and drop into greased muffin tins. Bake at 350 for 22 minutes or so. Makes 5 smallish muffins.

I was thinking these could’ve been a spectacular failure as I scooped them into the muffin tin, but they were actually yummy! They get a really nice crisp top (I think this has implications for future cookie/bar recipes) and the banana was wonderfully ripe so there were wonderful melty sweet banana bits on the inside.