Do You Know the Muffin Man?

Cooking is one of my favorite activities. It's a challenge from buying ingredients and choosing recipes to putting it all together. Since I'd have to do this every day whether I liked it or not, just to feed the guys around here, I decided a while back to just make it into a hobby.

Contrary to popular belief, I don't choose recipes specifically to torture or poison anyone...I'm just taking my job to keep them healthy seriously. My husband is great about praising my efforts in front of the kids (sometimes a little too much -- I actually know when something isn't that great) and he will eat anything I serve, as long as it doesn't have anything to do with tuna in a casserole.

So where's the trouble? Not surprisingly, it's with the kids. But we're not talking vegetables (they're pretty good at those)...it's the muffin. The simplest of breakfast foods, universally loved, is a huge challenge at our house. I've made carrot, zucchini and pumpkin muffins. Blueberry, strawberry and raspberry, as well as mixed-berry. Sour cream and buttermilk. Peanut butter and jelly. Muffins with ricotta cheese and with bananas. Cinnamon-topped. Glazed. Muffin tops and mini-muffins. Muffins shaped like donuts. Mostly, they are delicious. But the only ones the youngsters consistently get excited about either come from a boxed mix or are piled on a hotel breakfast buffet (also from a box).

I do try to put healthy, natural ingredients in the muffins I make -- which is a big reason to bother with baking from scratch. That means whole grain flour, fruit, yogurt (no hidden cauliflower or beets or anything at all subversive). And the boys are used to healthy stuff -- they have always eaten whole wheat bread and natural peanut butter and fruit spreads instead of jam. They consume tons of fruit and inhale healthy-ingredient pancakes like there is no tomorrow. Needless to say, no Twinkies or Kool-Aid have dared to enter this house (a subject for another post, no doubt).

A couple of years ago I wrote down this conversation with my sons after I served them fresh-from-the-oven oatmeal-raspberry muffins made with brown sugar and buttermilk. They looked and smelled lovely, like muffins should...lightly brown on top, no nuts, and even in a Toy Story paper liner with a cute, three-eyed alien on it. Here's how it went:

B -- (looking at muffin) Ew.
Me -- Oh, just try it.
B -- I hate these.
Me -- This is the first time I've ever made them.
B -- I still hate them.
Me -- How about taking a bite before you decide?
B -- (picking off a miniscule crumb) Yuck.
Me -- Really? How about an actual bite before you say that?
B -- (watches Pokemon and pretends I have left)
T -- (after a slightly bigger bite than his brother) I don't like these.
Me -- (curious) Can you tell me what you don't like?
T -- (helpfully) No.
Me -- I wonder how many other kids have freshly-baked muffins before school?
B & T -- (give me a look that clearly says, "that's an odd question")
Me -- (head for more coffee) Sigh.

After that, I took some time off from the Muffin Quest. Except for the occasional zucchini bread (which is not shaped even remotely like a muffin) I stopped with breakfast breads. Now that the weather is cooling a little, I might give it another go. They're older and more mature now, right? Surely I don't have to resort to a box to make this work. Maybe I'll try these: http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/inside-out-pumpkin-muffins-recipe -- they look delicious to me!

I'll let you know how it goes. No matter what I do, I imagine they will eventually go off to college and stock their dorm rooms with little preservative-laden blueberry muffins from Hostess, wondering why they were so deprived all those years.