Blueberry-Oatmeal Muffins: or, They're worth all the bowls

We needed something to bake right on the first attempt.

Blueberry-Oatmeal Muffins Heat oven to 350°. Line a cupcake pan with papers, or coat with cooking spray. Mix, and let soak 10 minutes: ½ cup buttermilk or sour cream (If using sour cream, add about 1 or 2 tbsp more. If you have neither buttermilk nor sour cream, mix 1 cup milk and 1 tbsp lemon juice, let soak 5 minutes before adding the oatmeal.) ½ cup rolled oatmeal While the oatmeal is soaking, combine: ½ cup all-purpose flour ½ cup whole-wheat flour 1½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp salt Sift them together, or stir with a fork or a whisk to mix and fluff up. Next, thoroughly beat together in a large bowl: 1 egg ¾ cup brown sugar 1½ tsp vanilla 2 tbsp water Add the oatmeal mixture, and mix well. Then gently mix in the dry ingredients. Lastly, add: ½ cup blueberries, or more if desired (if the berries are shrunken and partially dried out from being in the refrigerator too long, you can add a lot more) Save a small handful of berries to sprinkle into any muffins that don't have enough (like when you're scraping the last of the batter off the sides of the bowl). Stir 10 strokes, or just enough to disperse the berries. Fill muffin cups about halfway full. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until they spring back when gently pressed in the center. Note: This is a great recipe for blueberries (or any other berries) that have gone squishy or otherwise passed their prime. Source: some mid-2000s refrigerator calendar

After the chocolate dot cookies drove me to flour-induced madness (even though they came out all right in the end), I wanted a recipe that would work exactly as written. Which brings us to today's recipe.

Way back in the day, my mom had one of those big calendars on the refrigerator to keep track of who had soccer practice and who had marching band on what days. It was interspersed with household management tips and recipes. I thought these blueberry muffins looked good enough to copy down the directions, but then I was just never in the mood for blueberry muffins. And after a while I forgot the piece of paper was tucked in the cover of one of my cookbooks. But this week, we had a lot of blueberries go soft and squishy on us. They were still perfectly good to eat, but no one wanted to.

This recipe demands a lot of bowls and a surprising amount of countertop acreage. You definitely want a dishwasher at hand. 

Getting down to ingredients, this recipe uses a lot of brown sugar. You can definitely tell this it comes from before "The Great Muffin Disillusionment:" that moment when we all collectively realized that stirring fruit into cake batter does not make it healthy.  

Meanwhile, ten minutes of soaking time had turned our oatmeal and sour cream into spackle. I'm not sure why we were supposed to soak them ten minutes, but I'm guessing the muffins don't bake long enough to soften the oats.  

And now, less than a minute after we finished getting everything into separate bowls, we started putting it all back together. At this point I noticed there's no butter, shortening, or oil in the recipe. Maybe the absence of fat makes these muffins instead of uniced cupcakes. At first I thought that just cutting the fat out of a cake recipe would ruin it. Then I thought that the war cake only has a couple of spoonfuls of shortening in it, and it is always delicious.

I ended up nearly doubling the berries because (as aforementioned) ours were squishy and sad. I know I might have ruined the recipe, but it beats freezing half-expired berries and then forgetting they're lodged behind last month's casserole. But as you can see, we didn't overload the batter with fruit. Maybe the original recipe writers were a little bit too parsimonious with their berry allowance.

The batter tasted really good. So even if these had a terrible texture after baking, at least the flavor would be right.

These were unexpectedly popular in the house. I kept seeing everyone go back to take just one more off the countertop. Within a few hours, the top of the trash can had a little pile of empty cupcake wrappers. I was asked to make them again the next day. "But we don't have any more expiring fruit!" I objected.

"We could... uh... make them with fresh fruit." Well to my nickel-counting self, that was heresy. But since no one else had near-dogmatic objections, I committed fresh berries to the oven. It may be extravagant, but what could I do but give in to popular demand?

As you already surmised, these were really good. They are surprisingly light and airy. They tasted a lot like granola bars-- the good ones that don't try to pretend they're good for you. You could argue that I put too many blueberries in them, but I think they were better this way. They kind of turned into mini cobblers, and also they tasted better because I had the happiness of knowing that I had avoided wasting fruit. 

And even if you buy fresh fruit just for these, they're too good to worry about it.