Oatmeal Strawberry Muffins

In the wintertime, I usually eat oatmeal for breakfast. This sort of appalls my mother, who I guess has really horrible childhood memories of being forced to eat oatmeal, but I love it with some greek yogurt and sweetened fruit. I also love it with butter, heavy cream, and brown sugar but it's probably best not to do that too often. The only problem with oatmeal is that I like old fashioned oatmeal, like McCann's, and it takes forever to cook. Of course, one batch makes way too much for just one breakfast so I usually have enough for about a week but still, I don't like having to wait so long for my oatmeal to cook in the morning. I suppose I could make it the night beforehand but I want at least one morning where my oatmeal is hot and fresh. Since I returned to D.C. after Christmas I've been pondering muffins. Muffins could be great. They could be healthy, convenient, and I could freeze them? And then I could take one out each morning. So, I've been looking around, trolling the internet, for reasonably healthy, and tasty, muffins. I mean, I want it to be healthy but I'm not up for a bran/raisin/carrot muffin. I narrowed my searches down to oatmeal muffins and yogurt muffins and, this time, oatmeal won out. I found a recipe for Very Berry Muffins on All Recipes and I looked at the user comments to come up with my recipe. There were some other recipes that looked great too but I they called for wheat germ and I still have an aversion to wheat germ because my dad used to sneak it into waffles, pancakes, and chocolate chip cookies when we were little. I guess it worked at first but then he got cheeky and added more and more. I can still remember coming downstairs to a waffle and my brother and I would take one bite and say: "Ugh! Did you put wheat germ in the waffles again?!" Luckily, my mom made us breakfast 90% of the time and I don't think that she tried those tricks.

Oatmeal Strawberry Muffins

(adapted from Very Berry Muffins, allrecipes.com)

makes 12 muffins

1 1/3 c all purpose flour

1 c rolled oats

1/3 c packed light brown sugar

1 tablespoon of baking powder

1/2 tsp cinnamon

pinch of salt

1 c milk

1 egg, beaten

3 tablespoons of vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 - 2 cups of chopped strawberries (I used frozen and I thought that they worked really well)

raw sugar for sprinkling (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees and line muffin cups with paper liners or grease very well.
2. In a medium bowl, stir together dry ingredients. Mix in the milk, egg, oil, and vanilla and stir until combined. Add the strawberries. Fill muffin cups about 2/3 full. Sprinkle with raw sugar if you like.
3. Bake muffins for about 25-30 minutes in preheated oven, or until the tops are golden and spring back to the touch. (My muffins took about 20-25 minutes to cook but I used frozen strawberries and my batter was really cold. I don't think that it would take muffins made with fresh berries nearly that long too cook, especially at such a high temp.)

I thought that these were quite tasty with my coffee this morning. I don't use All Recipes that often but I think that I will try to use it more because it has that handy calculator that allows you to cut recipes, which is oh-so-nice when you're cooking for one. I gave the amounts for the original recipe plus my changes but I cut it in half to make 6 for me. It still made 9 though so I'm guessing that the original will make more than 12.