Watch a garden grow and indulge on an orange muffin

I love gardens, flowers, veggies, trees, greens. Everything green is attractive to me. This is why I filled a dozen jars, vases and buckets with greenery from the backyard garden.

Winters in northeast U.S. deprive me of my favorite time in the garden. So, at this time of the year (it is December now), I desperately seek blogs and YouTube videos about gardens. 

This morning I found the YouTube channel Suburban Homestead. The creator of the channel offers quiet, calming videos on gardening and related topics. The guy throws in a few recipes as well. And here is a good episode to start with:

Calm and in control: this is how I feel in my garden. It is a sort of “active” mediation. Instead of sitting and focusing on my breathing, I work in the garden and free my mind of all the noise and nonsense of the day. Watching the videos of the Suburban Homesteader has more or less the same effect on my brain (sadly, not my physical activity levels).

This weekend, I, the anti-sugar fanatic, baked oatmeal-orange muffins. The recipe might have come from a fiction book or Pinterest (I do not remember how I obtained it), but I substituted the sugar, milk and oil with bananas, water and applesauce, respectively, so in a way it is a new experimental recipe.

Orange muffins (for 24 cupcakes):

Ingredients:
1 and 1/2 cups oats
2 and 2/3 cups of flour (I use 1:1 whole wheat and white flour)
2 ripe bananas, mashed
4 tsp baking powder 
3 large eggs
1 cup of water
2 cups unsweetened applesauce
12 Tbsp orange marmalade
the zest from one orange (grate the peel of one orange)

Directions 
Preheat the oven at 400F. Line the muffin pans with cupcake papers. Mix the flour, oats, and baking powder. Separately, mix the eggs, water, applesauce, orange zest and mashed bananas. Add to the dry ingredients and mix only until combined. Distribute 1 Tbsp of batter to each muffin cup, spread on the bottom. Drop ½ Tbsp marmalade in the center of each muffin cup. Fill the muffins with the rest of the batter. Bake for 25 minutes.

The verdict: the muffins tasted fine; however, next time, I will make my own marmalade filling from 2-3 oranges and their peel. The store-bought marmalade was too sweet and a bit runny, so it leaked to the paper liners. Peeling the paper cups from the muffins was a feat. I may have to non-stick spray even the cupcake papers next time!