Yummy Good Stuff

Peanut Butter & Jelly Muffins

Yield
1 dozen (serving size: 1 muffin)

Ingredients
1 cup all-purpose flour (about 4 1/2 ounces)
3/4 cup whole wheat flour (about 3 1/2 ounces)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups fat-free milk
1/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup egg substitute
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Cooking spray
1/4 cup strawberry jam

Preparation
Preheat oven to 400°.
Lightly spoon flours into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flours, sugars, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl; stir with a whisk. Make a well in center of mixture. Combine milk and next 4 ingredients (through vanilla); add to flour mixture, stirring just until moist.
Spoon batter into 12 muffin cups coated with cooking spray. Fill each cup half full with batter. Spoon 1 teaspoon jam into each cup. Spoon remaining batter on top to cover jam. Bake at 400° for 20 minutes or until muffins spring back when touched lightly in center. Let cool in pan 5 minutes. Remove from pan, and cool on a wire rack.

Nutritional Information
Calories:
185 (28% from fat)
Fat:
5.8g (sat 2g,mono 2.3g,poly 1.2g)
Protein:
5.2g
Carbohydrate:
29.4g
Fiber:
1.6g
Cholesterol:
5.6mg
Iron:
1.2mg
Sodium:
288mg
Calcium:
113mg

Sourdough Bread. Take one..Take two...Take three!

Ok, I can bake. It's a talent I'm pretty proud of and I love to do it. I can bake most anything with pretty great success. Well, anything but bread. Every year or so I get the gumption to try again and every time it's disastrous. I even bought a bread machine and with high hopes attempted just plain ordinary white bread. What emerged from the machine something akin to a brown mud brick and no where near edible. And that was my most successful bread making venture so far. It's beyond maddening! Bread making is in my genes. My grandmother was known for her homemade bread. Her loaves were nothing short of spectacular! And my mother's are equally as delicious! Fortified with this lineage, I experimented with sourdough bread this weekend.
Take one. I will not share the picture. It's just too depressing. I assigned the failure to a bad recipe and tried again.
Take two. If you know anything about sourdough, you know you have to give it plenty of rising time. So after about half a day of rising in the turned off oven what do I do? I forget my beautiful creation was in the oven and I turned it on! I was baking pie crusts and forgot all about my dough! Needless to say, I killed it. So I took Bill's suggestion and we had scones for breakfast the next day. The dough wasn't good for much else.

Take three. By this time I've refilled the flour bucket four times and I think my parents think I'm completely nuts. I'm beginning to question my own sanity. Here's my end result.

Please don't laugh! It's about the ugliest loaf of bread known to man... but it was edible! In fact Celia and my nephew Josh saw me slicing it and insisted on a piece. They loved it! And they're both pretty picky. So I count this as my first bread making success!! Now I just have to work on the aesthetic!

Yummalicious!

I did it! I mastered homemade Sourdough English Muffins. They look store bought, but taste much better and none of the yucky artificial gunk. I'm quite proud! My next experiment? Bread. Wish me luck.