Recipe Revamp

Ever wonder how Nutritionists and Dietitians approach cooking/baking?  For me it's always been with a creative eye - always looking for a way to improve a recipe that will still make it taste good, but support my body in a healthy way too.  To demonstrate this I pulled out my recipe for carrot muffins.  Carrot muffins are a great way for me to get the benefits of carrots into my boys without the struggle of feeding them steamed carrots.

I found this recipe on allrecipes.com a couple of years ago and after a little tweaking, I'm pretty happy with the results.  It has also passed the test of the finicky 6 and 8 year old taste buds I live with.  Here is a little list of what I tweaked.

1. All-purpose flour is always replaced with 100% whole wheat flour in my house.  While this doesn't work super well with a pastry, it works great in baked items like this.  I choose a white whole wheat flour which has a lighter texture than the hard red wheat - but still contains just as much fiber.
2. Spices and leavening agents (baking soda & baking powder) I leave alone.  The salt content is necessary for proper interaction with the baking soda, so don't touch that either.  If you're on a low sodium diet, I'm pretty sure the 1/2 tsp of salt in a big batch of carrot muffins is not what is creating the issue for you.  ;)
3. Sugar has been reduced to 1/2 cup.  The carrots have a natural sweetness to themselves, and we aren't using yeast that would require a particular amount of sugar or honey.  I would also choose something like Sugar in the Raw, or some Evaporated Organic Cane Juice. I personally avoid artifical sweeteners as I can taste them (yes even Splenda) and am not using a large quantity so the quantity of simple sugars I'm adding is not significant.

4. Next I dropped the quantity of oil down from 3/4 cup to 1/2 cup.  Not a big difference, but every little bit helps.  I hate vegetable oil.  It's disgusting and your arteries don't like it much either.  Instead I opt for lite olive oil in this instance.  Great benefits just like regular olive oil, but less olive-y taste because it's not from the virgin press of the olive.  Note that light or lite is only referring to the color of the oil and is not indicating that the olive oil has less fat or calories.

5. Then I increase the amount of carrots being used from 2 cups to 4, and I opted to steam mine and puree them.  This was a personal preference and I really I did it so I wouldn't have to listen to complaints that there was a chunk of carrot in someone's muffin.  They still know the carrots are in there, but they aren't quite so obvious.
6. I kicked the frosting to the curb.  Completely unnecessary unless you were really trying to make a carrot cake - and if we're going for a healthier item we don't to top things off with extra sugar.
7. My last step is to add some extras.  What I choose to add varies depending upon my mood that day.  For a while it was ground flaxseed (extra fiber and some omega-3s, though they aren't as bio-available as those in fish).  Lately I alternate between the flaxseed and chia seeds.  Down the road I might toss in some chopped nuts.  I add my bonus ingredient at a rate of about 1/4-1/2 cup.  You can get flaxseed as the seeds.  These will last longer than the already ground variety - but make sure you have something to grind them with before adding them - like a coffee grinder.  The chia seeds, on the other hand, can be tossed in as the whole seeds.

And why do I do all this?  The more fiber I can cram in there, the more filling a muffin will be.  That extra fiber also helps keep cholesterol levels looking beautiful and our intestines healthy.  I double up on the carrots because the whole reason for the muffin is to sneak in extra veggies... so I'm going to go a little overboard.  And then I top it off with less sugar (because it really doesn't need it) and some bonus sources of fiber and healthy fats (flax and chia seeds).  It would be so labor-intensive to create recipes from scratch - tweaking someone else's work is a simpler way to create healthy things to eat.