Ah, guilt.

This period of time between Halloween and New Year’s Day is filled with rich holiday foods, sugary cakes and candy and cookies and sweets. And I’m guilty of peppering you with those things, too. It’s like the world has given us permission to indulge without regret and without regard to our waistlines.

Even my husband’s doctor gave him a free pass to not worry about his diet until after the first of the year! And in a side note, told him that he’ll probably take him off of the Metformin (diabetes drug) in March or April. Yay!

But I admit to feeling guilty once in awhile that I’ve been concentrating on all these decadent delights, with very little in the way of good, healthy food that you can eat without guilt. You know, in between Christmas cookies and cupcakes. It’s the Jewish mother in me.

So, just for you (and hubs), I created this healthy, sweet, moist, and delicious muffin that you can serve to anyone for breakfast or as a snack, without saying that it’s good for you. In fact, if I could come up with a guilt-free frosting, you could call it a cupcake! It’s simple and quick to throw together, too.

Guilt-Free Pumpkin Ginger Muffins
(makes 12 regular-sized muffins)

Ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup oatmeal, ground*
1/4 cup pepitas (pumpkin seeds), ground*
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup flax seed meal
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 tsp ground ginger
12 packets Truvía (stevia sweetener)

4 large egg whites
1/4 cup agave nectar
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup orange juice

1/4 cup chopped crystallized ginger (optional)

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375º F. Place muffin/cupcake liner papers, or silicone liners, in a 12-compartment muffin tin and set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together all of the dry ingredients until well combined and make a well in the center. Add all of the wet ingredients into the well, and whisk together until the batter is smooth. Fold in the crystallized ginger, if using.

Divide batter evenly into the prepared muffin liners and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a wooden skewer, inserted into the near center, comes out clean. Allow to cool for about 20 minutes before serving.

*Variation: Add 3/4 cup dried cranberries (as I did in the batch photographed here). The cranberries add an additional textural and sweet element without going over the top – delicious! This will also increase your yield by about 2 muffins, so prepare extra liners.

Notes:

I love ginger and I made these pretty ginger-assertive to complement the pumpkin. Feel free to cut the amount of ground ginger if you think it’s too strong. Won’t hurt my feelings. ->Sniff<-

As an attractive garnish, instead of adding all the crystallized ginger to the muffin batter, sprinkle half of it (about 2 Tbs) on top of the batter after loading up your muffin cups, before baking. Of course, the crystallized ginger does add sugar, so omit it if you want to go completely sugar-free.

Super low in fat, no sugar (except in the crystallized ginger, if you’re using it), and multigrain / high-fiber, not to mention all those lovely vitamins and beta carotene in the pumpkin, it doesn’t get much more guilt-free than this, people! That also makes these muffins suitable for people with sugar-restricted diets and at the very least, type 2 diabetics.

Since it’s heat-stable, I’ve been curious about baking with Truvía, one of the new stevia-based sweeteners, and I have to tell you that I’m super-pleased with this first effort. Maybe it’s the combination with the agave nectar, but there is absolutely NO artificial sweetener aftertaste in these muffins. If you didn’t know that these muffins are sugar-free, you would never be able to tell. I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked. You may be able to prepare this recipe using another brand of stevia sweetener, but I used the Truvía and that’s what I’ll vouch for.

Like any good muffin, these freeze really well, too. Make up a batch, allow to cool completely, toss ‘em into a freezer bag, and chuck ‘em in the freezer.

* Measure the oatmeal and pepitas and run them through the food processor together. I used the mini food pro that came as an attachment with my immersion blender.

Yup. You heard me. Pumpkin Rocky Road Brownies. I love Rocky Road ice cream and I love the fall flavors of pumpkin, cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom. So why not combine them into a brownie?

Kelly of Evil Shenanigans (and she is evil, people, make no mistake!) issued a challenge: In honor of the new show, Top Chef: Just Desserts, let’s see if we can duplicate the elimination challenge. We, of course, would have the whole following week and post on Wednesday. Last week’s elimination challenge was “Bake Sale”. The cheftestants had to create items that would sell big at a high school bake sale, so that became our challenge, too.

That was my inspiration for these – and I’m betting they’d sell big-time!

Pumpkin Rocky Road Brownies

Ingredients:

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup pumpkin purée
1 cup natural cane sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. ground cardamom
1/2 tsp. table salt

1 cup California Walnuts, chopped or crushed coarsely
1 cup chocolate chips
2 cups mini-marshmallows

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 325º F. Prepare a 9″ x 9″ pan by spraying with cooking spray, or by lining with non-stick aluminum foil.

Melt the stick of butter over medium-low heat and allow to brown (yes! brown butter!). Remove from heat and stir in the cocoa powder until completely blended. Transfer mixture into a medium bowl.

Add the pumpkin puree to the cocoa mixture and mix on low speed with an electric mixer. Add the sugar, then add the egg and vanilla extract, and mix well after each addition.

Sift together all the dry ingredients, except the chocolate chips,nuts, and marshmallows, and add to the wet mixture in thirds, and mix thoroughly after each third. Fold in the nuts, chocolate chips, and mini-marshmallows by hand. This is a fairly thick batter.

Pour batter into the prepared pan and spread evenly.

Bake on the bottom rack of the oven for 30 – 35 minutes, or until the top appears dry. Allow to cool completely in the pan, on a rack, before cutting.

Notes:

* Again, allow the brownies to cool completely before cutting, or you’ll wind up with a sloppy (albeit delicious) mess. Patience, Grasshopper.

* For all my brownies, rather than greasing the pan, I like to line it with non-stick aluminum foil. Not only does this eliminate the need to grease and clean a pan, but after a few minutes, you can remove the brownie cake from the pan, in the foil, allowing it to cool faster. When it’s completely cool, you can peel back the foil and never worry about digging out that first piece – every piece you cut can be perfect!

One of my Twitter buddies, Michelle over at Big Black Dog, has been waxing poetic about the new book by Dr. Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe François, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Their previous book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, introduced a different way to bake bread that, in the long run, saves a lot of the time and effort in the process of baking bread at home. AB in 5 (for short) became a sensation and still enjoys enormous popularity. Heck, I bought a copy of it, myself.

HB in 5 (see how I picked up the lingo?) is dedicated to making healthier breads, using multigrains, fruits, and even vegetables, and using the same methods and principles that made the first book such a phenomenon.

So when Michelle put out the word that she was putting together an internet group with the idea of baking its way through Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, I was intrigued and decided to join in.

Although we won’t officially begin our “Bread Braid” until January, we’ve been assigned a bread that’s perfect for autumn to get started, a Pumpkin Pie Brioche. If you don’t already own HB in 5, click here to get the recipe, and join in!

This is my first experience with this type of bread baking, i.e., mixing a wet dough that is never kneaded, is stored in the fridge, and that you basically just scoop out, let rest, and bake. And even though the dough is supposed to be “wet”, I think this particular recipe was even wetter because of the addition of the pumpkin.

I was really unprepared for just how wet and sticky it really was. So the first loaf I made was pretty fugly. Actually, the second loaf was only a little better. I also decided to break in the little mini-brioche molds I bought about 5 years ago, but never had the guts to use. If you decide to make this, keep the bench flour close and keep your hands well-floured at all times.

Without further ado, I bring you my lumpy Pumpkin Pie Brioche and mini-brioches! Looks are deceiving, though. It tastes delicious!

If you’d like to join in and try baking healthy breads in a whole new way, click here to visit Big Black Dog and learn about our monthly “Bread Braid”.

I’m not sure how this happened, but we just had possibly the worst Indian meal we have ever eaten in a restaurant. The place is called Heelsha and it is located in North Miami Beach. Let me start over:

MJ and I had to be in NMB Thursday evening, and since we were in the neighborhood, we thought we’d finally try Heelsha. We’d heard so many wonderful things about it. Heelsha is owned and run by a husband and wife from Bangladesh, and indeed the restaurant is named after what could be called the national fish of Bangladesh. We’d read all the rave reviews on the web and in print. And while we never had the pleasure of eating at this couple’s previous restaurant, they were at the South Beach Food & Wine Festival a couple of years ago, and we thought their food was awesome. We were psyched!

Omen of things to come: The papadums arrived at the table stone-cold and undercooked. How can I describe it? Have you ever cooked a pappadum in the microwave? You know you have. You didn’t want to dirty a pan with cooking oil and you just wanted a couple, and anyway you avoid some fat by just sticking one on a paper plate and tossing it in the microwave. Right? You remember what it looked like: pale and kind of bumpy and a couple of hard raw spots on one side. Okay, it happens sometimes at home. But at a restaurant? A good restaurant? Not an auspicious beginning.

Then came the vegetable samosas – promisingly crispy on the outside. And then – thick, doughy, and bland. Followed by the potato-stuffed puri. A puri (sometimes “poori”), for the uninitiated, is a light, crispy, balloon of a bread. It is the lightest and most tender of all the Indian breads. I’ve seen sturdier breads stuffed – parathas, for example. And that works. So let’s stop and contemplate the wisdom of stuffing a puri for just a moment. What arrived at the table was a thick, leaden, greasy slab, any puff having been sliced open and spread with a thin layer of somewhat seasoned mashed potato and then smashed back together. MJ thought it tasted like a knish. I think that’s insulting the venerable knish.

Of course, it doesn’t end there. Next up was the saag paneer (spinach with fresh cheese) and the pumpkin vhuna, which is supposed to be roasted pumpkin sauteed with onion and green pepper. Here’s the weird part: aside from the fact that the pumpkin was cloyingly sweet and the spinach tasted like tea, both dishes appeared to be identically seasoned. And not in a good way, either. There were only a few actual chunks of pumpkin, so both dishes had nearly the identical texture, too. And even after the post-mortem (we took the leftovers home – not to eat – but to dissect them in good light), I still couldn’t tell what dry, woody stuff it was we kept biting into that was getting stuck in our teeth. Bits of dry coriander (cilantro) stems? Green (chili?) pepper seeds? It was nasty.

Needless to say, dessert and chai did not follow.

I really can’t explain it. Has Heelsha gone downhill since it won its “Best Indian Food In Miami” award from Miami New Times last year? Were they having a bad night? Was the third-string team doing the cooking? Maybe they just don’t like vegetarians? (I’m not vegetarian – I just play one on TV). I don’t think we’ll be back. It’s a long way to go for what could be another disappointment.

So, if you’re in the Miami, Florida area and looking for good Indian food, there are a number of very good choices. I’m just not sure that this is one of them.
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