Sunshine Sunday and a Muffin Recipe

Hello, hello, hello! Whew! What a day! We've done five loads of laundry, planned meals for the week, went grocery shopping for said meals, and cooked a bunch for the coming week. And now, at 8:45, all three children are in bed and Shawn and I are finally sitting down to relax and watch the season finale of The Next Food Network Star.

So here's what I cooked today: I rotissered a chicken -- half for supper tonight and half for chicken burritos on Tuesday; I made ham and split pea soup with the ham leftovers for my lunch this week (and I've already put it into lunch-sized containers), I made Morning Glory muffins for our breakfast this week, and I made the meat mixture for tomorrow night's pop-up pizza casserole! Hooray for me! And hooray for Shawn for getting groceries and wrangling kids while I cooked.


Here are my super-delicious Morning Glory Muffins:

Morning Glory Muffins

1/2 cup oil or applesauce

3 cups bran cereal

1-1/2 cups milk (I used rice milk for Shawn)

1 cup whole wheat flour

4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

2 large eggs

1/2 cup brown sugar

1-1/2 cups dried fruit, coconut and nuts -- your choice of what you use!

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line muffins tins with papers. In bowl, combine cereal and milk, let stand 5 minutes until softened. Whisk together flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt in another bowl. Stir oil, eggs and sugar into cereal mixture. Fold in flour mixture. Stir in dried fruit, coconuts and nuts. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean, about 22 minutes. If using mini-muffin tins, baked 10 minutes.

Shawn found a tropical fruit/nut mix at Walmart today, the bag was only $1! He bought three, so I doubled my recipe and used two of them. The fruit was already cut into the perfect size for the muffins. There were banana chips, big coconut flakes, apricots, papaya and pineapple. Delicious!

And what Sunday is complete without some pics of our Violet! :)  I would have taken photos of the boys but, well, they were kind of grumpy and annoying. So sweet Violet gets all of today's blog coverage. Something super fun that she learned this weekend -- how to put her toes into her mouth! It's so cute!!! She totally reminds me of a chubby little bear cub, rolling around on her back with her feet in her hands, or in her mouth, and a big drooling grin on her face!

And these are my split-pea and ham soup containers for this week's lunch. It's not pretty, but boy does it taste good!

Have a great week everyone!

Mazy and Violet

Oh, one more thing. Violet and I picked up Mazy on Thursday night after we'd been to a Pampered Chef party. We hadn't seen him since Sunday so we were all excited to see each other. On the drive home, Mazy kept leaning over the seat and smiling at Violet and this is what he said: "She is such a cute baby! You're such a little darling. Why did god make you so perfect?!" 

Is that sweet or what? Little boys never cease to amaze me.