Doomed Diet Day 2 - Kill It With Fiber!

I ran my tail off today. I had MOPS this morning (craft committee, where we cut stuff out and then we talk while other people watch our kids. Awesome!), then we went to Chick-Fil-A with Casey and her kids, then we went to the office to do a couple things (Allison's sick, and I'm sure it's our fault), then we went to the grocery store and got the stuff to make the muffins, and then we came home and made about 5 dozen muffins, which is hilarious when you only have ONE muffin tin, and then I made dinner and then I sat down for like 10 minutes (for the first time all day) and then it was bath and now it's bedtime and I'm blogging.

PHEW!

So anyway, these muffins. When I was a kid my mom made these all the time. There are probably still some in the back of her freezer. They are the bomb.

When I was doing Weight Watchers there was some rule where you take the calories and the fat and divide by the fiber and multiply by the square root of pi and I don't remember how it worked and the WW people would probably be mad at me if I told you, anyway, you having not, presumably, paid for the weight watching, but the point is that if you had two things with the same number of calories - like an apple and a popsicle that are both 100 calories - the one with more fiber (the apple, dur) would be fewer points because fiber is good for you.

These muffins have so much fiber, they've probably got negative points*.

* I haven't actually calculated the points because, as you might have noticed, I totally forgot the magic formula. I think it has something to do with Bernoulli's equation...

Anyway, it doesn't matter because the entire point of all these run on sentences is to bestow upon you The Recipe for the Horkin' Fiber Chunks Bran Muffins.

Get it while it's hot, folks, because Mom didn't actually give me permission to post the State Secrets that I am about to reveal, and there is a better than 50/50 chance that she's going to see this in the morning, call me, and demand that it be removed from Ye Ol' Blog. There are recipes like that in my family. We don't even speak about Grandma Shank's Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe in a voice above a whisper.

So here you go. Now you can't say I never gave you anything. Go forth, and do things that Dr. Oz would be proud of... (The parenthetical remarks are Mom's unless I signed them ~Amy).

Combine:

2 cups boiling water and 2 cups 100% Bran Buds or All Bran cereal (Pro tip - freeze the cereal after you've gotten out what you need because no amount of sugar or starvation will ever be enough to make anyone in your house eat any of the cereals involved in these muffins in any form other than muffin form. Trust me. ~Amy)

1 cup oil or Crisco

2 ½ cups sugar

Mix all the above together and let it cool (so you don’t cook the eggs!)

Then stir in 4 eggs one at a time

In a separate bowl combine and set aside:

5 cups of flour

5 teasp. of baking soda

1 teasp. salt

To put it all together, put 4 cups of bran flakes in a large bowl (a REALLY large bowl!) and pour 1 quart of buttermilk over the flakes (this is what makes them moist)

Add the Bran Bud mixture to this, and any extras you want to add, mashed banana, nuts, raisins, orange rind, craisins, chopped apple and some cinnamon, whatever. (I used a regular size bag of walnuts - it was one or two cups, one bag of craisins which was about 1-1/3 C, and 1 C raisins, and a big old dash of cinnamon ~Amy).

Then add the flour mixture. Once you stir in the flour mixture don’t stir any more than necessary to combine.

Bake in muffin pans that have been sprayed with Pam. Or you can also bake them in cupcake liners in the pan if you don’t want to spray the pans.

Bake at 400 for about 12 to 14 minutes till the tops are not moist. Don’t over bake them. The time is kind of arbitrary. Sometimes they take a little longer depending on what all you put in them. (Mine took 14 minutes and I used exactly 1/4 cup because I'm anal and it really annoyed me that they didn't all come out exactly the same size ~Amy)

This makes 5 or 6 dozen depending on how full you fill the cups (5.5 dozen ~Amy). They can be frozen, and will keep in the fridge for a couple weeks wrapped in plastic.

There you go. Make some today!

I came in exactly 6 calories below my daily allowance, which is as close to perfect as I am ever likely to get.

Two days of watching what I eat - that's got to be some kind of record.