August 30th, 2008
Heawfy Bran Muffins
I love my mom, despite her quirks. Maybe because of her quirks. Speaking of quirks, she’s got one that provides endless entertainment for me, my husband, my siblings, and our kids. It’s this total hang-up she has over trying to make extremely unhealthy food items somehow, at least a little bit, nutritious. She’s been doing this since I was a baby, so I’m quite sure this is an aspect of her personality that is not going to change. If she gets Alzheimers it’ll probably be the last part of her memory to go; it’s that deep seated.
Recently I was reminded of this habit my mom has of trying to make unhealthy things healthy when I bit into one of her “healthy” bran muffins. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at a recipe for a really good, moist, sweet bran muffin, but if you have, you know that they are anything but healthy. In exchange for some fiber, you must accept that you are going to be required to eat about a half a cup of sugar and half a stick of butter and oil in each muffin. Seriously, that muffin is going from your lips to the hanging fat on the back of your arms or the new butt plateau you’ve been growing since you hit age 37. There’s not much to recommend a bran muffin from my cardiologist’s perspective.
But my mom thinks she has found a way to change all that. ”Bran muffins for all!” she says. There’s no reason why bran muffins can’t be healthy, healthy, healthy!
Au contraire, Mother, there is a reason, and you have soundly proved that to me this day. From her lips, to my fingers, to your eyes, this is how it went:
MOM: ”See, I was making these bran muffins, and I decided that there was much too much oil and butter and sugar; so what I did was use flax seed oil instead of the butter and oil. And then I realized that I had soaked the bran but forgot to put it in the mix, so by the time I put it in my mixture, it wasn’t acting right [this should have been a warning sign to my mom, but she regularly ignores those], so I decided to add some extra things in the mixture to buff it up a bit [she 'buffs up' mixes every time she bakes or cooks, usually with something green because she tells me green=healthy]. I think they turned out pretty healthy, if I do say so myself.”
She brought a muffin to me at work (she works across the hall from me in another office), and I was starving because I hadn’t eaten any breakfast. I was typing away at the computer, as I bit into the muffin, not paying attention to what I was eating. As I was chewing, I lost my focus on my work. My mouth came across some weird textures as they floated across my tongue and teeth. And I noticed that this particular muffin was not sweet and moist, but dry and…dry. What? Did she forget the sugar? And what the hell is that crunchy thing? I pulled the muffin away from my face to take a good look at it, to see if maybe it had been wrapped in paper. I was thinking that maybe I had eaten the paper wrapping around the muffin or something. But there was no paper.
So I’m chewing and looking at the exposed insides of this muffin that had some suspicious red and green things suspended in its cooked batter. What is going on here? I emailed my mother: ”What the hell did you do to this poor bran muffin? Next time you decide to make muffins with chunks of copy paper inside them, warn me first!”
She emailed me back: ”You ungrateful brat. Next time I’m not sharing my heawfy muffins with you, and I’m going to eat them all myself.” Her reference to “heawfy” is to a time when I was a single mom with two babies (ages 2 and 4), living with her because I was as poor as dirt and couldn’t afford a place of my own. While we lived there with her she cooked up all these tweaked recipes, with green things in every single one of them, of course. She made these godawful cookies (that had a lot of nerve going by the moniker ‘cookie’ I’ll tell you) that tasted like cardboard (flax seeds, pumpkin seeds, bran flour, fake sweetener, flax oil…you get the idea), and my little babies ate those things right up. ”Weeeeee! Gwamma’s makin’ heawfy cookies for us!!!! Yaaaayyyyyyy!!! I yuv heawfy cookies, we yuv heawfy coooookies!!” It’s all my damn kids’ fault. They encouraged this craziness, and now we’re all stuck with it. Thanks a lot piglets.
That bran muffin I had been tricked into eating had pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, and I’m pretty sure spit balls in it. It’s true, I was an ungrateful brat not appreciating having my heawfy breakfast hand delivered to my desk, but my colon thanked my mom. And truth be told, I’m going to continue to eat every single heawfy thing she delivers to my desk in the morning because she’s my mom, and I love her. And while her efforts maybe a bit misguided, they are done from the heart, and that’s all that matters.
So, if you’re reading, thanks for the heawfy bran muffin Mom. Next time though, can you add some sugar to the mix? Please?