“Mom, are these hippie muffins?”

Me: “No!”
Brother: “Yeah.”
Me: “Shut up! Do you like them?”
Both: “Yeah!”
w00t!

Ok, so we have a whole bunch of squash. Seriously.There was this part of the garden, see, where we’d dumped the chicken compost. We’d only ended up using half the garden space, because we got tuckered out. So the place where the pile was just had the leftover compost, sitting on hard clay. Someone gave us winter squash plants, and we put them out. They went everywhere!

Mostly our garden didn’t produce much. First year, very clay soil, not much added. But when the frost-warning came, we found something like a dozen huge butternut squash to pick.

The good news about this recipe is that it’s yummy, and made of pretty good stuff. The bad news is that a dozen muffins only used up about a third of a squash.

Winter Squash or Pumpkin Muffins

Big bowl ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup raisins (Optional. I liked both ways.)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp ground cloves
• 1/4 tsp salt

Small bowl ingredients

• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 cup cooked squash
• 3/4 cup yogurt (adjust for consistency)
• 3/4 cup xylitol (use stevia, sugar, brown sugar, honey, you choose)
• 1/4 cup melted butter

Directions

Combine the dry ingredients in a big bowl. In a small bowl or, if you’re me, in your 4 cup pyrex measuring cup, whisk the egg, and stir in squash and yogurt (or pumpkin and buttermilk) and sweetner, then stir in the melted butter. Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients just until the flour mixture is all moistened.
Smear a very thin coat of butter on the muffin cups. Hint: I use an air-bake pan, that has two layers of metal with air in between. Bottoms never burn. Ever.
Fill the tins about 1/2-2/3 full. Bake at 325? for about 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.? (Disclosure! The original recipe said 350 and 25-30 minutes. You know what I’m gonna say. Experiment.)

Cookies

If you run out of muffin tin space, this also makes nice cake-cookies. They’re very soft, not for storing, but they taste yummy. Just put blobs on a cookie sheet and stick them in the oven with the muffins. (Use an air-bake cookie sheet to protect the bottoms!)

Aspirations

These cookies are pretty much made of real food, but I aspire to learning to cook well without baking powder, and maybe without baking soda. If you need a factory to make it, I figure it’s not really real food. For now, though, these are pretty darn yumzie.