My work day morning routine is quite time-strict. I am up at 6am and out of the door by 6:45am; In that time I get washed, dressed and word-ready as well as taking my valuable 5 – 10 minutes with H when I get her up. So anything I can defer to the train I do; This includes my breakfast. After a year of eating a healthy porridge and banana breakfast during Mat Leave (that dish literally saved me during those early breastfeeding weeks when I also had stomach flu and tonsillitis) I wanted something equally filling and healthy. I eventually came across this great muffin recipe on BBC Good Food which has no butter or sugar in it. Every fortnight I get baking a batch of twelve which covers me for two working weeks. So last night, after H went to sleep, I went to the kitchen to get to work…
Earlier that day I had realised I didn’t have the low-fat yoghurt I needed. So H and I did a mad dash in to Sainsbury’s before Music Train to get some – crisis averted. At lunchtime, I then got my bramley apple chunks out of the freezer to defrost so I could whizz them up in the evening. As I was contemplating my baking whilst H had her boiled eggs and beans for dinner, I suddenly remembered I was out of bananas! – another key ingredient. All through the bedtime I mulled over substitutes and reconciled with adding a little more apple and a spoon of Greek yoghurt. Another crisis averted.
H happily asleep I started getting ingredients out as the oven warmed. I opened the fridge to get the eggs…the eggs I gave to H for her tea. NOOOOOOOOO. I didn’t relish having a boring cereal bar on the train – I have a train image to maintain. So I grabbed my laptop and literally Googled: “healthy breakfasts with apple puree”. (I wouldn’t want to waste that bramley now would I?!)
A couple of results down and I found this bad boy: Apple & Cinnamon Breakfast Cookie. No sugar, no butter and I had enough of the main ingredients. So I gave them a go. Sure they don’t look as fancy as the ones in The Healthy Chef’s blog but she probably spent more than 5 minutes on hers. They don’t taste too bad for the effort and are an acceptable replacement for my delicious muffins! The moral of the story though: don’t get complacent about routine baking and check you’ve got all your ingredients when you do the weekly shop.
