Meghan Apple Seed: EatSeed.com Muffins

In my everyday life, I experience metaphorical seeds quite often. For instance, the reelection of the president on Tuesday --> “sowed the seeds of hope” in my heart. Sometimes I go around --> “planting seeds of doubt” in other people’s minds just to stir things up. But I rarely interact with literal seeds.

That changed when I discovered eatseed.com, a company that believes in the benefits of adding seeds to your diet. You can order seeds a la carte from their website, or join their Super Seed of the Month Club to have a new type of seed delivered to your door every month. Unfortunately, eat seed is based in North Carolina, thousands of miles away from me. So these seeds aren’t local, but they do offer a healthy supplement to local ingredients.

I ordered the Six Seed Super Blend, which includes pumpkin, sunflower, chia, sesame, hemp, and flax seeds. So many seeds. And so many health benefits! Just to name a few:

Pumpkin seeds can help fight depression, since they’re rich in tryptophan, which can increase serotonin levels. Sunflower seeds are high in vitamin E, which reduces the risk of heart disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. Chia seeds are packed with omega-3 fatty acids and calcium. Sesame seeds are also high in calcium: half a cup of sesame seeds contains three times the calcium of half a cup of milk, so sesame seeds are great for your bones and teeth. Hemp seeds can reduce cholesterol levels and improve your skin. And, of course, flax seeds (or linseeds) keep you regular. Not “regular” in terms of your personality (that’s a lost cause), “regular” in terms of your poop. Brilliant.

Eat seed features a blog with recipe ideas, but I wanted to come up with one of my own. I started with the obvious: sprinkling the seeds on my oatmeal. It made breakfast look a little fancier, but whole seeds can be hard to digest.

I knew that to get the real benefits of the seeds, I’d have to grind them up and bake. That made me nervous, as baking always does: you have to follow the directions exactly or risk blowing up your oven. The stakes are so high!

I decided to use locally grown apples in the recipe to add sweetness and texture. And also because I really wanted to adopt the moniker Meghan Apple Seed, if only for the hour or so it took me to bake these muffins.

Meghan Apple Seed Muffins

Here’s what I used:
1 cup ground Six Seed Super blend
1 cup old fashioned oats
1 apple, chopped into small bits (from Fair Hills Farm in Topanga Canyon, distance from me: 74 miles)
½ cup raisins
1 cup flour
1 cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 egg whites
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

I preheated the oven to 400 degrees. Then I ground up the Six Seed Super Blend in my spice grinder until it became a powder, like this:

I mixed the flour, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, apples, and raisins in with the ground seeds:

 Then I added the wet ingredients and mixed it all up, like so:

I plopped the mixture into a baking tin and popped it into the oven for about 18 minutes, until I could stick a fork into one of the muffins and it would come out dry. Ta-da!

The muffins were absolutely delicious. David and I snacked on them late-night style, then had them again for breakfast in the morning… and for lunch that day. They didn’t taste gross like some good-for-you muffins – instead, the apples, raisins, and brown sugar added sweetness to the healthful goodness of the Six Seed Super Blend.

This successful endeavor planted some seeds of change (!) regarding my fear of baking. But I’m just planting seeds left and right now, since I’m Meghan Apple Seed now.