I made some things

I made these muffins. Or energy bars. Or something. They're really good, whatever they are. And they were easy. Someone gave me a huge bag of rolled oats and a huge bag of dried cherries. I took this as a challenge.

First, I made oat flour. Sort of. Making oat flour is normally really easy. You put rolled oats into a blender, then turn it on until you have oat flour. In my case though, the only blender I have is a stick blender. For a decade, it's worked as well or better for all of my blendering needs. Making oat flour though wasn't one of those. I stuck the blender in a bowl with a small amount of oats. Turned it on. Oats flew all over the kitchen. I chose a mixing bowl I have that's more than a foot deep and taller than it is wide. Nope. Same thing. I ended up putting two towels over the bowl with the stick in between. This prevented huge clouds of oats from flying all over the kitchen, but some still sprayed out of the spaces. I ended up only blending it about halfway, so that it was basically half oat flour and half rolled oats. That's about what I was going for though, so it was all good.

I didn't actually measure any of the ingredients, because this was totally just improvising, but the recipe ended up being roughly:

• 2 cups crappy oat flour (so, like one cup oat flour and one cup rolled oats)
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup almond milk
• dried cherries added so that they made up about half of the volume of the batter/dough

I then spooned it into a muffin pan. I had these muffin papers that I got at IKEA for 99 cents or something, and I used them because I had no idea what consistency I would end up with, and I wanted them to come out of the pan easily. They ended up being something in between a chewy muffin and a soft energy bar. I still have a crapload of oats and cherries, so I likely will make them again. Um, I might see if one of my neighbors will loan me a jar blender though.

Oh, WIC now allows oatmeal, and they give you milk and soymilk, so this could be a great WIC recipe too. They don't allow dried fruit, but you could make it with fresh blueberries or bananas I'm sure.