A Hopefully Helpful Thing + A Thought: Blender Muffins...and Why Calling Them 'Healthy' is Complicated

Come for an easy recipe, stay for the fat + disabled liberation!

I recently got a copy of Erin Gleeson’s new book The Forest Feast Road Trip: Simple Vegetarian Recipes Inspired by My Travels Through California. It’s a lovely book that makes me want to pack up our pets and take an epic road trip alongside a coast. Any coast!

When I first flipped through the book, Erin’s recipe for Blender Muffins immediately jumped out at me. Here’s a recipe I want to make right now and I already have everything in my kitchen to make it. Don’t you love that feeling?

So I made the muffins. And then I kept making them. I now always have a Ziploc bag full of them in our freezer. Grace and I regularly pop them in the microwave to warm them up, split them in half, butter them, and have them with coffee. Our dogs inevitably get a bite or two and they’re just an all-around hit for our family. I’ve taken a couple out of the freezer and put them in a container in my backpack when I go hiking and they hit the spot when I need a snack. Great for car rides, too. I texted the recipe to two of my closest friends who have little kids and within a few hours, I got a text back with a photo of the muffins.

Erin was inspired by Sonja and Alex Overhiser from A Couple Cooks and adapted their recipe for Healthy Banana Muffins. I have more to say about the word ‘healthy’ here, but first, how you make these muffins: you put bananas, eggs, olive oil, agave nectar or maple syrup, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt in the blender and once that’s all smooth, you add a couple of cups of oats and blend until smooth. The blender does all the work of mashing the bananas, mixing the ingredients, and then pulverizing the oats into flour. If you can make a smoothie, you can bake these muffins. I love that this method makes baking a little less intimidating. After the batter is blended, you pour it into a greased muffin tin and bake. They’re like miniature banana breads and the texture is great and they’re infinitely adaptable— Erin offers a few variations in her recipe, but I could also imagine playing with the spices and adding all sorts of other mix-ins like chocolate chips, walnuts, granola, whatever!

Here’s Erin’s recipe (including her signature lovely artwork):

Shared with permission from Erin Gleeson from her new book: The Forest Feast Road Trip.

About the word ‘healthy’ in the original recipe and the language about flour-free foods in both the original and Erin’s adaptation. Both give me a bit of pause and I just wanted to share a bit more about my thinking during that pause, especially as someone actively divesting myself from diet culture and recovering from what has taken me a very long time to realize was an eating disorder. It feels important to say that there’s nothing wrong with eating regular flour and there’s nothing unhealthy about it (unless of course you are allergic to it or have celiac disease).

But what does ‘healthy’ mean anyway? As I wrote about a bit in Simply Julia (including in this essay) and have continued to deepen my thinking on, healthy is a fraught word. It too often gets used as a synonym for skinny, even though they absolutely do not mean the same thing. Having health as a goal, a sort-of moralized north star, also furthers anti-fat bias and ableism. In other words, we’ve not only equated ‘healthy’ with ‘skinny,’ we’ve also equated it with ‘good.’ Just like being fat is neither inherently bad, being healthy is not inherently good.

Our collective obsession with health steeps us all more in healthism (coined by Robert Crawford in 1980) and leads not only to serious issues like eating disorders, but also keeps so many of us individuals feeling like we’re doing something wrong or we’re not doing enough of something. Keeping the responsibility of ‘good health’ on the individual frees so many larger systems from accountability.

I’m not putting all of this on this muffin recipe! I clearly love this recipe. I just think it’s worth examining how casually we (including myself) have used, and continue to use, the word ‘healthy’ without seeing the bigger picture this small word fits into.

I am often torn between shelving the word all together and reclaiming it. I think both options are worthy. When I think about reclaiming it, it invites me to actually define what it means to me, rather than accept whatever definition is being implied.

These muffins are a good example. For me, they’re not healthy because they have oats. They’re healthy because they’re easy to make. Accessibility is healthy! They’re healthy becomes of the feeling of dependability I have when I have a batch in the freezer and know that I’ve made it possible to experience pleasure at any given moment. They’re healthy because of the feeling of togetherness and connection they allow me to feel with my wife and our pets. They’re healthy because when I eat them, they taste good and things that taste good make me feel happy. Feeling happy makes me feel healthy.

Thanks for listening + I really hope you enjoy these muffins as much as I do. And thanks again to Erin, Sonja + Alex for creating and sharing the recipe— it’s become a staple in my house and I bet it will in yours, too.

xo, Julia

PS: For paid subscribers, I’d love to hear about what you feel when you hear the word ‘healthy’ and how you define it. Let me/us know in the comments!

A recent double batch!