Pumpkin "Muffins"

Sorry y'all, there are no photos to go with this, but there is a delicious, whole foods muffin recipe, so you should read on anyway.

I made this yesterday to take to brunch with some good friends, and the kids ate 2 each on the way there.  And then another 2 throughout the day.  Do you know why that was okay with me? Because it's basically oatmeal.

It was all gobbled up yesterday, so today I made more, with a couple changes. Here's your recipe:

Pumpkin "Muffins"
Makes about 20 muffins

1 1/4 cup steel cut oats
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup quinoa
1 T coconut oil or butter

2 t pumpkin pie spice
1/2 t sea salt
1 cup hot water

3 eggs
1 cup pumpkin puree
2 cups milk
1/3 cup pure maple syrup

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees, and grease some muffin tins.

Melt the butter in a small pot, and toast all the grains for about 3 minutes (till they smell toasty).
Add the sea salt and spices and mix well.  Pour hot water over the dry ingredients and set aside.

Whisk eggs, pumpkin, milk and maple syrup together until smooth.  Pour the grains into the wet ingredients, and give a good stir. It will look VERY wet, but it should work.
Ladle into greased muffin cups.  Unless you try very hard, some will have more grains, and others more pumpkin "soup", but they will both come out fine.  The more soupy muffins will have more of a pumpkin pie texture on top.

Bake for 45 minutes or until set.

Here's the true joy (for me) in this recipe: it's super flexible.  Yesterday I made it with half steel cut oats, half rolled oats (no quinoa), and it was great, a little fluffier than today's version. You could replace the maple syrup with sugar, and increase the milk or water by 1/3 cup. You could also scale the sugar back (when I was looking for inspiration, I saw some baked pumpkin oatmeal recipes with no sugar, but I like a little sweetness.  You could try it, and let me know how it went.).  You could probably even reduce the number of eggs.  If you wanted to skip the muffin tins, you could make 2 pumpkin loaves out of this.

Nutritional info (using whole milk):
78 calories, 11g carbs, 3g fat, 3g protein, 6g sugar