Some of you may know about chia seeds from Gwyneth Paltrow and her ubiquitous site Goop.  You can get great advice there about managing your time – find a place that does your mani at the same time as your pedi!  Time saver!  I think she also invented avocado toast because her cookbook was the first place I read about it. Now it’s sweeping the nation! Chia has also moved more mainstream in the time since I first read about chia pudding in Gwyneth’s cookbook.  .  When you can get organic chia at Costco, it’s gone mainstream.

My knowledge of chia though, goes back much farther.  I’m a fan of kitsch and also a botanist, so the chia pet was basically a match made in heaven for me.  I got one for Christmas one year, maybe when I was in college?  The chia ram.  I loved it for about one chia life cycle and then I kind of lost interest.  At the time, I lived in a very run down house in Athens Ohio, and I had last pick out of 6 bedrooms.  This meant I had the smallest bedroom, but also the only one without carpeting, which made it the least gross.  The bathroom had some seriously thick and absorbant blue carpeting, that later took on a green sheen when I took off a shirt that had chia seeds in the pocket and they spilled everywhere.  The humidity in Athens is pretty high, but in an un-airconditioned bathroom… let’s just say the chia seeds prospered in that carpeting.

Later in life I was given a Jerry Gar-chia head, and it was very cool, but the clay was actually pretty subpar compared to my chia ram. Jerry’s hair was pretty spotty.  At the time I had easy access to chia seeds because I worked for a seed company that packaged chia seeds for the chia pet company.  I had many responsibilities there, but one of them was to be screamed at and belittled by the chia seed company guy. I always imagined him with a bright red face, screaming at the top of his lungs, veins bulging out, shirt straining at the buttons across his beer belly, on the verge of a heart attack.  I wanted to suggest that he switch to a job where lives were at stake and his fury would be justified.  That guy turned me off chia pets for a while.  I did manage to get a giant package of seeds for a friend who was planning to grow a chia coat and be a chia pet for Halloween.  (Idea copywrited.)

This summer, Jack and I found the chia ram in the storage bin, and he asked if I would get some chia seeds.  I said sure, since it’s a golden age of chia and I could probably avoid going through the chia pet company to get them, although I don’t know if the Costco seeds will actually sprout.  (TBD – see future post.)  So now I have a big bag of chia seeds and I am working on ways to use them.  I put some in Jack’s oatmeal and he loved it.  And then I came to today’s recipe!  Blueberry chia seed muffins.

I have been looking for a generic muffin recipe that I could use as a base and I found one at the King Arthur Flour page.  To this recipe, I added 2 tablespoons of chia seeds.  On top of the muffins, I put 4-5 blueberries.  Then I topped it with a cinnamon/vanilla crumb that I had in the freezer form a prior blueberry muffin.

Dave said, “These lemon blueberry poppy seed muffins are delicious.”  I said, “Well there is no lemon, but they are very yellow because I used eggs from the neighbor’s chickens.  And it’s actually chia seeds not poppy seeds.”  He said, “In that case, yuck.  Never mind.”

Jack gets the photo credit today.