I knew this day was coming: three days ago the half and half went bad and yesterday the milk curdled when I heated it for coffee. When I did not bestir myself to go to the health food store for milk and half and half, I realized I would face a morning without coffee and minus foods I typically eat for breakfast. I did not have a plan.

As I was reading the news online this morning, YouTube tossed up a video of a woman making what she claimed was a splendid carrot cake, followed by another about testing apples for pies. Now, I could have made an apple pie for breakfast, but I wouldn’t enjoy it without cream in my coffee or a mug of black tea with milk. Sigh.

By the time I watched the carrot cake assembly I was hungry. “Why not make carrot muffins?,” I thought. I have carrots. “If I look up a carrot muffin recipe that uses yogurt, that should work.” I had oil and eggs and flours and sugars.

When I got to the kitchen, I pulled up the basic recipe for proportions. And then I started improvising.

I had a lone zucchini on the counter that had seen better days. I attacked it with a fine grater. It yielded three-quarters of a cup.

I got out the carrots. I peeled them and grated the smallest two, bringing the grated vegetables to one cup. But I needed a cup and a quarter. How about an apple? I rinsed one off and grated it, peel and all, only avoiding the core and seeds. There was my quarter cup. Excellent. And since I was grating things, I got out ginger root from the freezer and grated a healthy tablespoon of that into the mix. Only after I had grated everything did I preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

What else did I need? One third of a cup of oil. I keep a fancy blood-orange infused oil on the counter and, as luck would have it, had just one-third cup. I added that to my liquid measuring cup first so that any residual oil would help the yogurt slide out.

When I went to get the yogurt, I saw the ricotta container. A few tablespoons of ricotta remained. I would use them and add Greek yogurt to make the three-quarter cup I needed. A little ricotta wouldn’t make any difference and I love it when I can use several things that need to be used in a single recipe.

Two eggs. Check. Brown sugar. Check. Vanilla. Check.

I almost got through the dry ingredients without any additions or substitutions, but I decided to substitute a half cup of whole wheat flour for some of the white flour called for in the recipe.

I folded the ingredients together as instructed, lined a muffin tin with paper liners and began to scoop batter into the muffin cups. I could tell right away that I had excess batter, so I reached for a small china bowl, oiled it, and filled it with batter.

After I popped the muffins in the oven, I began the kitchen clean-up. There was a lot: graters and knives and a peeler, bowls, several measuring cups, a rubber scraper, plus a mound of carrot peels, eggshells, zucchini trimmings and an apple core for the compost. By the time I had composted the scraps, wiped the counter and cutting board and washed the measuring cups and knives, it was time to check my muffins. I took one to eat and decided to put the rest back in for a few more minutes while I boiled a kettle for green tea.

The verdict: this recipe, even as amended by me — even with half a cup of whole wheat flour — makes lovely, moist, light muffins. I did not get much of a rise, or a flat, spread-out muffin top, but the muffins were not dense at all, despite all of the wet vegetables in them. The spare batter in the china bowl rose beautifully.

The taste? I could detect the ginger and the orange from the blood orange oil. I could not taste the vegetables and fruit, which might make these ideal for your picky kids. I could taste the walnuts, but not the vanilla or cinnamon. The ingredients blended into a harmonious flavor, sweet enough, but not overly sweet. I ate one. Then another. And then another. Granted, I was hungry, having been up for nearly four hours before I bit into my first muffin, but I don’t think it was just hunger that made me keep eating these muffins.

Muffins with vegetables and fruit in them are versatile. I could imagine grating beets into these muffins along with carrots. If I had had pears on hand rather than apples, I might have used a grated pear. I used the walnuts that the recipe called for, but could have used pecans, hazelnuts or almonds. I could have used cardamom extract rather than vanilla. I could have used almond flour instead of whole wheat flour. I could have used white sugar, but why would I? Brown sugar is so nice in muffins.

I don’t do nutritional analysis, but these muffins seem quite healthy to me between the cup and a quarter of grated vegetables and fruit and all of the proteins: eggs, yogurt, ricotta and walnuts. Both walnuts and olive oil are “good fats.” The only ingredient you could quibble with is the sugar, but three-quarters of a cup of sugar spread through fourteen or fifteen muffins works out to way less than a tablespoon per muffin. If you are horrified by that much sugar, you can experiment with cutting it a little, but remember that sugar has a role to play in the texture of baked goods and in their browning.

Good thing I’m upstairs typing, or I might be downstairs scarfing down another muffin.