Frozen banana treats

Frozen bananas are the perfect antidote for hot summer days when you've been outside working too hard or playing too hard. They are also perfect for balmy summer evenings when you welcome neighbors to sit a spell on the front porch and chat. Or after you've tucked the kids into bed for a night and feel your sweet tooth calling. Actually, they are perfect just about any time. With just a little bit of planning, frozen bananas are a quick, healthy snack that appeals to just about everyone. And, if you can stand a little bit of a mess, making these treats can be a fun activity for the kids.

You will need:

2-3 bananas
6 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
popsicle sticks
desired toppings (grated coconut, ground peanuts, sprinkles, chopped fruit, granola, etc.)

Melt the chocolate chips with the vegetable oil in the microwave and stir well. Allow to cool a bit so that it is easier to work with. Then, peel the bananas into the desired size and insert a popsicle stick into each part. I sometimes use tooth picks and they work equally well but the bananas have to be cut a bit smaller.  Now, roll each piece in the chocolate then quickly sprinkle with whatever toppings you have chosen. Place on a cookie sheet covered with tin foil or parchment paper and freeze.

These can be served when the chocolate sets or stored in a covered container in the freezer for up to a week. Mine don't normally make it that long!

Banana/oatmeal muffins

I'm traveling and not cooking a whole lot, so the below is something I scraped from a blog of mine that I put on hiatus, in part because I'm over here posting recipes anyway. These are muffins my children love. You can bake this batter in whatever pan you like--loaf, small loaf, muffin, square...just test the center with a knife or straw to make sure it's cooked through.

P.S. I'm aware that the above is NOT a muffin. The above is a tiny little loaf pan that turns out a beautiful miniature loaf of quickbread.

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I've devised a banana muffin recipe (based in part on the Joy of Cooking) that (a) my kids will eat but that (b) has relatively low sugar and relatively high fiber. Give it a try. They're good buttered, hot or cold, and they last a couple of days. We use these for breakfast and for snacks...either way, they're cheap! My kids really love these, to the point that I double this up every time I make it, which is about once a week or so. Caveat: my kids are a little bit...odd.

You will need...
Old brown bananas
Applesauce, unsweetened
Flour
White sugar
Brown sugar
Oats
Wheat germ
Egg
Canola oil
Vanilla
Cinnamon and nutmeg
Baking soda
Baking powder
Salt
Two mixing bowls, a good whisk, a big spoon/spatula
Muffin pan/cups

1. Get two bowls, a big one and a small one. Set your oven to 350 F.

2. In the small bowl, whisk together one cup of flour (I use white whole wheat--if you use whole wheat, cut it with half white or they'll be too heavy), a half cup of dry oats (I just use Quaker oats), and a half cup of wheat germ (obviously, this isn't for the gluten-free crowd). Add in about a quarter teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda, and then shake cinnamon powder over it until it's all covered in cinnamon powder (or, to taste...sorry, I don't measure my spices). Shake in some powdered nutmeg (I give it about three good shakes), and mix really really well with the whisk.

3. In the large bowl, put in two or three peeled, super ripe bananas and smush them up. Add four ounces of applesauce, a quarter cup of white sugar, a quarter cup of brown sugar, one teaspoon of vanilla, and six tablespoons of canola oil (or some other reasonable oil, but don't use one with a strong flavor, like, say, olive oil). Add one egg. Whisk it all together until you get as many lumps out of the banana as you can.

4. Dump the dry stuff into the large bowl. Mix until all is moist. Muffin recipes always say to mix until everything is "just" moist, but I just mix the hell out of it.

5. Fill muffin liners (I use muffin liners to avoid greasing a pan, but if you don't like them, grease the muffin pan) about 3/4 full. Put in oven for 18 minutes or until inserted utensil or straw or toothpick or whatever comes out clean. I also turn the muffins halfway through.

Cool, butter, serve.

This will get you about 9 or 10 muffins, good for a number of breakfasts or snacks at about 50 cents each. You can also make this into banana bread. Put the batter into a greased loaf pan, bake for about 40 minutes (or until whatever you use to test these things comes out clean). I always turn it halfway through.

If you think these are OK, I've got a pumpkin muffin recipe that'll knock your socks off.

Green smoothies

Recently I started experimenting with our smoothies. I want my older daughter, who is dairy-free, to have more calcium in her diet from food (not supplements).

Somehow I stumbled onto the idea of Green Smoothies. These are very popular among people who are on a raw food diet, but truly would be a wonderful addition to any person's diet.

The concept of a green smoothie is pretty simple: leafy green vegetables blended with fruit into a smoothie. Many green smoothies are actually green in color, but I found that when strawberries are in it, that overpowers the green. Especially if the leafy green is spinach. When I use kale, the smoothie looks more brown.

Do you think this sounds gross yet? I promise you, it's not. With both spinach and kale (the only two greens I've tried so far), there is no taste difference.

The truth of that can be seen in the fact that my 5 year old daughter will drink it down and ask for more. And she knows there is a leafy green in it, I didn't try to hide that fact.

There are, I'm sure, a million different leafy green and fruit combos you can try. Someone recommended swiss chard, an apple and orange juice saying it was divine (but definitely green).

I have used kale with strawberries or mixed berries (frozen) and bananas, and I've used spinach with the same and added fresh pear as well.

For my part, I decided to start with what I know the girls will drink: strawberry and banana smoothie. At first, I added just one leaf of kale. Then two, and now it's up to three leaves which is roughly two 1 1/2 to 2 cups.

And truly, my daughter doesn't care. She adores these smoothies. My younger daughter - not so much. But she never was a big smoothie drinker in the first place.

I start by blending the kale first with 1/4 cup of milk (we use rice). Then add in the frozen strawberries, then the banana. There's no real recipe here - just make your smoothie the way you normally do, but use a little less fruit and add a leafy green.

I usually add a little bit of sugar and some additional rice milk if I feel like it needs to be smoother and thinner. You can add a protein powder or anything else you would normally put in a smoothie.

I have read it suggested that a green smoothie should be 40% leafy green and 60% fruit. I strive for that, loosely, but I don't follow it hard and fast. I figure any amount of leafy green we can add to our diet is a good thing.

My preferred leafy green is kale because it is such a nutritional powerhouse, but spinach and romaine lettuce work well.

The smoothie below contains 2 cups of spinach, 1 cup of frozen strawberries, 1 fresh pear, and 1 small banana. There is also some rice milk and about 2 teaspoons of sugar. It yielded about 2 1/2 cups of smoothie that I split with my daughter.


My exploration with green smoothies is by no means complete. I want to try adding fresh apple and using orange juice. I find them to be seriously delicious.

Help me out and tell me: how do you make YOUR smoothie?

Banana Chip Snack Cake

First, I apologize for supersaturating readers with yet another banana/baking recipe. I can't help it--I bake what I bake. And apparently, so do many other people.

It's probably because we all experience the common occurrence of a surfeit of bananas, browning on the counter. That's my weekly conundrum, what to do with aging bananas that my uber-picky offspring won't eat. My usual answer is to bake banana muffins, a hybrid involving oatmeal and wheat germ and other things my children don't know about. But I'm sick of the things, so I went searching for another way to bake bananas into food.

I found it on pg. 549 of The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. It's called "Banana Chip Snack Cake," which at first made me recoil in horror, envisioning those nasty banana chips (sorry if you love them so) somehow baked into a snack cake. But the chips are actually semisweet chocolate, so...phew.

This one's straightforward and made the most beautiful cake batter I've ever seen. And, my kids love it.

Ingredients: all-purpose flour (2 c), baking powder (2.5 tsp), salt (0.25 tsp), sugar (1.25 c), unsalted butter (one stick/8 tbsp), 2 large eggs @ room temp, 2 ripe large bananas, peeled and mashed (~1 c), whole milk @ room temp (0.5 c), vanilla extract (1 tsp), and semisweet chocolate chips (0.75 c).

I did a few things while making this that differed a bit from the above. First, I cut down the sugar by about a quarter cup. Second, I used 0.75 c of heavy cream because I had it left over. I sifted the dry ingredients, beat the bananas on medium until they were quite, quite smooth, and also beat the hell out of everything else as I added it, except for the flour and semisweet morsels, which I stirred in by hand.

Steps: Grease an 8x8 pan. Oven at 350. Mix flour, baking powder, salt in medium bowl and set aside. Beat the bananas or mush them, whichever. In a large bowl, beat sugar and butter until smooth and fluffy. Add in eggs, one at a time, followed by bananas, milk, and vanilla, beating well on medium until quite smooth. Stir the flour into the egg mixture, and then the chocolate chips. Smooth into the pan and bake between 55 and 65 minutes. Mine was perfectly done at one hour on the dot.

The cookbook says to cool for 2 hours. Um, no. We turned it out, let it cool about five minutes, then cut right into it. It was quite a hit. (That's the bottom you're seeing in the pic...the chips kinda sink down into their own layer there).

This cookbook also offers a nice tip that might help those of us with uneven banana ripening schedules. If you've got a banana you want to use, but it's not quite ripe enough, pop the entire thing, peel and all, into the oven (about 350) for 10-15 minutes. It'll brown just as though days had passed, bringing out the sweetness and reducing the starchiness. Given my weekly banana affliction, I thought this was a great tip.

If you're not sick of banana recipes, give this one a try...and enjoy!

Banana-nut kugel for Passover

So here's the problem with sharing recipes for a holiday like Passover (Pesach) ahead of time: While I don't keep anything even resembling kosher during the bulk of the year, I do try to do something vaguely resembling kosher for Passover during those particular eight days. (It's my version of kosher for Passover, and it involves--essentially--my cleaning out our kitchen cabinets and putting all the chametz into our pantry where N can get to the things he can prepare for himself and the rest of us can ignore them entirely.) There's lots of stuff I don't do, but what I do do...well, I like to actually do that little bit "right." So I don't open the matzo or any of the other Passover staples until the last possible moment, generally the day of the first seder, when I'm preparing the meal. Which means that I also can't/won't make a dish several days ahead of time, photograph it for this blog, and freeze it to serve at my seder. Nor do I want to open my slated-for-Passover ingredients to use only a small amount of them, then throw the rest out.

And so, you get a stock photo of bananas, instead of a shot of what is seriously one of my and Em's favorite dishes, Passover or no. (I'll be making it not only during the eight days, but several times in the weeks and months after--no prohibition about using Passover foods after Passover.) But take our word for it: This is good stuff. I serve it as a side dish, but it verges on being dessert. And you definitely don't need to be Jewish to enjoy it.

Banana-Nut Kugel (adapted from a 1992 recipe my mom got off of her Prodigy--remember them? if you do, you're old like me--Food and Wine Club mailing list)

3 cups matzo farfel (or just take a few sheets of matzo and crumble 'em up, which is what I generally do, since farfel is just crumbled up matzo but costs like four times as much per ounce)
4 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup melted butter
2 medium unripe bananas, sliced
1/2 cup chopped nuts (I usually go with walnuts for this one, but pecans work, too; though I'm usually an almond fan, I don't think they'd work so well here)

1. Preheat oven to 350.

2. Put farfel in colander; run cold water over farfel; drain immediately. What you want is farfel that's moist, but not overly soggy.

3. In a separate bowl, beat eggs with salt, sugar, and melted butter.

4. Add farfel and mix to coat.

5. Grease a baking dish. The recipe recommends a 1-1/2 quart dish; I just whichever one is clean and isn't too big for the job.

6. Spoon half the farfel mixture into a layer in the dish. Place sliced bananas over the mixture, then sprinkle nuts over the bananas.

7. Cover the bananas and nuts with the rest of the farfel mixture.

8. Bake uncovered at 350 for approximately 45 minutes, until set and lightly browned on top.

Incredible. Seriously. Try it.

(And, hey...While I'm not by any stretch of the imagination The Jew To Go To for information about my religion, I'm happy to try to answer any questions you might have about the various rituals and such around Passover. It's one of my favorite holidays--and yes, that's mostly because it's all about trying out and using recipes you pretty much ignore the rest of the year.)

Banana chip muffins

This one is so easy and so good you'll soon be calling it one of your go-to baking recipes. It's definitely one of those things that I can pretend is healthy while satisfying my need for something sweet. Plus it's kid-friendly.

Here's what you need:

1 cup of sugar
1 cup of softened butter
6 ripe bananas, mashed
4 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon of vanilla
2 1/2 cups of flour
2 teaspoons of baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

2 cups of butterscotch or chocolate chips, depending on your preference

In a bowl, mash the bananas and mix in the beaten egg and vanilla. Set aside.

In another bowl, measure out your dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon) and whisk until well-blended.

Using an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar. Add the banana mixture and blend thoroughly. Add the dry ingredients, mix well. Stir in the chips by hand.

Pour into paper-lined muffin tins and bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Makes about 24 muffins.

I very often cut this recipe in half, especially if I only have a couple of over-ripe bananas on hand. You can also pour the batter into parchment lined loaf pans (the full recipe makes two loaves) and bake for about 50 minutes. Enjoy!