Peach Orange Banana Smoothie

After having carefully groomed the Internet and several cookbooks’ worth of smoothie recipes, I went and made one up. It has four ingredients–well, five, counting ice–and is just about the most delicious thing you could eat at any time of day. Because of fruit. Fruit is amazing.

Peach Orange Banana Smoothie

• 1/2 cup of vanilla yogurt (my favorite yogurt is Dannon Light & Fit vanilla yogurt)
• 1/2 cup of diced peaches (I used one 4-oz. fruit cup of Del Monte diced peaches in light syrup, drained)
• 1 clementine, peeled and separated
• 1 medium banana, sliced and frozen (note to the literal: slice it before you freeze it)
• 4 ice cubes

And that’s it. You blend the above until frothy on the appropriate blender settings, adding the ingredients in the order listed. Then you drink the nectar of the gods. Or if you’re like me, you eat it with a spoon. Serves one.

Plus, the whole thing is only 22o calories, which is pretty awesome considering you just had breakfast and three fruits at the same time. Everyone wins with smoothies.

Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

Upon making the happy discovery that there were three brown bananas in the back of my refrigerator, I took the opportunity to make muffins.  Depending on the size of the bananas or muffin tin, this recipe can yield 12-18 servings, if you hold the foolish belief that a serving is a single muffin.  I used three medium bananas this time and came out with fifteen muffins, which sounds like six or seven servings to me.

Wish I had pictures, but you know what muffins look like, right?

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (or whole wheat flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
3 large bananas, mashed
3/4 cup white sugar (or half white and half brown sugar)
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup butter, melted

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Prepare muffin tins with non-stick spray or paper liners, or, in my case, half of each, since apparently I need more paper muffin cups.

1a.  Mash 3-4 very ripe bananas with a potato masher or fork.  I leave the bananas just a little bit chunky.  Melt butter in a little dish in the microwave.

2.  Combine bananas, sugar, egg, vanilla and butter in a mixing bowl.  (Tip: Allow the melted butter to cool a little so as not to cook the egg, or add them separately.  Live and learn.)  Also, half the time I forget to add the vanilla, but I’ve found it makes little difference.

3.  Add flour, powder, soda, and salt.  Stir by hand until just combined.  (Tip: Stirring too much makes them extremely dense.)  Add chocolate chips or 1 tsp. cinnamon or both.  You will probably need to taste some chocolate chips to ensure their quality.

4.  Bake for 25-30 minutes, though in my current oven, they are done in 23 minutes.  The original recipe says, “Muffins will spring back when lightly tapped,” but I have never found this to be true, despite having tapped at least one muffin in every batch.  Perhaps I am still over-stirring.  Springy muffins make me apprehensive anyway.

These muffins taste good hot, though the banana flavor comes out more the following day.  They also freeze nicely and reheat in the microwave in 25 seconds, making them a minute and five seconds faster than oatmeal for breakfast.  I call this a win.

WORD COUNT: 48,650

February 9

My joy at the snow day today was mitigated somewhat by the fact that the automated alert program at my university waited until 6:11 AM to call and tell me about it.  So while I was grateful to hear the news, I was annoyed that I was now wide awake nineteen minutes before I would have been if I’d adhered to the original plan of teaching this morning.  So I stayed in bed for an excruciating forty more minutes, thinking about getting up and having breakfast and emailing students and planning my day, until I actually got up and did those things.

So my day consists of working on my thesis as long as possible at all costs.  To commence at 9:00 AM after I have the world’s longest, hottest shower and one or possibly two cups of tea.  Operation Thesis Guilt will be in effect until 4:00 PM, at which time I plan to give up and read more of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow.  But if I genuinely work on the thesis even most of that time, I will have gained a lot of ground toward finishing my preface by February 15.

Strangely, it does not appear to be snowing right now.  The roads appear white, but not the ground.

March 11

1.  The Summer Job Market.  The school I attend requires its students to take a summer class in order to work on campus in the summer, so needless to say I won’t be working all summer to pay for a class I don’t really need.  On the other hand, that leaves me with few options that anyone with a college degree isn’t overqualified to do (I speak here of retail in all its forms: a necessary evil).  However, to save myself from the drudgery of That’ll Be Twenty Dollars Even, Sir, I have applied the principle of “It’s not what you know, but who you know” and have been asking acquaintances for job information.  Reader, consider yourself asked.

2. Limbo.  Now that most of my major deadlines have passed (Translation Exam, Master’s Comprehensive Exam, Teaching Fellowship Application), I feel rather like I’m in Limbo.  I haven’t heard the results of any of these, and probably won’t for at least a few more weeks.  A few more weeks isn’t a very long time at all when you think of the span of a lifetime (or of eternity), but a few more weeks never felt more like eternity than it does right now.  In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, I hate waiting.

3.  Endings.  In my current work-in-progress, I’ve passed the halfway point and am now trying to pull all the threads together into some coherent design.  Endings are always particularly hard, in writing as in chess, because often I will have only a vague conception of the end when I begin.  It might be an image or a state of being that I want characters to pursue or regain, but in truth it’s nebulous.  More often than not, once I’m done, the beginning and the ending will feel off-balance, and most of my rewriting will be spent trying to get them to agree.  I hope, however, to finish this one on Friday, or at the very latest Saturday, so I’ll know pretty soon whether the ending was successful or not.

4. Breakfast.  I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I do love eating the same thing for breakfast every day.  It gives definition to my morning and I never have to worry about or plan what to eat because I already know: oatmeal and tea.  Although today I must be feeling wild, because I put some cinnamon-sugar on my oatmeal.  A good omen, I hope.

5. The Far Pavilions.  I’m progressing rapidly through my epic novel.  I believe I attained page 200 last night, the point at which most other novels are drawing to a close.  But this protagonist, still young and quite adventurous, has just set out on a new mission.  So that means I’m just over 20% through it.  One fifth.  Hooray me.

An Ode to Breakfast

I remember reading in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, a series that has been on my Reread Immediately list for quite some time, that breakfast is the least-frequently-written meal in literary history, lunch and tea being more popular and dinner most of all.  Therefore whenever I eat or write breakfast, or read for breakfast, I feel somehow proud of myself a) for rising in enough time to make breakfast viable and b) going against the grain, so to speak, by championing a less noticeable meal.  And why shouldn’t my characters eat breakfast?  I do.

Breakfast this morning for myself included a cocktail of decongestants in orange juice.  Orange juice does not usually feature on my breakfast menu, but as I am trying to fortify my immune system against the cold that keeps me teetering on the edge of miserable, I have added eight ounces to my daily regimen.  Also it has calcium and Vitamin D, and since I haven’t left the apartment since Sunday, I know I can use the latter.

Usually to drink I will make myself a cup of Scottish breakfast tea or PG Tips with Splenda and skim milk.  Tea tastes fifty times better with real sugar than with Splenda, but I can’t afford the calories, since I can drink three to five cups of tea a day.  This morning it was Scottish breakfast.

I also enjoy eating yogurt with my breakfast, usually a couple spoons-ful dipped out of the tub while the water for my tea is heating.  I’ll buy a reasonably healthy vanilla yogurt in a big container and whittle away at it until the Best By date has passed.  Lately, though, I’ve been buying the small cartons of yogurt in different flavors; not nearly as cost-effective nor long-lasting, but sometimes I just can’t say no to banana strawberry, my favorite flavor, which I ate this morning.

The staple of my breakfast, that part of the breakfast which I could eat alone and still consider myself to have dined well, is the oatmeal.  I am not a gourmet when it comes to oatmeal: I take mine in microwavable packets with water, not milk.  There is, however, a science to adding the right amount of water to the packet contents, so that after microwaving for a minute and thirty seconds, it will come out just right.  Whether this perfect amount of water–never measured, always eyeballed–actually reaches the bowl depends heavily on whether I’m wearing my contacts or not.  Many’s the time I’ve had to microwave for two, for two and a half minutes, to evaporate the excess water.  On those occasions, the oatmeal doesn’t taste quite the same, but I eat it anyway.  This morning, happily, I was wearing glasses, so my oatmeal was a success.

I also regularly read for breakfast.  I take breakfast at my desk, so natural reading material is gmail and google reader, and if things are slow, facebook statuses.  Yesterday I read C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, a book that has been on my Reread Immediately list longer than Thursday Next.  Today I wrote and read email, blogs, facebook, and this blog post as a Lewis appetizer.  I hope to finish it today.

As I was eating breakfast this morning, I contemplated the story I am writing to see whether I could feature breakfast in it.  But alas, my characters are working themselves up to a bread riot, so they get up with no breakfast, go to bed with no dinner, and eat a meager lunch provided them at work.  Sorry, characters.  The best you get for breakfast is dreams.

Good Morning

There’s something about the morning that’s just delicious–ripe and full of the heady scent of potential.  What am I going to do today?  The things I have to do, of course, but also the things I want to do.  So often I sacrifice the want for the have, but I myself still made the choice.  Chaucer had it right, perhaps:  What women want is power.

This morning I had a cup of tea, an apple, conversation, and a cookie for breakfast.  And why not? I say.  This is as good a breakfast as anyone might have, and few do.  And now that the house is quiet but for syncopated clocks and I see that the time is barely grazing half past eight, I think about the hours unwinding themselves before me, and how I might fill them up, or not.  Philip Roth’s Everyman will probably be involved, and some friends, and a ferret.  Maybe a movie, maybe a restaurant.  Some more tea.  JuNoWriMo Day 1.

I quite like having a day with nothing scheduled.

Discovery

Apparently I’ve been discovered. Thanks a lot, Chera.

The word “discovered” always makes me think of the book of Revelation. When I was in high school, the pastor did a very long series on the entire book, and he often reminded us that revelation had its root in reveal. Connotations are un-cover and dis-cover: something that was hidden has now been shown to us, such as when an angel bids Paul John to “write” all throughout Revelation. For comparison, see Daniel 12:8-10.

My apologies. I didn’t mean to throw scripture at you on the first go.

This morning I changed my facebook status to “Kelly is contemplating what she wants for breakfast. Certainly a cup of tea. Some toast? Oatmeal? A fried egg and fruit? :: God is a luxurious morning.”