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.

Sunday seems to be soup day

Sunday has its own routine, mostly involving chores and cooking.

We get up and get ready for church; on our way out the door, I throw a load of bedding in the wash so we don’t have to listen to it. We go to church, and then we go to Chipotle, where our orders are memorized and the staff say, “Good to see you again.”

Sometimes afterward we run to the grocery store or the bookstore or the library, but usually we go home.

At home, I put the laundry in the dryer and usually make cookies, although sometimes applesauce. This week, I made two dozen chocolate chip and pecan cookies by halving the recipe on the back of the Toll House semi-sweet chocolate chips, adding 1/2 tsp. of cinnamon to the flour and 1/2 c. each of chocolate chips and chopped pecans. They came out yummy. I hope the women in my Bible study tomorrow think so too.

The afternoon can have different dimensions but usually goes something like this: I talk on Skype with my friend, I write three short articles for work, I watch a TV show, I make soup for dinner, the leftovers of which are designated for my lunch for a couple of days. In the evening I read.

The soup I am making today is a variation or, more properly, a conglomeration of several chicken tortilla soup recipes I viewed online. Its chief attraction is that it has only six main ingredients, plus spices.

Mexican Chicken Soup

1. Dice a medium onion and saute in vegetable oil in the bottom of a soup pot until soft (with minced garlic if you have some).
2. Add these items to the pot: a can of fire roasted tomatoes, a can of white and yellow corn (drained), a can of black beans (drained), an 8 oz. can of chicken, a 32 oz. box of chicken broth or stock. Instead of the can, you can also boil a chicken breast and shred it with a fork or dice some leftover chicken, which is much more my style.
3. Optional: garlic powder, onion powder, chili powder, red pepper flakes, cumin, paprika, fresh or dried cilantro, or a jar of salsa instead of the diced tomatoes.
4. Bring to a boil, then simmer for at least 15 minutes. Longer is better.
5. Serve with, according to taste, tortilla strips, avocado, shredded cheese, sour cream, or chips and salsa. Serves 6 (appetizer) or 4 (main course).

It seems pretty foolproof to me, but I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Cookies that don’t spread are dumb

I made a new recipe: Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies. The cookies did not spread. Now they are tasty but ugly.

Nonspreadability Reason #1. This recipe is pretty much chocolate chip cookies with some of the flour replaced with cocoa powder. But the traditional recipe calls for 1 & 1/8 cups of flour (I halve the 2 & 1/4 cups called for in the full recipe); whereas this recipe called for 1 cup of flour plus 1/3 cup of cocoa powder. That’s rather a bit more dry ingredients than usually go in to the mix.

Nonspreadability Reason #2. There wasn’t enough baking soda. The traditional chocolate chip cookie recipe I use calls for 1/2 teaspoon. This one only used 1/4 teaspoon! I knew it was too little, but I double-checked and triple-checked the recipe. Because of my previous cooking disasters when I deviated from the recipe, I made the cookies exactly as described.

That was dumb. I mean, I know how to make basic drop cookies, and I knew the recipe was out of proportion. I’m good at making cookies, dammit! Now the cookies are dumb and also ugly because they didn’t spread out.

And I used up the last of pretty much all of my ingredients (well, the eggs, vanilla, and cocoa powder), so I can’t remake them the right way. Nor can I make any other kind of cookies to replace them without grocery shopping. And I am supposed to bring cookies to a party tomorrow.

It’s fine. There will be so much food at the party that if I brought nothing, everyone would still have too much to eat. It doesn’t matter if my cookies are tiny and lumpy. I will just call them (Dumb) Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie Bites.

But I’m still mad about it.

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

The World’s Best Dip

Here’s how to make the World’s Best Dill Dip.

• 8 oz. sour cream
• 8 oz. mayonnaise (please, no Miracle Whip!)
• 2 tbsp. minced onion
• 1 tbsp. dill weed
• 1 tsp. minced garlic
• garlic salt, onion powder, celery salt to taste (optional)

Mix together all ingredients and refrigerate at least one hour before serving with an army of fresh vegetables, but especially carrots.  Also good with chips or in tuna salad.

I swear, I can eat my weight in this stuff.  I’ve been using it as a reward for myself: five hundred more words, and then you can have some more celery and dip.  At the moment, I’m three hundred words short of yesterday’s goal, so I clearly have a lot of eating to do before I get caught up.

WORD COUNT: 26,144