Have You Tried Banana “Ice Cream”?

No?  You probably should.  It’s like all the good things about ice cream, but it’s also gluten-free, vegan, and pretty darned good for you.  I feel like world peace could be achieved if everyone could have some of this ice cream (except for people who are allergic to bananas — they will just have to negotiate peace on their own terms).

So basically, you take some bananas.  Ripe ones, with a few brown spots.  You want them soft and squishy and very sweet.

Then you peel them and slice them into disks.  And then you freeze those.  In the freezer.  Or outside, if you live in Central or Eastern or Atlantic Canada.  Or Northern Europe.  Or Siberia.  Or Antarctica (actually, then they’d probably be too cold.  Your freezer is probably warmer than Antarctica).

Then you take them out of the freezer.  And you plop them in your food processor.

AND YOU GIVE IT A WHAZ.  Which is what Jamie Oliver would say.  And the Pie and I love him, so that’s one of our new favourite phrases.

And when it’s all gooey and soft and smooth, you can eat it!

If you prefer your soft serve a little more firm, you can chuck it back in the freezer for a bit.  I like the fact that when it thaws, because it’s banana, it doesn’t get all soupy.

And you can flavour it as well!  Add peanut butter, Nutella, chocolate chips, cocoa, vanilla … you name it (I added Nutella and vanilla).

The only limit is your imagination — and what you have to stuff in there.  GO BANANAS!

Gluten-Free Pumpkin Dog Treats

This is the last pumpkin post, I swear.  We’re finally rid of it.  Fortunately, there is one member of our family who will never tire of pumpkin, and that is The Short and Spoiled One.

Have we met?

This is a quick recipe that I put together with inspiration from Betty Crocker and Simply Sugar and Gluten-Free.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, whisk together 4 cups brown rice flour with 2 tablespoons ground flax meal (optional) and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.  It occurs to me after the fact that you could also use a mixture of brown rice flour and quinoa flour, seeing as quinoa is the new superfood for dogs these days.  Very trendy of you.

In another bowl, whisk together 2 large eggs with 1 3/4 cups (or 1 14 oz can) of pure pumpkin purée (not the pie filling) and 1/4 cup peanut butter (all natural, with no added salt or sugar, please).

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir until a shaggy dough forms — you may need to use your hands.

Sprinkle with more flour and stir that in if it’s still tacky.

Take the dough and form it into a small ball with your palms.  Flatten it into a patty and place it on the baking sheet.  Angle your thumb sideways on one side of the cookie and press it into the dough.  Use the point of one of your fingers to make four indentations along the curve of your thumbprint.   So it looks like a wee paw print.  Cute, eh?

Bake for about 25 minutes, depending on the thickness of your cookie.  A finished cookie is crisp and dried out.

Allow them to cool completely on a rack and store them in the fridge to keep them fresh for a couple weeks.  At room temperature in an airtight container they’ll keep for about a week.

Gren obviously enjoyed testing them.  Here he is waiting for my okay.

Scarfing down the first piece.

Discovering the second.

Scarfing that one too.

Are there no more?

Gren was nice enough to share with some of my coworkers’ dogs, and this was the review:

Photo credit: E. Wright

The Uber Cookie

When I experiment with recipes, I usually steer away from tampering with the essentials in baking: the exact proportions of flour and baking soda and all of that jazz.  The thing is, when you are working with gluten-free options, all those proportions go out the window anyway.  All you have to think about is general cohesion and texture.

So I invented a cookie recipe from scratch.  I know, it’s not that impressive, but I’m pretty pleased with myself.  Q picked me up from the airport last week and I promised I would bribe him with baked goods, so here they are.  I took input from my husband on what he believes the three main important ingredients in cookies are meant to be: he picked peanut butter, raisins, and oatmeal.

I can work with that.

Preheat your oven to 375°F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

The best part about this is it turns out that I have some osmotically-absorbed or genetic knowledge about how to bake cookies from scratch, so there was no real trial and error here.  I just kept adding stuff in and it all seemed to work out.  I don’t want to get cocky, though; the next time I do this it’s likely I’ll end up blowing something up.  I think the real trick with stuff like this, when you’re not sure what’s going to happen, is to do it by hand, and avoid the labour-saving devices in  your kitchen.  That way you can see how the ingredients interact with each other while they’re being mixed, rather than shoving it all in the mixmaster, turning it to high, and hoping for the best.

So with that in mind, I started with a bowl and a spoon.  Because I was going to use peanut butter in this recipe I halved the amount of butter I would normally use.  So in a bowl, cream together 1 cup granulated sugar and 1/2 cup softened butter.

Then add in 1 cup softened peanut butter.  If you use Jiffy or whatever then it’s probably soft enough as it is, but I used that stuff that you have to stir the oil into and then keep in the fridge, so it needed some time to come to room temperature.  Mix that in well.

Add to that 2 eggs, one at a time, mixing until each is well combined.  At this point you could add 1 teaspoon vanilla, but I forgot.  Still they turned out great.

Now for your dry ingredients.  Plop in 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, and 1 1/2 cups buckwheat flour (don’t let that name fool you, buckwheat is gluten-free and not related to wheat at all).  Mix that all together well.  Another bonus of doing this with a spoon instead of a mixer is you can make sure the sides are well-scraped down and that there are no ingredients hiding unmixed at the bottom.

To your cookie dough add 1 cup gluten-free rolled oats and 1 cup raisins.  You could probably add in some chocolate chips as well if the mood strikes you.  Mix until that’s well-combined.

Form your dough into balls measuring a bit more than a tablespoon and flatten them with your fingers onto the parchment-lined baking sheets.

Bake for 12 minutes, rotating your pans halfway through, until cookies are set (they will likely not brown much for you).  Leave them to firm up in the pan for about five minutes before removing to a cooling rack to cool completely.  Seal in an airtight container for up to a week.  I bet they would also freeze well.

Peanut Butter Spaghetti

This recipe is actually called something like “Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Snow Peas and Carrots”, but the Pie and I have made it so many times that our version is better.  It came out of an Every Day Food from eons ago, and it’s kind of like a lazy man’s pad thai.

We made it for Kª one night when Kº was off gallivanting in Russia, leaving her alone with Il Principe and the Incredibly Little Hulk.  Served with our crispy won ton crackers, it was a great and easy meal.  Even Il Principe approved.

Start some water a-boilin’.  Like enough to cook about 8-10oz of whole wheat spaghetti (to serve 4).  Then you can, you know, cook that there spaghetti for about ten minutes, or according to your package instructions.

While you are waiting for the water to boil and for your pasta to cook, prepare the following mis en place:

3 medium carrots, shaved with peeler

8oz snow peas, tough strings removed

1 (300g) package of firm tofu, cut into small cubes (if you’re not a fan of tofu it’s conceivable that you could replace this with thin strips of cooked chicken or steak)

Prepare as well this wee bowl of sauce:

5 tablespoons organic peanut butter (smooth or crunchy, it’s your choice)

2 tablespoons brown sugar

2 teaspoons rice vinegar

2 teaspoons soy sauce

2 teaspoons lemon juice

2 teaspoons sweet chili sauce

Stir that all together.  If you can’t get the peanut butter to go, don’t worry, the heat from the pasta will melt it.

When your pasta is cooked, scoop out about a cup of the pasta water.  You may or may not need it later.  I like to keep you guessing.

Drop all the vegetables and tofu into the pot with the pasta and let sit in the boiling water for 2 minutes before draining the whole thing.

Toss the pasta to make sure everything is mixed around.

Pour in your peanut butter sauce and toss to coat.  If the sauce is too thick and won’t coat properly, pour in some of the reserved pasta water to thin it out a bit.

Garnish with crushed peanuts and serve.  Fantastic cold the next day.

Related articles

• thai anyone? (realfoodjoy.wordpress.com)
• Healthy Recipe: Thai Edamame Pasta (fitsugar.com)
• Peanut Butter Attack (patspapers.com)
• Woman Sends Peanut Butter-Coated Letter To Ex’s Allergic Wife [In Brief] (jezebel.com)

Chewy Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cookies

This recipe is an interesting one, and the Pie pointed it out to me.  He loves peanut butter, but isn’t a huge fan of the peanut butter cookie, finding it too crumbly and dry.  So he found me this recipe in Baked’s first cookbook, and I thought I would try it out for one of my research participants.  The participant in question, poor fellow, just broke his collarbone in two places.  I got a one-armed hug for my cookie efforts.  It helped that I also brought along some of the ever-popular peanut butter cups.

And, because my lovely Baked book is back in St. John’s, I used the instructions of Laura over at Kitchen Illiterate — thanks Laura!

I doubled my recipe and am going to attempt to freeze half this dough and see how it turns out.  As always, I left out the salt, because my butter is salted.

So get your mis en place all set up:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, whisked or sifted together with 2 teaspoons baking soda

1 cup butter, softened and cut into pieces

1 cup granulated sugar and 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup peanut butter (I used all-natural crunchy)

6 ounces chocolate, chopped (I used dark chocolate)

If you’re not sure how fine to chop your chocolate, remember that, unlike chocolate chips, bar and slab chocolate does not retain its shape when it’s melted, so think carefully about the size of chocolate goo you want wandering around in your cookie and you’ll be fine.

First, beat the butter and the sugars together until they’re totally fluffy.  If you find your mixture is too dry and crumbly, your butter needs to be softer.  You can chuck your mixing bowl into the oven at 250°F for a few minutes and that will do the trick nicely.

Add each egg one at a time and beat until fully incorporated.

Then you can plop in your peanut butter and the vanilla.  I found it mixed easier if I softened the peanut butter as well, but it depends on the type of peanut butter you use.  Beat that until it’s just mixed.

Add about half the flour mixture and beat for 15 seconds (just following the recipe here, folks).  Add the second half and beat until just incorporated, though you want to make sure you don’t have any pockets of flour anywhere.

Now you can add in your chocolate.

Cover your bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 3 hours.  I am a bad person, and only had time to do it for 2 hours, but I don’t think it makes a whole lot of difference.  The dough might be a little harder to handle, but you get used to it.

Preheat your oven to 375°F.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and use a tablespoon measure or small scoop to drop rounded balls of dough onto the sheet. 

The secret is in the roundness of your implement.

Make sure they’re at least 2″ apart, because these babies will spread like the Dickens. (Incidentally, does anyone know where that particular turn of phrase comes from?)

Flatten the balls with your fingers, but just a little bit.  They’ll do the rest on their own.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating your sheets halfway through baking, until the cookies have just started to brown on top.  You may find that your oven is hotter or more efficient than this and your cookies end up a bit darker or slightly burnt on the bottom. I always burn my first batch anyway.  My dad loves it because it means more cookies for him.

I ended up cutting the baking time down to 8 minutes, rotating halfway through.  It might even be better to cook them at 350°F instead, but I guess it depends on how thick your pan is.  I used two kinds of baking sheets, one rimmed and one not, and the ones on the rimmed sheet did not turn out as dark.

Remove them from the oven and allow them to sit on the baking sheets for a few minutes to firm up before you transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.  Then you can stuff your face.  Go ahead.  You know you want to.

Peanut Butter Cups

I will never understand the obsession the male half of my family has with peanut butter.  To be honest, if I was never allowed to eat peanut butter again, I would probably live a long and fulfilled life.  Not so for the men in my two families.  Peanut butter is a staple.

This recipe is adapted from Karen Solomon’s Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It, and makes 12 large peanut butter cups.

Get your ingredients together:

1 1/2 cups crunchy peanut butter (I got mine fresh ground at the health food store!)

1 teaspoons honey

2 tablespoons icing sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 cups chopped chocolate

Have ready 12 large cupcake liners.  Or more.

Chuck the peanut butter, honey, icing sugar, and vanilla in a bowl and mix it up.  I used the stand mixer because I am supremely lazy.  That’s just how I roll.

Take about two teaspoons of the peanut butter mixture, roll it into a ball, then flatten it into a patty that will fit in the cup but won’t touch the sides.  Do the same with the rest of the peanut butter until you have twelve.  Or, if like me, you doubled the recipe, you’ll end up with more than that.

Melt your chocolate.  I think I used more than was required, because I had to melt additional chocolate.  But there’s nothing wrong with that.

Spoon about 2 teaspoons of melted chocolate into the bottom of each cup.  Place a patty in the centre of the melted chocolate and tap it into place, but don’t let it touch the bottom.

Spoon an additional teaspoon of chocolate on top of the patty, making sure that the chocolate goes up the sides and encloses the peanut butter completely.

Tap the cup on the bottom to smooth out the tops.  Allow to sit undisturbed for at least four hours for the chocolate to harden completely.  Now wasn’t that easy?

Store up to two weeks in an airtight container.  Do not refrigerate.  ENJOY!

No-Bake Peanut Butter Crunchy Squares

I made these as a present for the Pie when he came to visit me at Thanksgiving.  The man is a slave to peanut butter, and I like to express my love through food.  We’re a well-matched pair.

The recipe I have calls for 1 cup of crispy rice cereal and 2 cups corn flakes cereal.  I don’t particularly like eating either of those cereals (they get soggy too fast) so I didn’t want to be stuck with piles of cereal when I was finished the recipe.  The solution?  Special K.  A small box containing a mixture of both cereals.  And high in protein too.  In doubling the recipe, I ended up using the entire box (6 cups cereal), which was an added bonus.

For the double recipe you need 1 cup corn syrup.

Corn syrup photographs really well, don’t you think?

2 cups smooth peanut butter.

1/2 cup butter or margarine (go for the real deal).

1 cup packed brown sugar.

And 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.

In a saucepan over low heat, stir together peanut butter, butter, brown sugar, and corn syrup.

Get it all melty and stuff until it’s all smooth and looks like caramel. Caramel made of peanut butter, that is.

Remove it from the heat and mix in the vanilla.

Pour your cereals (2 cups crispy rice, 4 cups corn flakes) in a bowl an mix them (or use my cop-out cheat method of 6 cups Special K Satisfaction).

Pour in the peanut butter goo and mix well.

Press evenly into a sprayed pan (double the recipe makes for a 9×13″ pan).

Chill for 6 hours or until firm.  Flip mixture onto a flat surface and cut into squares.  You might need a spatula to help you ease the squares out of the pan.

Enjoy.  I know the Pie did.

Will keep in an airtight container for ages and ages (separate layers with waxed paper).

Mum’s Peanut Butter Balls

This recipe is for my brother Ando, who was heard to mutter to his wife Teedz that he couldn’t find it anywhere on my blog.  And then she told me.  So I felt guilty and therefore obliged to rustle some up.  Yesterday, when I was angry at the world but mostly my thesis supervisor, I did.

We didn’t have a lot of sweets in the house when I was a kid because Kristopf had problems processing sugar (and because my parents were health food nazis).  He was, however, an enormous fan of peanut butter, and every so often, if we were lucky (read: well-behaved), my mother would make peanut butter balls.

To do the same, you need three ingredients: peanut butter (smooth works best), skim milk powder, and honey.

Start by mixing together equal parts peanut butter and milk powder (with generous dollops of honey to taste). 

Adjust the milk powder (add maybe a handful more) until you have a texture that’s sticky enough to adhere to itself, but not sticky enough to leave itself stuck to your hands.

I’m thinking Play-Doh consistency here.

Anyway, once you’ve got the mixture to your taste (as in, tastes like peanut butter with milk and enough honey to make you happy), take about a tablespoon’s worth of your “dough” and form it into a ball by rolling it on the palm of your hand.  Repeat until you’re out of dough.  Keep them in the refrigerator so they don’t go all gooey.  I suppose you could freeze them as well but seeing as they’re super easy to make I don’t really see the point.  I’d save you some but the Pie and his father Papa John ate them all.

That’s it, Ando.  Are your childhood illusions of a special treat shattered?  I know mine were.

Ash’s Mother’s Peanut Butter “Fudge”

I remember making this after a sleepover at Ash’s house, standing with Ash and her mother in their kitchen in the middle of a forest on Vancouver Island.  I haven’t seen Ash in person in about 16 years, but I still have this recipe at the beginning of my magic cookbook, and I think of the cedars outside the kitchen window every time I make it.  The Pie, who doesn’t have this memory, nonetheless loves the peanut butter aspect of this easy peasy sweet treat.

It was kind of like this. (Credit: Marine Eco Tours.com)

This isn’t real fudge, so don’t be deluded here.  It doesn’t require cooking over a hot stove with a candy thermometer at the ready, for one thing.  And it’s like instant pudding in that it’s ready to eat almost as soon as you’ve finished making it.

Which makes it all the more awesome.  I do apologize in advance, however, for the photos.  There’s no way you can make chocolate fudge look like anything other than, well, poo.

Butter a baking dish generously and set it aside.  I have also tried lining a dish with plastic wrap, which works well too, if you’re okay with your fudge looking a little wrinkly.  Waxed paper probably works well too.  In fact, I’m going to try it with waxed paper.

In a bowl, mix together 3 3/4 cups icing sugar and 1/2 cup cocoa.

To this add 1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter (I bought smooth by accident, alas) and 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Melt 1 cup butter and stir that in as well.  Use your hands if you have to.  Make sure to get all the icing sugar at the bottom.

Press your fudge mixture into the pan and flatten it out.

I smacked mine around a little with a spoon.

And stuffed some into novelty ice cube trays.  Why not?  Obviously I need more ice cube trays, for variation.

Refrigerate until hardened, about half an hour, before slicing and eating it all.  I like to put mine in the freezer overnight for extra hardness.  If you don’t eat it all, then keep it in the fridge or it will melt.

Rodentia: Judgment Day

I had two more posts about this damned mouse.  So much for that.  Had to delete ‘em.

I had a dream about mice last night.  I dreamed the house was overrun with them. One of them was so big it resembled a large angry black cat that hissed at me.  Armed with a broomstick I did battle with it, only to be distracted when the house (which, in the dream, was a ship), hit bad weather and started to roll.

The Pie and I were quite pleased with ourselves for blocking the gap under the door to the water heater with dryer sheets.  Now the mouse’s only egress into the house was through the fireplace.  We have a piece of wood that leans against the fireplace opening to hide the ugly insulation and block drafts, but if you place it flush with the opening it topples open, so we have to have it at an angle where there’s a small opening at the bottom.  This is the mouse’s entrance.

I came home from work today (which for me is the 12th), all gung-ho to finally prepare a wedge that would keep the door fully shut.  I found the appropriate piece of wood in the shed and sawed it down to size.  Cut myself on my new saw.  Now it has a taste for blood.

I came back inside and was ready to wedge it into place when I figured I’d better check the trap in the fireplace, just in case the little bugger had managed to eat the rest of the peanut butter off the other side of the trap (I had discovered to my dismay a few days previous the mouse’s ability to remove the bait from the trap without setting it off).

And I got the bejesus startled out of me.

The mouse (I’m guessing it’s a female but I could be wrong) got too confident and went too far over on the trap.  It looks like it was instantaneous at least.

I have mixed feelings about this.  I’m not in the habit of killing small things (except house centipedes, because those things terrify me), or even big things for that matter.  The mouse was just following her biological imperative, and I had no right to interrupt that.  On the other hand, she was pooping in my pans, and who knows where she had been?

Andy and I ceremoniously dumped her in the scrap heap in the backyard, and then threw out the trap.

We’re going to stay vigilant in case she wasn’t the only one but the problem is solved for now.