White Chocolate Banana Scramble

Yum.

If this is not one of your new favorite breakfasts, I'll...well, that's not going to happen. Thank you so much to Ashely and Ashley for the idea!

You can use this base and put in your favorite add-ins, but I am a sucker for white chocolate.

Make this now. (Sorry to sound pushy, but this is just sooo good.)

White Chocolate Banana Scramble
3/4 banana
a small glob of better n pb
1T rolled oats
1T wheat bran
1-2T unsweetened almond milk (Almond Breeze or Silk are great.)
about 1/2T white chocolate chips

Mash banana really well (a fork works nicely for this.)

Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well.

Spray a skillet (or pot) with nonstick spray. Add banana mixture and form a thin pancake (again, a fork does a good job too.) Wait until that is slightly browned on the bottom.

Meanwhile, I made a pb sauce. I love the combo of pb + banana, so this works well for me. Scoop some better n pb (or regular pb) into a small bowl or cup. Add a small amount of unsweetened almond milk (do not drown it.)

Nuke (covered of course! no electromagnetic waves for us) for 25 seconds and stir well.

Once browned, start stirring, sorta like you would with scrambled eggs. The Ashlies' original recipes were more like pancakes, but mine are more scrambled. If you really, really want a pancake thing, I guess you can try to form it like a pancake, and very carefully flip it.

I have tried doing it like that in the past, but it doesn't turn out quite right. Maybe it will be different for you, though.

You can cook it to how you like it, but I am in love with the taste of caramelized bananas, so that's what I cook it to.

I like to eat this scramble by flattening it against the bottom of the bowl with my trusty fork, spreading my better n pb sauce on top, and sprinkling it with additional white chocolate chips. 

I love these so much I eat them pretty frequently for dessert. I'll be back with my experiments with different flavor combos in later posts. 

Okay, now you can go make these. (Seriously.)

Enjoy!

-Kelly M.

The Better Butter

I have a confession to make.

Ever since I was a little girl, I haven't liked peanut butter. It's horrifying, I know. 

But I survived. So when I went to go lose the weight, I really didn't miss it because of its high calorie count. I knew it was all good fat but, well, I just didn't eat it. So when I found out about this "low calorie" product, called better n peanut butter, that was made from defatted peanut flour, peanut butter, and peanut oils, I didn't know what to make of it. 

So I picked up a jar at Trader Joe's, and it was love from there. It's so sweet, creamy, and delish. AND it only had 50 calories and 1 gram of fat per tablespoon. I had it made.

But when I went natural, I wanted to integrate real peanut butter into my diet. Sadly, I still had that haunting problem; I don't like peanut butter. So I started playing around on the Internet, and I found this amazing blog called Eating Bird Food, written by a lovely sounding and knowledgeable woman named Brittany. I haven't met her, but I would be SO honored to, and to be under her wing, and I plan on emailing her soon. So on her website I saw recipes for nut butters, along with links to other blogs such as The Edible Perspective, that had recipes to nut butter recipes, too. So I finally treated myself to a food processor (Don't try making nut butter in a food chopper, it doesn't work. Not that I would know.) So into the processor went...

Cinnamon Honey (or Maple Syrup) Peanut Butter

1 cup of dry roasted unsalted peanuts

1T Stevia (more sweetness)

1-2t cinnamon

about 1 1/2t honey (or 3 tbs. maple syrup)

My good old Safeway dry roasted unsalted peanuts.

Add ONLY THE PEANUTS. Sorry, but I didn't want you to miss that.

Not quite ready yet. (It never hurts to check with a steak knife.)

So here I added the cinnamon, stevia, and maple syrup. I  used maple syrup for this batch, and honey for the next one.

This is why I am the Fiasco Foodie. This is a fiasco right here. Can anyone mess peanut butter up? I can. Apparently, I added WAY to much maple syrup, and in a feeble attempt to thin everything out, I added water. Don't ever, ever do that. Ever.

So there it is. My sad, sad "butter."The good news is that it's only about 73 calories a tablespoon. The bad news is that in no way shape or form is it a peanut butter. That is pretty bad news. So I think I'm going to make an attempt to salvage it in some sort of peanut sauce. More on that later...

Round 2 (I really hope this goes better.)

Fingers crossed...

...it's still going...

Beautiful.

So here I added my cinnamon and honey. I said "about" for the honey in the ingredient list because I used a modest knife-ful, and not an actual measuring utensil. (Sorry about that. Good luck interpreting my strange knife conversions.;) By the way, see that little bit of peanut butter missing from the right corner? That was my sampling. It was good.)

So there it is, all blended and ready to be devoured. It actually worked! I'm so excited. And here's some of the best part, even I, peanut butter non-believer, am hooked. It's so creamy, smooth, light, and good. If you luck out like I seemed to have, it will also have the perfect amount of sweetness. My mom  suggested I rename it Ambrosia butter, because she said it was the best nut butter she has ever had. And my mom loves peanut butter.

And all is right in the nutty world for now.

Enjoy!

-Kelly M.