I love dessert. Ice cream, cake, cookies, muffins, straight up chocolate... You name it, I'll eat it! And lots of it! I ran across a recipe for grilling some fruit the other day, and decided that while there's no backyard grill in sight, a little broiled fruit couldn't hurt.
This is easy, easy, easy-- especially if you don't have to hand-squeeze those fresh lemons! :)
Ingredients:
3 bananas, chopped into 1 inch slices
3 apples, chopped into large cubes
*Other fruit would be great, but the market here doesn't have much in-season fruit right now, so these are the most flavorful.
1/2 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup honey
Mix the juice and the honey. Pour it over the fruit in a bowl. Marinade the fruit in the lemon juice-honey mixture for at least 30 minutes, stirring intermittently to make sure all the fruit is covered.
After 30 minutes, skewer the fruit and place on a foil lined baking sheet for easy clean-up. Broil it for 8-10 minutes.
They're A-B-C-Delicious! (Austin would like to let you know that they're not as good as chocolate cake.)
We are definitely cereal lovers. We'd eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and every snack in between if we could! It's just a little hard to come by here, and by that, I mean our town has NONE! We can find a little for outrageous prices in towns far away, and some corn flakes and fiber cereal for okay prices about an hour away. Our family also helps with our supply from time to time. (Thanks!) But for those in-between times when the cereal spot is looking a little bare, we've taken to experimenting with making our own granola.
I've tried lots of kind this year, adding sesame seeds, peanut butter, almonds, raisins, and anything else I could think of, but this recipe is probably my favorite. Simple, sweet, and great for snacking. Usually I just pour in ingredients until it looks good, but for the sake of blogging, I tried to measure this time.
Ingredients:
4 1/2 cups oats (Old Fashioned style)
1/2-1/3 cup of honey (Both our oats and our honey are a little different than those in the U.S., so you may need to adjust just a little.)
1T. + 1t. cinnamon
Stir the three ingredients together (feel free to add any other spices, seeds, or fruit pieces too!). Spread them on a baking tray, sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.
Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 20-25 minutes, stirring granola when it is halfway cooked. I usually pull mine out when it is browning but still soft. It hardens a whole lot as it cools, and we don't like ours too too crunchy.
I move it immediately from the baking tray to a pot to prevent it from cooling as one big rock, and I use the spatula to stir it around every five minutes or so until it cools. Sometimes it's a little sticky and will need to be chopped up or stirred again before pouring a bowl for breakfast, but it tastes great!
An Original Recipe
Peaches. Chop 'em. Throw them in the crock pot. Add 1/4 cup water. Cook for 4-5 hours on high, covered. Remove lid to let excess liquid evaporate... Fast, easy, incredibly delicious!
These are a little greasier than our average favorite snack foods, but delicious! (Of course!) With a nonstick griddle, they could be even better!
1 large baking potato (1 pound), unpeeled
1 small onion
1/4 cup flour
1 large egg
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Oil for frying
Chop the onion into small pieces and grate the potato. (Great job for manly hands... see below.) Wrap the potato in cheese cloth and squeeze as much liquid out as possible. (Any lint-free towel will work.)
In a bowl, mix the flour, egg, salt and pepper together. Stir in the potato-onion mixture until all pieces are coated.
In a skillet (or whatever heatable piece of metal that is available in your country), heat 1 tablespoon of oil until shimmering, shining, and glistening. Drop teaspoons of the mixture onto the griddle, flatten, cook 1.5 minutes, flip, cook some more, and voila! A latke treat for all!
So Austin made some AMAZING chili, and we needed something to add to it. In a world devoid of tortilla chips or CHEESE (really, how can this be?), we decided to whip up some chips of our own.
Ingredients:
Jiao Zi Pi (Dumpling Skins)
Oil
Salt
They sell dumpling skins super cheap in our local market, so they're great to experiment with. (Every once in a while we use them to actually make dumplings.) This time, I cut them in half, laid them in a single layer on a wire rack, misted them with oil, and lightly salted them.
After that, I baked them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. They begin to bubble, and when they're lightly browned, they're ready. The change happens fast, so I always eye it. It takes 5-10 minutes, but they burn fast!
They're perfect for dipping or just for munching!
