Green Monsta

So I dunno if you picked this up from my last post involving mushrooms, but I am attempting to go vegetarian. Emphasis on the word attempt. I've been doing it for about 3 weeks now and I've only had 3 or 4 slip-ups! That is, if you even call them slip-ups - my vegetarian coach Brett told me that turkey is a vegetable and bacon is a fruit, so except for that Buffalo Chicken sandwich I had last weekend, I am in the clear!

Anywho. I was looking for some vegetarian recipes and I found this website called Oh She Glows. The author, Angela, is vegan, which is a little too hardcore for me, but I am still interested in trying some of her recipes. She has this smoothie drink called a Green Monster that piqued my interest. She had a recipe for a basic one on her site, but I kind of just used her recipe as a jumpoff point. She has a ton of different recipes that I want to try, but my first one was just kind of basic.

Ingredients
spinach
1 banana
frozen berries
coconut milk
ice

No amounts, except for the banana. Yea, so sue me. I just eyeballed it, and added more stuff as it blended. Let your hair down already geez.

Maybe this visual will help.

Or this one.

Basically throw it all in the blender and hit blend! Then drink.

My first attempt - not so green.

Second attempt. Greener!

 

Much better! And you can't taste the spinach. It is supposed to give you a ton of energy. I'll be putting up other recipes with different variations as I make them. To look for more recipes yourself, check out her Green Monster Movement.

My Very First Banana Bread

So I went grocery shopping this past week and bananas were on my list. I should have seen a red flag when there were hardly any bananas left, but I picked some that looked pretty good to me and moved on. When I got home and tried to put them up on the banana hook, one just fell right off. Oops. Then another one had already broken open. Then Dennis just said to hell with them and that he doesn't want to eat them, so I decided to make banana bread.

I have never made banana bread before, but I have made pumpkin bread a lot so I thought I could handle it. The ingredients were quite simple, as was the recipe.

Ingredients
3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
1/3 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

The recipe says that you don't even need a mixer for this & that you can just use a spoon, but that sounds like more work. So I used my hand mixer.

First preheat the oven to 350. Then mix the bananas and butter together, then add the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Once they are all mixed together well, add the baking soda and salt, and lastly the flour. OMG wasn't that easy?

Pour the mixture into a buttered 4x8 loaf pan and put it in the oven for 70 minutes. I just tried a little piece and it tastes great. The recipe is hard to screw up though, so that is not saying a lot about my cooking. Seriously though, I am a great cook and this bread is going to feed Dennis for a week. Also, I can't find my camera right now you'll have to settle for this terrible picture I took with my computer:

And yes there is a piece missing. So what?! Leave me alone!!

The original recipe from SimplyRecipes.com.