Two banana pancake recipes

Recently, one of my sisters sent me a recipe for a banana pancake. It looked simple enough to make and so I decided to try it. However, as I read through the comments about the recipe, in which one person called it a “banana omelet” instead of a “banana pancake,” I came across an alternative recipe to try for a banana pancake. Since we had extra bananas, I decided to give both recipes a whirl!

The first recipe is the one my sister sent to me. Here is what’s needed for Recipe 1:

1 banana
2 eggs
Cinnamon (as much as desired)

Mash up the banana in a bowl, add the eggs and stir to mix well. Add cinnamon and stir again.

I poured it out on the griddle and cooked them like pancakes.

Here is what’s needed for Recipe 2:

1 banana
1 egg
1 Tbsp. Flour
Cinnamon (as much as desired)

Instructions for this one are the same as for the above recipe. I just mixed them all together one at a time.

I also cooked this one like pancakes on the griddle.

Here they are, ready for tasting:

The result? Recipe 1 was the winner. Both my son and I tasted each recipe. We tried them first plain then with syrup then with Nutella. Even with Nutella, the second recipe was gross. Yuck! The first one was definitely the best. We both gave it a 5. Even my husband liked the first one best. Yay!

Here’s the winner:

I also enjoyed the first recipe plain. It was sweet enough to enjoy without any toppings or anything. The best part is, it kept me full. It was several hours later in the day before I was hungry again, and I only ate 2! I guess it’s another bonus that the first recipe makes more pancakes (8 compared the Recipe 2’s 6).

I am glad we have this new recipe and I’ll be making them again. Yay! (And thanks to my sister Millie for the recipe!)

While I was sleeping

If there’s one thing I can count on waking up to in the morning, it is evidence that my oldest was up and about last night after I had gone to bed. Jen is a night owl, but not only this, she gets a case of what I call the “midnight munchies.” She’s always hungry late at night. I’m fine with her eating at night – she is underweight so extra food in her stomach is okay by me! – but as much as I remind her to clean up after herself once she’s done going on another culinary experiment, she tends to forget. I have woken up to find a plate of cookies in one area of the kitchen and EVERYTHING used to make those cookies in the sink. (Well, at least they were in the sink, though she usually forgets to rinse out things.) Or sometimes I’ll find used dishes scattered around the house or areas of popcorn, sugar, cinnamon or stray pieces of cereal on the kitchen counter.

This kinda thing definitely happens when Jen has a friend spend the night at our house. I always wake up to discover that, yes, two teenagers were up and about after both Jesse and myself had gone to sleep!

I have a morning routine when I get up in the mornings. I start the coffee and turn on the TV to the news if it’s the weekday or cartoons if it’s a weekend. (Now that it’s summer vacation, though, I’ll be turning on the TV to the cartoons more often!) I wash my face, turn on the computer, tidy up around the house a bit, check my phone for messages (and delete the spam) and drink bottled water before having coffee. Well, part of the tidying up I did this morning included washing up some kind of brown powdery stuff on the counter in the kitchen. When I smelled it, I realized it was cinnamon. And since it was near the toaster, chances are good that Jennifer and the friend she had sleeping over last night had made themselves some cinnamon toast while the other two people in the house were asleep. (Anytime Jen has a friend sleeping over, they’re usually up until 2 or 3 in the morning.)

Granted, Jen should start cleaning up after herself when she’s making herself something to eat at night, but the truth is, I really don’t mind the clean-up. I am just glad she ate something! The messes she leaves behind are usually very small so that’s usually why I don’t say anything about it. She knows if she and/or her friends leave a disaster in their wake, they’ll hear about it from me! But it’s small stuff and I’m fine with taking care of it. Maybe one day she’ll remember to wash out a glass or wipe stuff up. I am just glad she and her friend could enjoy the task of making something together and having something to eat.

Meanwhile, I continue to wake up to little surprises in the house. At least they are not bad surprises. Sometimes, there’ll even be something for me to eat, too.

I heart meal planning

This morning, as I was cooking bacon for breakfast, I got a text from one of my sisters living in California. We got to talking and she asked me how my day had been going. I told her it was good; I’d planned the meals for next week and that I was currently “makin’ bacon.” She asked about the meal planning thing and I shared with her why I started planning meals for the week.

I know that meal planning is not new. I have some friends who plan meals and one of them even shared a chart she uses for her meal planning. I finally started trying this out too and, oh my gosh, it has been a HUGE help!

As I explained to my sister, planning meals for the week has helped take the mystery out of what to make for dinner on certain days. I cook meals 4 days a week, we get fast food on the 5^th, and my husband is responsible for dinner on the final 2 days. (When it’s his turn, he usually gets fast food.) And I just got tired of asking myself on Mondays or Wednesdays, What the heck am I going to make for dinner tonight?

By planning meals, I’ll KNOW what will be for dinner on a certain day.

This has also helped us plan our grocery shopping better, too. We can shop in advance for what we will need for certain meals. At minimum, we get the basics we’ll need for breakfast – like cereal or doughnuts – as well as the basics for lunches, like cans of soup, noodles, lunch meat, etc. But when we know what will be for dinner ahead of time, we’ll also be sure to get the needed hamburger or chicken or…whatever else will be needed! This way, we won’t have to make an unexpected run to the store to get a pound of hamburger or shredded cheese. We’ll know we’ll need it and we’ll be sure to buy it on either Sunday or Monday.

Additionally, I will review Jesse’s lunch menu for the coming week and decide how many lunches he’ll be taking to school, thereby adjusting the grocery list for the number of days he’ll take a lunch. I know what he likes and doesn’t like, so this helps us prepare for those days he won’t buy lunch at school.

The meal planning has another benefit. I’m able to determine if we have a certain kind of dinner too often, not often enough, and to add variety. Ever since I started planning meals, no one has complained, “We’re having chicken AGAIN?” (Apparently, screaming at them “YOU’LL EAT IT AND LIKE IT!” doesn’t necessarily mean they will eat it. Or like it.) So that helps to ensure there is more variety in the meals we have for the week.

Also, if somebody says “I want meatloaf” or “I want spaghetti and meatballs” but we don’t have the things needed to make them, I can add those meals to the menu for next week.

And, finally, planning meals means I can try out more recipes, because I can set aside one day to try out a new dish then shop for the ingredients we’ll need for it ahead of time.

Of course, the meal plan for the week is not set in stone. Sometimes I’ll have to move a meal to another day and switch it with that day’s planned meal if I don’t have time to cook a certain meal or if we were not able to finish the weekly grocery shopping and get everything we needed. But for the most part, the meals I plan out for the week are the ones we will eat. My husband once asked why we were having fast food on a certain day and I told him that was what was on the menu (though I should’ve said “meal plan” and not “menu” because “menu” was not entirely accurate).

Planning the meals for the week has definitely worked out great for us. I like that it causes less stress and we can prepare our shopping trips accordingly. It also takes the mystery out of what’s for dinner!

The recipe project

I said earlier this year that I would NOT become a foodie and that decision still stands. Despite my interest in trying new recipes and gathering together other recipes that I’d like to try sometime, I’m not a foodie. Used to be crazy about cooking, but not so much anymore.

Still, I like to try things. And if a recipe sounds good, then I’ll try it!

That said, I have many recipes for things I’d like to try. But I have quite a few other recipes, too. Some of them are recipes we tried and loved, some of them are family recipes and still others are recipes from friends and family who wanted to share them with me. There’s also a few of my own creations.

That collection of recipes got to be pretty big. That was one problem. Another problem was that they were scattered everywhere – in my drawer, in a box, on the computer or on the Internet as a bookmark. Whenever I wanted a certain recipe, I would have to go hunting for it or get back on the computer to look for it. A third problem was that some of them were not all clear or very legible. In fact, I had to hunt down the original of one recipe because the copy I had was not very clear.

So, yeah. My system wasn’t perfect. It was time to come up with a new system!

The problem was, I could not figure out what kind. How would I organize ALL of these recipes? How can I possibly find the time to do it?

Well, it seems that Life took care of solving the problem. I despaired over this for a long time and then, it was like the answer to my problem was born within. Out of nowhere, I started the process of organizing this ginormous recipe collection. I started gathering the things I needed and started editing/retyping/organizing all of the recipes. That’s what I actually started to do today. I spent some time last week getting a few things I thought I’d need – an 8-subject folder as a temporary storage, a LARGE binder for the final collection and subject dividers – then, today, I took some time working with the recipes themselves. I’d gone through about 80 pages of the recipe collection and I haven’t even made it halfway through all of them yet. But that was as much as I could do today. I still need to go through others in my hard drive and print out a bunch of others which I have bookmarked.

After working on this recipe project today, I realized that the 8-subject folder will not work for me. I am using it temporarily, yes, but there are 12 categories of recipes altogether. So I will definitely need to use the binder. I just have to get my hands on a 3-hole puncher. (I seem to have misplaced mine.)

These are the recipe categories for the final collection:

Breads

Salads

Appetizers & Snacks

Desserts

Main Courses

Breakfast Recipes

Side Dishes

Sauces & Dips

Drinks

Sandwiches & Wraps

Soup & Stew

Seafood

It’s definitely going to be a large collection. I already have one binder filled with recipes but that one is not as organized as this one will be. So I’m looking forward to putting this all together and completing this project. It’s going to take me some time because I can only find time to work on it during the weekends (as I only work on non-writing projects during the weekends) but if I stick with it, we will have yet another binder of recipes to turn to anytime we need them. The bonus is, this time, they will all be found in one place.

Colby Jack week!

It all started when I was dissatisfied with a fast food purchase. I’d seen the commercials for Wendy’s Monterey Jack Ranch Chicken Burger. So I wanted to try it. But when we got it, I was disappointed right from looking at it.

First, it was small. Then, the taste wasn’t so great. It was ... okay. For a small chicken burger sold to the tune of a dollar twenty-nine.

I thought, you know, I could do better. So I set out to try.

But I didn’t imitate THEIR burger. What I did was end up using a DIFFERENT kind of cheese for MY chicken burger. Which was a lot larger, I might add. I used Colby Jack cheese. And, oh my Lord, it was delish!

This set me on the task of trying other ways of using Colby Jack cheese in recipes. The following are the results.

Monday

My chicken burger:

Mayo on the bun
Breaded chicken patty
Colby Jack cheese
Lettuce
Ranch

Result: DELICIOUS!!

Tuesday  
Ham sandwich:

Mayo on both slices of white bread
Mustard
Colby Jack
Lettuce
Ham  
Result: I slapped both slices together and ate. Yum! Would like to try it with sourdough bread.

Wednesday 

Grilled cheese with Colby Jack

Tomato soup

Result: The sandwich was really good but it tasted even better when I dipped it into the tomato soup.

Thursday

Breakfast sandwiches:

Toasted white bread
Ranch
Colby Jack
Fried egg

White bread
Mayo
Colby Jack
Lettuce
Fried egg
Salami

Result: Both were good but the first one was MUCH more tastier!

Friday

Cheese quesadilla

I LOVE quesadillas so I tried out the Colby Jack cheese for a plain cheese quesadilla. I also had one of the beef fajitas we were having for lunch and the flavor combo of both was AWESOME!

Result: The quesadilla was good. Combined with chicken or beef, it would taste great!

I am so glad I discovered Colby Jack cheese and tried it out with different recipes. We’ll definitely be keeping it as part of our regular cheese supply!