Maybe I’m crazy, but I feel like sometimes being limited in the kitchen is almost more idea-inspiring than when you have every ingredient on the planet to work with. My kitchen is regularly fully-stocked and yet, often times I stare at the cupboards unable to form a meal plan. How is that possible?

This week I did something that I imagine everyone who loves to eat would probably dread doing: I had my wisdom teeth taken out. You think I’d be crushed from the limitations that brings… no delicious bagels to tear at, no crunchy snacks to munch on, etc.- but instead, my world was opened up to a vast array of velvety soups full of spring veggies, Scottish Oatmeal, vibrant smoothies and luscious desserts. Could I make these things before? Sure. Did I? Nope. Inspiration comes from odd places sometimes.

I prepped for my recovery by bookmarking lots of easy-to-eat recipes, including these lovely Chocolate Peanut Butter Pots De Crème. Who needs vicodin when you have something that’s delicious and full of chocolate and peanut butter? It’s also perfect for any of you gluten-free eaters, and a nice avenue for using PB&Co’s tasty Dark Chocolate Dreams Peanut Butter since the flavor of it really comes through nicely.

Note: I like a bit of a skin on my pudding so I didn’t put plastic wrap on top right away as the recipe suggests. Mine also came out a little light and foamy-looking on top, I think because of my vigorous whisking.

I guess it’s worth mentioning that cooking and blogging are also an excellent distraction from the discomfort. This was a great activity / dessert all around.

Get the recipe by Jacqui Scoggin on The Peanut Butter & Co All-Star Recipe Blog.

You’re probably not going to believe this, but we’ve been trying to cut back on our sugar intake ever so slightly. I could never give it up all the way, but after reading this NY Times article on the toxicity of white sugar, Taste Tester decided to make some changes. One of which was to give up cereal.

Cereal- also known as my go-to breakfast for pretty much my entire existence. Seriously?

I thought he was crazy. Crazy, I tell ya! But after some initial resistance, I consumed the last of my cereal stash and I too, have stopped eating it. It made sense, really since most dry cereals are shockingly loaded with sugar and never kept me full til lunch anyway. Life has been better since giving them up with one minor problem… what the heck do we eat for breakfast now??

There are plenty of options, but cereal was just so… easy. :-/ It produced 1 bowl and 1 utensil of dirty dishes; no prep work required. Eggs use a pan, oatmeal uses a pot… both take time… what to do?

We spent a month in Austin last winter, during which I near-stalked a local smoothie joint and discovered the magic of smoothies and fresh juices. I had never paid much attention to them before but wow, did I feel better after drinking one!

So instead of using up our bananas to make banana bread like usual, I tried making a smoothie for Taste Tester. I blended banana, reduced-fat milk, peanut butter, honey and cinnamon.

He said it tasted really good, but there was one problem: it was warm, not chilled like a smoothie should be. I tried putting it in the freezer for a few minutes, but the edges of the drink just froze. Clearly, I am a newbie at this.

So, the next time we bought bananas, I waited for them to get ripe, chopped them up and froze them individually, so I had 5 ready-to-go chopped bananas that could just get thrown in the blender for 5 easy breakfasts. It worked like a charm- they produced tasty, chilled breakfast smoothies that Taste Tester loves. Yay!

This may not be a solution to the dirty dish problem since you need to use a blender, but it is a solution to the healthy/filling/non-time consuming problems. Plus, now that I make them so often I can just eyeball the measurements so I don’t have to waste a bunch of measuring spoons and whatnot.

Check out the recipe after the break. Give up your standard-issue breakfast for a day and give this a whirl (Yay, blender pun!). You won’t regret it. And if you must have a little treat, go ahead and add a little cocoa powder in. I won’t tell anyone! ;-)

On the same smoothie-loving note, now that we are no longer in Austin near my go-to smoothie place, I discovered this stylish iPad App that will keep me stocked and busy with smoothie recipes! Super fun.

Enjoy!

Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie
Yields 1 large serving or 2 small

1 frozen chopped banana
2/3 cup 2% milk
2 Tbsp + 1 tsp smooth peanut butter (we’ve been using Planter’s but use whatever tickles your fancy)
1 Tbsp honey
1/8-1/4 tsp ground cinnamon (to taste)

Add all ingredients to a blender and puree until smooth, about 30 seconds. Pour and enjoy!

Your parents always taught you never to do drugs, but did they say anything about eating yourself silly on super addictive CPB toffee crackers? I didn’t think so. These crackers are just as addictive and head-swirlingly satisfying as drugs without… being drugs. Hooray!

My sisters and I all love peanut butter, but my mom hates it. Every holiday we join in to make dessert and probably much to her dismay at least one peanut butter dessert makes its way to the table. One of this year’s Easter desserts were these salty / sweet CPB Saltines. They seemed a bit too snack-ish to be on the dessert table, but no one was debating technicalities as they were too busy stuffing their face holes and reveling in the tastiness.

These are super addictive. You know how when you are destroying a bag of chips, each one is just so perfectly salty that you can’t resist grabbing another and another? These saltines actually get baked in the oven for a few minutes so they come out a bit crispy instead of full on crunchy like they usually are and they are topped in a layer of sweet crunchy toffee, dark chocolate and roasted peanuts. The sweet toppings combined with the salty crackers makes for a wonderfully deadly delicious combination of flavors and textures.

Get the recipe on Allrecipes. My sister topped hers with honey-roasted peanuts, but you could also add a layer of peanut butter and peanut m&ms as this blogger did. Enjoy!

As someone who regularly bakes and gives away treats, I tend to really appreciate it when the tables turn and someone gives me a personally-made pastry instead. I especially appreciate it when it’s a unique treat that I’ve never had before and when it’s something as delicious as these bars were. Who knew that something called “dried spent grains” could be so tasty?

Yep you got it, these yummy bars were a side product from a home beer brewing kit. The grains left behind from making beer were dried and re-incarnated in dessert form. So if you make them, not only do you get to enjoy them but you can do so with a cold glass of your own homemade small batch beer in hand (or at least, dreaming about said homemade small batch beer glass since the fermentation process takes a lot longer than these bars do). Kudos to the creator (Brooklyn Brew Shop) and maker (TJ!) of this recipe for deliciousness, creativity and resourcefulness. I would have just assumed the spent grains should get thrown away. For shame, ignorant hypothetical self! No barley CPB bars for you.

Big thanks to TJ for sharing! You can find the recipe he used from Brooklyn Brew Shop. (Though if you don’t happen to have dried spent grains on-hand, I’d be willing to bet that a crunchy cereal of some sort would work in their place. They just might not have that same wonderful Bill-Nye essence to them.)

Busy, busy, busy. We’re all busy. You’re probably too busy to be reading this blog post right now. But you’re smart because let’s face it, the prospect of eating delicious cupcakes or hell – just looking at them – beats out whatever you’re supposed to be doing right now. Laundry? TPS Reports? Butchering a Whitney Houston song? You’re singing right now, aren’t you? Stop it, just stop. Look – cupcakes! Ooooh!

Despite feeling like a generally productive person and loving to read about food maybe even more than I love puppies (that sentence felt wrong even as I was writing it. Who doesn’t love puppies??), I have fallen embarrassingly far behind on my google reader. How can this be? I’m a disgrace to my own nerdy kind! But there are a few blogs on it that I just love and can’t quit. Happy Go Marni is one of them. Her blog is full of awesomely delicious recipes complete with helpful how-to photos. When she posted these cupcakes made with two of my favorite ingredients, I just couldn’t help myself.

Could you?

Feeling up to the baking, but not up for dealing with my pastry tips and piping bags, I went for a low-fi decorating technique. I admittedly stole this cute and tasty technique from a wonderful cupcakery called Sugar Mama’s in Austin, TX. The honey adds such a pleasant sweetness, extra moistness and nicely ties the flavors of the honey-roasted peanuts and peanut butter together.

Honey is one of my new favorite things to use in the kitchen. In the face of all those other questionable sugar replacers out there, it seems to be a safe, healthy and tasty option for sweetening. Plus, it goes super well with peanut butter and cream cheese. Just make a small valley in the middle of your icing with your offset spatula, fill it with a drizzle of your favorite honey and top with a few butter toasted peanuts.

Since I was feeling extra lazy, I didn’t toast my own nuts (that sounds almost as wrong as the puppy thing). We picked some up from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI. I love Zingerman’s for many reasons, one of which is that when you go there, they happily let you sample lots of their delicious items. Fancy peanuts seemed like a pretty safe purchase for us, but after tasting them, they were without a doubt coming home with us. They are ridiculously good, crunchy sweet peanuts that are great on their own, but also make a great cupcake topper.

Get the cupcake recipe, complete with “how to” photos at Happy Go Marni and pick up some tasty Butter Toasted Peanuts from Zingerman’s.

And now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to eat one and catch up on my reader. :-)

We are nearing the end of a month spent in Austin, TX. I have loved it, though working in someone else’s kitchen has definitely been an experiment. My kitchen at home is almost as small as you can get- but it is fully stocked with just about every kitchen gadget as well as a pretty full pantry. I both feared and looked forward to leaving it behind.

When we arrived in our temporary apartment (acquired on airbnb.com), we quickly headed over to inspect the kitchen. There were about 4 spices: curry powder, red pepper flake, cumin and cinnamon (some of my faves) and some pretty sad looking pans. There was a collection of wooden spoons and a spatula, but no whisk and no hand mixer.

No need to panic – I’ll just have bitchin’ forearms from all the manual mixing by the end of this trip, right? Perhaps I’ll realize my new career as an arm-wrestling champ. Yes!

Or maybe I’ll just eat some real tasty pancakes… that’d be swell too.

Aside from the oven smoking the first time we used it (clearly it’s not a frequently used device), we’ve done pretty well. There’s no toaster oven or microwave but there is a blessed dishwasher – something I don’t have at home. The only things we cracked and purchased were a coffee grinder, a milk frother (hey, I love my latte’s), a good chef’s knife and a knife sharpener. We’ve cooked anywhere between 1 and 3 meals a day, making everything from casseroles to soups to cookies to potatoes au gratin. It was interesting to learn what I could and couldn’t live without. It was also interesting to learn that one of said sad looking pans cooks pancakes *perfectly*- something that I always have trouble with using my nice shiny new pans at home. Is it the electric burners they have here providing a more even heat? The heavy weight of the pan? Whatever the case, I was happy.

Another plus to cooking in Austin is that it’s the home of the world’s first Whole Foods, which means of course that the one here is a food nerd’s dream. At the start of the month we stocked up with lots of organic supplies – something I don’t always treat myself to. To my surprise, we went through the flour really slowly. I quickly made up for it by making a few batches of pancakes.

The first time I served these oatmeal pancakes, I topped them with stewed apples because the pancakes are thick, filling and beg for a fun topping. Wanting to switch it up the second time around, I made a peanut butter maple sauce and chocolate butter, and topped them with chopped bananas.

This trip has also been a lesson in how to make a variety of stuff with a limited pantry, which translates to: how many different ways can I use the same peanut butter and chocolate hazelnut sauce I brought with me? The answer: many! And all of them delicious.

But now that the trip is almost over, the real question is: can this much peanut butter sustain us for 2 1/2 days?

Eep.

Recipe after the break!

Austin, TX is *full* of fun food trucks and food trailer parks. Did you know that? I didn’t. They are everywhere and it’s awesome.

We had plenty of reasons to spend the month of January away from the northeastern chill of NYC, soaking up the warmth of Austin, but soon found out that the food there was an extra bonus. Quite a few trucks were on my “Must Eat” list and Holy Cacao was one of them. They sell cake pops. Cake pops seem to be everywhere these days and yet I had never really tried one.

We picked up three at Holy Cacao – Brass Cake Balls (chocolate peanut butter), Wedding Cake (vanilla) and Velvet.

These cake pops are the mullet of dessert. Why?

They’re business on the top…

and a party on the bottom.

They’re much tastier than a mullet, though. At least I imagine, since I’ve never actually tasted mullet. Ew.

Hey look, a cross-section shot. Neat.

I loved them all. The chocolate coating was firm but thin enough that it cracked easily as you bite into it. The vanilla cake was very sweet and the sprinkles on the bottom added just enough texture to balance the soft filling nicely. The red velvet was well-balanced all around. It didn’t taste too strongly of cream cheese or food coloring – it was just perfectly sweet, cocoa-flavored, moist and tasty. Our favorite of course, was the chocolate peanut butter, which was made with good peanut butter and also perfectly sweetened.

I thought that this was the perfect truck food – easily transportable, kitschy, fun and delicious. If you find yourself in Austin, stop by Holy Cacao.

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Bread Gallery was just too long a name, but make no mistake – we love banana bread. I make it a lot but as delicious as it is, even I get a little tired with the same old presentation: brick of bread on a plate.

Lately I’ve been making fancier breakfasts than usual, so brick on a plate doesn’t quite hold up to my standards. Unless you have enough bricks to build some kind of fort. That’d be cool.

What? I didn’t say I had mature standards.

Without enough bricks to build a fort (drat), I did the next best thing and covered the bread I had left in peanut butter frosting and chocolate hazelnut frosting.

These are easy to make, they look fancy and you can eat em with your hands. They are great for kids to assemble and eat as well, especially if you cover em in rainbow sprinkles. It is the weekend after all, so have a little fun with your food. Go bananas!

Exhibit A: Peanut Butter Banana Bread Petit Four

And Exhibit B: Chocolate Hazelnut Banana Bread Petit Four

Recipe after the break.

The peanut butter and chocolate hazelnut spreads I had were too thick to spread on the banana bread without making a mess of them, so I thinned em out a little to make a frosting. They are sweeter and better this way anyway. :-) Enjoy!

Banana Bread Petit Fours
Yields 2 servings

1/3 loaf of your favorite banana bread, cut into large cubes
1-2 bananas, sliced 1/2 inch thick, at an angle

To make the peanut butter frosting, whisk together:
2 Tbsp natural roasted peanut butter (I used Justin’s)
1 Tbsp 2% or soymilk
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp honey
generous sprinkle of cinnamon

To make the chocolate hazelnut frosting whisk together:
2 Tbsp Askinosie Chocolate Hazelnut Spread*
2 Tbsp 2% or soymilk
1 Tbsp light brown sugar
sprinkle cinnamon
*If using Nutella, omit the sugar and use less milk. The Askinosie Spread is far superior though, so I recommend you pick up a jar!

To assemble:
Coat one side of each banana bread cube in the frosting of your choice and top with a slice of banana bread. Serve immediately- in a fort, if possible. :-P

This is an easy recipe with an amazing yummy taste. You can easily gift them to someone or simply refrigerate them for your family. What really makes them special is the creamy peanut butter filling inside the dark chocolate coating.

Remember before buying the ingredients that you have to choose a top quality chocolate to get that perfect taste for your peanut butter balls. The better the chocolate, the better their taste will be.

Making peanut butter balls is a little bit of a time consuming process, however very simple. You can take a look at the recipe after the break.

Chocolate Dipped Peanut Butter Balls
by Ellen Spencer

Ingredients for peanut butter balls
2 cups (480 ml) creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup (57 g) unsalted butter
1/4 tsp salt (optional)
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups (250 g) confectioner’s or icing sugar

Ingredients for chocolate coating
9 oz (260 g) semisweet or bittersweet chocolate
1 Tbsp (15 g) shortening

Garnish
finely chopped peanuts (optional)

Directions

1. Prepare baking sheets: Line two baking sheets with wax paper. Keep them ready so that once the peanut butter balls are ready, you can simply place them on the baking sheets.

2. Make the peanut butter balls: In a baking bowl, combine the peanut butter, unsalted butter and salt. Microwave the ingredients for about a minute. You will have to make sure that the mixture is only soft and not liquid, so after every 20 to 30 seconds, stir it. Add the vanilla and the confectioner’s sugar. Stir the mixture until a firm dough is formed.

3. Roll the peanut butter balls: Roll the dough into 1-inch (2.5 cm) balls. Place the balls on the prepared wax paper-lined sheets and refrigerate them for about an hour.

4. Melt the chocolate for coating: Chop the chocolate and add it to a double boiler set over barely simmering water. Add shortening. Heat gently, stirring until the mixture has melted.

5. Coat the peanut butter balls: Dip the peanut butter balls into the melted chocolate with the help of a toothpick or a fork. When you remove the peanut butter ball from the chocolate, allow all the excess chocolate to drip off. Place the chocolate-covered balls back onto the baking sheet.

6. Garnish the dipped peanut butter balls: After placing the peanut butter balls on the baking sheet, you can sprinkle finely chopped peanuts on top of them. Or you can simply roll the entire peanut butter ball on crushed peanuts.

7. How to store: You can to refrigerate them for about a couple of weeks.

Chocolate Dipped Peanut Butter Balls are very easy to make and are a perfect gift for many occasions. You will just have to spare some time to dip the peanut butter balls into the melted chocolate, as this is the only process that consumes time.

About the author: Ellen Spencer is a blogger and writer. She is a health freak and very environmentally aware. Her writing covers a variety of topics and these days she is busy writing an article on postpartum depression. She has a baby sling of her own in her house.

One of my favorite things about going to cafés is seeing what interesting and unusual latte flavors they offer, as well as the goofy names baristas like to give them. But since I now work from home and no longer pass a dozen coffee shops on my commute, I started making them myself.

This latte contains some of my favorite things: chocolate hazelnut spread, peanut butter, honey and soymilk. I call it the Honey Bear. Maybe because I love it so much, it deserved a pet name? Or maybe because chocolate and peanut butter are brown like bears? …who eat honey? I don’t know what I’m saying anymore, but there’s lots of greatness to this drink:

• It packs some protein from soymilk, peanut butter and hazelnuts.
• It’s sweetened naturally with honey, a great match for pb.
• It’s not too heavy, satisfying your sweet tooth without weighing you down.
• It will keep you going with extra espresso and filling protein.

I have been trying to perfect fancy latte drinks for a little while now. My favorite drink changes regularly, but this is the flavor of the week. Recipe after the break. Enjoy!

Honey Bear Latte
Yields 1, just for you!
Special equipment: espresso-maker and milk frother*

Ingredients
2 shots of espresso (prepared via aeropress but I assume any method would work)
1 Tbsp honey
1 1/2 tsp Justin’s Classic Peanut Butter
1 1/2 tsp Askinosie Chocolate Hazelnut Spread**
1/2 cup unsweetened soymilk, steamed (not boiled)

Directions
1. In your mug, combine espresso, honey, peanut butter and chocolate spread. Froth (or whisk) until thoroughly blended.

2. Froth your steamed soymilk and pour over top. Enjoy while warm.

*If you are a coffee drinker and don’t currently own a frother, I highly recommend you nab one. Being able to make café-style drinks in your home is a great treat, and frothers are not expensive. Since we are traveling this month, I purchased this handy compact aerolatte which even has it’s own travel case. Neat!

**Askinosie Chocolate Hazelnut Spread is very dark and bittersweet. If you are replacing it with something sweeter like Nutella, omit or go easy on the honey.