I love banana bread. Any kind – you can make it “healthier” or not, I always enjoy a hearty slice of sweet banana bread. Chocolate chips, nuts, applesauce, carob, lots of spices, berries mixed in, you name it, I’ll eat it! This week, my brother got a hold of a ton of bananas (literally) and he made the most delicious banana bread ever. He gave me some bananas, I asked for the recipe, and I was shocked to find out that it was incredibly simple. Too simple, it seemed. But delicious. So, I made it exactly as he instructed, except I made two batches – one in a loaf pan and one batch into muffins. They were scrumptious both ways. Consider this recipe tested and perfected and so simple and quick to whip up, you will want to make it all the time. Except somehow you’ll have to have so many bananas you turn yellow. I think I have eaten enough, except now I want more, but magically we have eaten all the bananas he conjured up! Jesse, go find more!

Banana Bread Ingredients:
4 ripe bananas
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup room-temperature margarine (I used Soy-Free Earth Balance)
2 cups white flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
sprinkle of dried coconut or sliced almonds, for topping

Preheat your oven to 350º F.

Mash bananas in a bowl using a potato masher or fork. You want to create as few lumps as possible. Beat in the sugar and margarine, till you have a smooth consistency. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix into the wet ingredients.

Pour into a greased loaf pan, or lined muffin tins. Sprinkle dried coconut, sliced almonds, or a pinch of sugar over batter to give a crunchy topping.

Bake muffins for 25-30 minutes.
Bake loaf for 60-70 minutes.
*Stick a toothpick into the center and it should come out nearly clean (a few crumbs are okay because it is best a bit moist).

For some people, school has started already, and this granola would be a perfect way to start your kids’ mornings or pack in a baggie for a mid-day snack. Monday is the first day for my school district, so tomorrow I will have 24 eight year olds in my classroom and I’m hoping that starting my day with a bowl of this hearty granola will help me keep them at rapt attention and create a strong learning environment from the get-go!

Granola Ingredients:

4 cups rolled oatmeal flakes (use gluten-free oats if you want)
1 cup uncooked quinoa, rinsed well
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1/2 cup sliced or slivered almonds
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup unsweetened fruit juice – I used orange
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup brown rice syrup
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 cup large flaked unsweetened dried coconut

Preheat the oven to 300º F. Mix the oatmeal, quinoa, spices, and nuts together, then add the vanilla, juice, oil, and sweeteners. Toss well to moisten evenly, then toast on a sheet pan until browned, about 30 minutes, stirring a few times. Add the raisins and coconut once the cereal is cooked.

Spring is here! It makes me simultaneously incredibly joyful and a little bit sad. It makes it really difficult to study, teach, and sit in class while it is warm and sunny outside…So I plan on making this post quite short in my effort to stay on the computer and inside as little as possible when I don’t have to.

Last week, we had gorgeous weather, and this week it’s looking and feeling beautiful again. However, last Friday was colder, grayer, and rainier, and of course this was the morning that I had off to play. My friend Zoe had fortuitously given me some ripe bananas the evening before, and so, instead of playing, I baked this spicy, moist, fragrant, and ultimately overall delicious Banana Bread. I made two variations; one with chocolate chips, and one without. Both loaves had pecans mixed in. Feel free to throw in whatever other add-ins you prefer. You can also use all agave or all maple syrup instead of the combination I used; just think about what flavors you want to bring out. I brought half a loaf of each variation to my afternoon class, with the intention of slicing and freezing the rest to keep for a future treat. Instead, I (and friends) ate it all within two days! Since there is no refined sugar (except in the chocolate chips) and no oil, it was a delightfully healthy study-break snack. I wish I could keep enjoying it, but alas, it is all gone. Anyone have bruised bananas that they want to gift to me so I can bake more?

Banana Bread Ingredients (recipe for one loaf):

3 ripe bananas
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/3 cup agave
1/3 cup maple syrup
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp. ground cloves
1/8 tsp. ground nutmeg
3/4 cup chopped pecans + some for topping
3/4 cup chocolate chips

Preheat your oven to preheated 350°F. Grease and flour a loaf pan.

In a medium sized bowl, mash bananas with Agave nectar, maple syrup, applesauce and vanilla until combined and creamy.

In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Add the wet to dry. Sprinkle in nuts and/or chocolate chips, and stir batter until just mixed.

Pour batter into loaf pan and bake for one hour.

And, let’s just notice that these muffins are purely agave- and fruit-sweetened, so they’re 110% healthy, right? I can eat them all day long?

Tropical Muffin Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. egg replacer
3/4 cup orange juice
1 cup water (carbonated water will make your muffins rise a bit more than regular tap water)
1/4 cup agave
1 1/2 Tblsp. finely grated orange zest
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup diced pure pineapple
1/2 cup fresh blueberries

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a muffin tin or use cupcake papers to line the tin.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and whisk.

In a separate bowl, dissolve the egg replacer into the orange juice, then add the water, agave, orange zest, and oil, and mix until smooth. Combine the wet ingredients with the flour mixture. Fold in the coconut, pineapple, and blueberries.

Pour the batter into the muffin tin almost to the top and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Set aside to cool.

I know it’s a Hallmark Holiday, but I always love to celebrate it with lots of pink and hearts. All the love floating around just makes me smile

Right now, I’m student teaching in a third grade class, and the students were so thrilled about the holiday – their excitement was contageous! My Cooperating Teacher has really set up a lovely community in the classroom, where the students feel comfortable with each other and with her; the Principal even commented on Friday that the class is just like a family, where there is trust and love and safety – and where the students are so close that they want to celebrate holidays exorbitantly together! These eight and nine year olds didn’t just bring in store-bought cards for their friends for Valentine’s Day, in fact, many of them brought goody bags filled with candy and chocolate and sweet notes for every single student in the whole class! One of our tables was literally covered, piled high with pink boxes of chocolate and red-wrapped chocolate roses, and one student even gave me a foot-long Valentine’s pen! It’s pretty incredible and I plan on treasuring it for a long time. It was hard to get any academic work done on such a celebratory day!

My students inspired me and I stayed up way too late on Thursday night making them all collaged cards and I had so much fun that I ended up making cards for all my friends…And then on Friday evening I had a crafts night with my girlfriends and made more V-day cards…And Saturday I spent the evening baking these delicious Banana Blueberry Muffins with my friend Talia and of course I had to put them in the festive paper liners that my mom bought me as a surprise! Aren’t they cute? Thanks, Mom!

Talia and I are not eating sugar, and she’s currently not eating wheat, so we did a lot of experimenting and adapting, and came up with this muffin recipe using spelt flour and date sugar. We were really into how delicious the batter was, and then how tasty the muffins were after they were baked, but we were a little concerned that they might not pass the test for “normal people” who eat white flour and white sugar all the time. We asked some friends to taste them, and they said they were good! So, this recipe is a great “heart healthy” (for Valentine’s Day as well as your real beating human heart) breakfast muffin, and with all the healthy additions it is certainly a great snack and was approved by all! However, if you don’t have those specialized ingredients on hand, and don’t have the same dietary concerns, then you can easily use white sugar instead of date sugar, and use white (or whole wheat) flour instead of the spelt. You could even make this recipe into a quick-bread, which would be delicious, and you can add in nuts or chocolate chips if you want!

Banana Blueberry Spelt Muffin Ingredients:
Makes 12 regular sized muffins, or 24 mini-muffins

2 cups whole spelt flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup date sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
2 ripe bananas, mashed
2 Tblsp. ground flax seed
3/4 cup water
1 cup unsweetened almond milk (or any non-dairy milk)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Lightly grease your muffin tins, or line with paper liners.
In a medium-sized bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together.
In a large bowl, beat the date sugar and oil together, then add the mashed bananas. Stir in the flax. Add the water, non-dairy milk, and vanilla, and mix thoroughly.
Add the flour mixture and stir until all ingredients are just combined.
Gently fold in your blueberries last.
Fill each muffin tin 3/4 full with batter. Bake regular sized muffins for 20-25 minutes, and mini-muffins only about 15 minutes. You’ll know they’re done when they begin to brown on top and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Those were the only requests made by my friend Rachel for her birthday cake. Actually, she suggested a loaf-type-dessert, but I thought that since it was her birthday after all, she should have something that more closely resembled a cake! I’ve always loved this recipe, which originated from The Candle Cafe Cookbook, and is for their Lemon-Poppyseed Muffins. However, as I made it this time with my baking buddy Julie, I took out the cane sugar (substituting date sugar instead), added extra lemon zest, and doubled the whole recipe to fit into a large bundt cake pan. I’ve never baked with date sugar before, and I wasn’t sure exactly how it would react in a cake – the results were fabulous. I barely noticed a difference from how the original recipe tastes, except for a slightly “darker” flavor, a little bit like I had added a touch of molasses. It’s nice to know that you can substitute a totally natural sweetener for the highly processed white cane sugar that is in so many baked goods, making them a little more nutritious as well as ethically healthy (i.e.: animal-friendly).

Personally, I loved this cake as it was (and I love it so dearly in muffin form too!), with tons of crunchy poppy seeds in every single bite, but I was told that it would be extra delicious with a lemon glaze drizzled over. I would do this right after taking the cake out of the oven, and as the cake cools it will create a crispy crunchy sweet top. …And after writing this post and looking at my pictures again, I’m wishing I had an extra slice leftover to nosh on right now!

Lemon-Poppy Seed Muffins Ingredients:
Makes 12 muffins (double this recipe if you’d like to make a bundt cake)

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (or a combination of 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour and 1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour)
1/4 cup date sugar (you can easily substitute 1/4 cup of cane sugar, if you want, and you will be back at the original recipe!)
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. sea salt (fine grained)
1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine, slightly melted
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup almond milk (or your favorite non-dairy milk)
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/4 cup poppy seeds
3 tsp. grated lemon zest

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a muffin tin, line tins with cupcake papers, or grease and flour a bundt pan.

Sift the flours, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into a large mixing bowl and whisk to mix. In a separate bowl, whisk together the margarine, maple syrup, almond milk, and lemon juice until foamy. Pour the wet ingredients into the flour mixture and mix until the batter is smooth. Fold in the poppy seeds and lemon zest.

Pour the batter into the muffin tins or bundt pan, dividing evenly and spreading flat across the top. Bake on a center rack of the oven for 20-25 minutes for muffins, or 55 minutes for a cake – make sure to do a toothpick test by sticking a toothpick into the center, and if it comes out clean you can take the pan out of the oven. The muffins are best served while warm, but if you choose to make the cake then leave it to cool in the pan for at least 30 minutes before extracting it. Take your cake out of the pan and let cool completely before eating.

You must be wondering, the title of this post has nothing to do with apples or soups, so will I get to the point yet? Truthfully, this post is about the muffins I made last week. I had a close family friend and her son over for brunch (it was actually on Christmas Eve morning, has it really been that long?), and I wanted to surprise them with a tasty treat to follow our bagels. It needed to be both adult- and kid-friendly, and have a seasonal twist so that it would feel appropriate for the holiday. I was inspired by Isa’s Gingerbread Flax Muffins on The Post Punk Kitchen Blog, and whipped them up that morning. They were easy and scrumptious. The only changes I made to Isa’s recipe were to add about a tablespoon of freshly grated ginger and a sprinkling of some diced candied ginger on top. I also put a pinch of coarse sugar on top of each muffin to give it a crunchy outside. Soft and moist in the middle, with a healthy dose of gingerbread spices, this muffin pleased everyone’s palettes and even had 3 year old Dylan coming back for seconds, thirds, and tastes of a fourth!

In my Kindergarten student teaching placement, we have been studying corn as a way to address the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. It is a complicated issue to talk about in a classroom, as there are clearly multiple perspectives to cover and so many politics to maneuver. The inaccurate mythology and historical omissions can be confusing and damaging to teach, especially when you get into the denser and more confrontational issues surrounding genocide and land theft. As an educator working for social justice, how do you make sure you cover the valuable positive and big ideas of gratitude, fairness, equality, resistance, and liberation without miscommunicating the true facts? I’ve always felt trapped in how I would like to cover this material – and have often found that it is much easier to just avoid talking about it altogether in the classroom. However, Kindergartners get so excited about holidays that you have to incorporate it somehow into the curriculum.

I really like the critical way my cooperating teacher thinks about these issues, and her solution this year has been to teach the students all about corn. She can teach them about the Native Americans’ history growing and eating corn in different forms, and about how the Pilgrims interacted with the Native Americans and their land when they arrived in the “new world”. We have had class discussions about how the Native Americans lived and how that contrasted with the lifestyle that the Pilgrims were used to, and how both were very different from how our students live today. We have talked about what it would feel like if someone moved into your backyard, and had the kids think about how they would react to this. We shared about the communities and customs that both groups of people had, and the reasons why the Pilgrims were leaving Europe. We framed these conversations around the kinds of foods the two groups of people were used to eating, tying in our larger theme of corn. My cooperating teacher has brought in many different examples of corn for the students to study as Scientists with huge magnifying glasses – we’ve looked at dried “Indian Corn” in beautiful shades of purple, yellow, and red; baby corns in a jar; dried corn kernels; cornmeal; canned corn; and hominy. We’ve had them taste different kinds of corn-foods, like corn chips, corn nuts, popcorn, and even candy made with corn syrup. Yesterday, I woke up obscenely early for no good reason, and decided what would make me feel better about this lack of sleep was to bake something for my class. So, out came the baking pans and on went the oven (a perfect way to warm up my chilly house!). I quickly whipped up a batch of Cornmeal Muffins that I could give the students, who would then get to taste the corn in a new way.

I brought the muffins in to the classroom, and while they were not overwhelmingly popular with the five year olds, they received good reviews from the adults who tried them before and after the sharing event. I wasn’t sure what reaction to expect from my students, since kids these days eat lots of sugar and Cornmeal Muffins aren’t particularly sweet, but I really wanted them to be able to feel the slightly crunchy texture of the cornmeal in the muffin and the softer sweeter fresh kernels of corn mixed in. In the end, some of the children devoured the muffins, some did not, and I of course felt okay about that. I think this recipe is quite delicious, but perhaps not the most kid-friendly one that I could have picked! Perhaps they would have enjoyed them more with jam spread on top, or with more sugar added to the batter. The muffins were moist and heavy, as a cornmeal muffin should be. The top was crispy and the color was a natural bright yellow from all the corn. I recommend it, even if my students did not!

Cornmeal Muffins – lightly adapted from The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

Ingredients:
1/2 cup coarse yellow cornmeal
1 tsp. salt, divided
1 cup almond milk
1 1/2 tsp. Ener-G Egg Replacer (equivalent of 1 egg – you can also use 1 Tblsp. ground flax seed)
1 Tblsp. warm water (+ 1 more Tblsp. of water if you use flax seeds…)
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 cup granulated sugar + some for sprinkling on top
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/3 cup Earth Balance or other non-dairy margarine, melted and cooled
1 cup canned whole corn kernels

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Lightly grease or line your muffin tins.
Soak the cornmeal and 1/2 teaspoon of the salt in the milk for about 15 minutes, while you prepare your other ingredients.
Meanwhile, whip the egg replacer (or flax seed) with the water in the blender, until thick and creamy.
In a medium-sized bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and the remaining 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
In a small bowl, stir together the almond milk/cornmeal mixture, melted margarine, and egg replacer mixture until combined. Add to the dry ingredients, and stir just until blended. Add the corn kernels and stir to combine. Do not overmix.
Let the batter sit for 10 minutes before spooning into the prepared muffin tins, filling each cup about 3/4 full.
Sprinkle a pinch of sugar on top of each muffin (this will give it a nice crispy top, and add a little touch of sweetness).
Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Cool in the tins for 5 minutes, then remove to cool on a wire rack.

This Persimmon Granola is perfect paired with almond milk for a yummy breakfast, but it also is tasty plain as a snack, and I’m sure it would be good with vanilla ice cream as a crunchy topping.

You can make this granola with any mix of nuts, spices, and dried fruits that you have on hand. I think the persimmons give it a wonderful Fall flavor and color, but raisins or dates would be delicious as well. You can add brown sugar, agave, or honey if you want added sweetness, but I am enjoying the subtle sweetness of the brown rice syrup on it’s own; it really makes the persimmon’s natural sweet taste stand out. And the spices of course are flexible – add whatever you like best. My house was filled with great smells after baking this!

Ingredients:

5 cups oats
2 cups raw almonds, coarsely chopped
1 cup raw walnuts, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup shredded & unsweetened dried coconut
1 Tblsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cloves
1/4 tsp. cardamom
1/2 tsp. salt

1 cup brown rice syrup
1 cup unsweetened applesauce
2 Tblsp. vegetable oil

2 cups chopped dried persimmons (it is easy to cut them with scissors into bite-sized pieces).

Preheat your oven to 300F. Cover two jelly-roll pans (cookie sheets with sides) with aluminum foil (this will make clean-up easier).
In a very large bowl, mix together the oats, almonds, walnuts, coconut, spices, and salt.
In a small saucepan, heat the applesauce, brown rice syrup, and oil. Stir constantly, till they are smooth.
Mix the heated liquid mixture into the dry ingredients until thoroughly combined, then divide and spread the mixture evenly on your prepared pans.
Bake the granola for about 40 minutes, stirring every ten minutes, until the granola is a deep golden brown color.
Remove the pans from the oven, and cool completely.
Stir your chopped dried persimmons into the granola after it is cool.
Store the granola in a large, airtight container.