Banana-Chocolate Chip Muffins

Bored one Sunday morning, still suffering from the miserable failure of the Healthy Mug Cake from last night (coming soon!), I decided to make something sort of healthy (but still delicious) to give myself some confidence back. Since The Best Recipe is consistently amazing, I decided to peruse the pages and find something to make. I chose muffins since it was a Sunday morning and my brothers would be ravenous when they got back from their workout.
I apologize in advance for the terrible lighting in these photos. I'm trying to find the ideal lighting for food photography.


Banana-Chocolate Chip Muffins (adapted from The Best Recipe):
Makes 12 large muffins or a heck of a lot of mini muffins
UPDATE: I made mini muffins this weekend. The recipe made 53 muffins using a heaping tablespoon of batter for each muffin. I thought I'd tell you since "a heck of a lot" isn't the most descriptive.

Ingredients:

2-1/2 cup all-purpose flour

Scant 1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 tablespoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

10 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

1 cup packed brown sugar

2 large eggs

1-1/2 cups plain low-fat yogurt (substitute 1 cup greek yogurt and 1/2 cup skim milk if you don't have plain yogurt)

2 large bananas, finely chopped (about 1-1/2 cups)

3/4-1 cup chocolate chips
12 muffin liners or vegetable cooking spray or unsalted butter


Instructions:

Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and preheat to 375 degrees.
Whisk both flours, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.

With an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, roughly 2 minutes.

Why are the worst things for you so good?

Add eggs one at a time, beating well after adding each egg.
Beat in half the flour mixture.

Beat in one-third the yogurt.

Beat remaining dry ingredients and yogurt in two batches each, alternating. (Flour-yogurt-flour-yogurt.)

Fold in banana and chocolate chips.

Spray a 12-cup muffin tin with vegetable cooking spray or coat each with butter or use muffin liners.

Divide batter evenly amongst cups. Bake until golden brown, 25-30 minutes. Allow to cool for about 5 minutes in tins, then remove from tin and serve.

The thing I love about The Best Recipe is that each basic recipe includes a bunch of variations. It also leaves room for your own variations. There wasn't actually a recipe for banana-chocolate chip muffins, but there were ones for banana almond and chocolate pecan, so I combined them. Since I wanted to make these a little healthier, I substituted some whole wheat flour for some of the all-purpose, although they are by no means a health food. However, they are absolutely worth it.
Not only are these delicious, they are by far the prettiest muffins I've ever seen–better even than bakery muffins. They had a rounded top and were a gorgeous golden brown.

Aren't they gorgeous?

I'm gushing about these like they're my children. 

My babies!

The chocolate chips were perfect in the muffins (if you want lots of them, use a cup instead of 3/4 of a cup). The banana is great also, but you can't mash them or they get lost in the wonderful flavor of the rest of the muffin.

Best. Muffins. EVER!

Innovative Leftovers Part 2–Coulis Stir-Fry

When you have a severely depleted fridge, what do you make as a vegetable for dinner? Hint: You have a random bag of shredded carrots, some peas from your garden, two paltry scallions, and a blender half-full of tomato coulis.
What do you do with this mish-mosh of produce? Gnaw on raw scallions? Sit in a corner by yourself and eat a bag of raw carrots? Chug the coulis from the blender? Aside from being completely disgusting, where's the fun in that? No, you have to cook something. And that something is stir-fry.

Coulis Stir-Fry


Ingredients:

1 bag shredded carrots
2-3 scallions

3-4 cups sugar snap or snow peas
Meat of choice (optional)
1/2-1 cup tomato coulis
1-2 tablespoons olive oil, depending on pan size


Procedure:

Chop the scallions into small pieces.

Place pan over medium heat. Pour olive oil into pan and use spatula to coat bottom entirely.

Put vegetables and meat into pan and stir with spatula. Stir periodically until cooked, roughly 5 minutes.

Scoop stir-fry into bowl and pour coulis on top.

Though the coulis wasn't great on chicken, it was fantastic on stir-fry! It coated the vegetables nicely and enhanced them with its tomato flavor. The vinegar definitely wasn't as noticeable as it was on the chicken. Also, the stir-fry was so pretty! The colors were so bright and happy-looking.

See? Look at those peas. They're smiling.

This is a perfect summer dish!

Simple Sauces Part 2–Raita

This is the second in a series of quick and easy sauces to jazz up any dish.

I had about a half-tub of leftover yogurt from the Bell Pepper Harissa Soup. Since we were having spicy sausages for dinner, I decided to make a nice yogurt sauce that I could douse my sausage in to hopefully prevent it from burning a hole in the roof of my mouth and causing irreparable damage to my larynx as it blazes a fiery trail down my esophagus.
So.
I consulted one of my favorite cookbooks, The Joy of Cooking. It has two recipes for raita, which is an Indian yogurt sauce specifically for spicy meats. Perfect! I chose the fruit one, mostly because we didn't have any of the stuff for the other one and conveniently had everything for this one. (The other is a cucumber/mint sauce.) It was actually good that I didn't have a choice, because they both sounded good–and they're both really easy to make.


Fruit Raita

Ingredients:


1 ripe banana, peach, or nectarine, finely chopped, or 1/2 cup fresh pineapple chunks
1 cup yogurt or 1/2 cup yogurt and 1/2 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons chopped almonds or macadamia nuts

1 tablespoon golden raisins (optional)
Up to 4 tablespoons sugar or honey, depending on fruit
Pinch of ground nutmeg or ground cardamom


Procedure:


Chunky: Put fruit, yogurt, nuts, and raisins in bowl and stir. Add honey/sugar and spice to taste and stir to combine.

Honey

Smooth: Put fruit, yogurt, honey, and nuts in a blender and blend until smooth. Add honey and spice to taste and blend a little more.

Please accept this picture of an adorable puppy as my apology for there not being pictures of the smooth sauce.

Though I don't mind chunky sauces, I created a "Smooth Sauce" approach for those who do. I wouldn't recommend using raisins for a smooth sauce, though, because I don't know how well those would blend.
I really like this sauce. It cut down on my sausage's heat nicely.

Thankfully, it did not burn a fiery hole down my esophagus.

Though some might say that it's just yogurt with fruit chunks, I disagree. It has the consistency of yogurt, but it tastes like more than a sum of its parts. The fruit and honey make it a sweet, balanced sauce perfect for hot dishes. Also, it's hugely versatile. By my calculations, there are over 192 versions of this sauce that can be made just by using peach and macadamia nuts instead of almonds and nectarines and simple switches like that. And that doesn't factor in the veggie version at all!

I should have a raita party–traditional Indian cuisine with a bunch of tiny things of raita. Can anyone loan me some bowls?

Bell Pepper Yogurt Harissa Soup

So a couple of days ago, I was looking through Martha Stewart Living and I found this soup recipe. Mom said I could make it for dinner this week, and last night was the night! It's soup-er easy (sorry, couldn't resist) and takes less than 15 minutes to prepare. Since it has to chill for at least an hour, it's perfect to prepare earlier in the day if you're super busy (See? I can abstain from making bad puns.)

Bell Pepper Yogurt Harissa Soup


Ingredients:
3 yellow bell peppers
2 teaspoons harissa
2 cups low-fat plain yogurt (I used Whole Foods Organic Nonfat Plain Yogurt)
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt

Preparation:

Chop peppers into quarters and slice out seeds. Cut quarters into large chunks.

This was very hard to photograph and involved me precariously balancing a knife embedded in the peppers on the edge of the counter and praying it wouldn't fall.

Dump everything in a blender and pureé until smooth.

Not all the peppers fit in the blender. The ones on the cutting board were very relieved until I made them the second batch.

Chill for at least an hour in the fridge or for 15 minutes in the freezer if you're pressed for time.

This soup is really good! For me, it was a tad spicy, but I still enjoyed it. My family all liked it (although I wasn't present when they tried it, so they might have just been saying that...)

Actually, never mind. My dad was raving about it; he definitely liked it. The texture never got completely smooth because the blender couldn't get the little tiny bits of pepper and stuff in the harissa (which is a North African chili sauce, by the way. I didn't know what it was either.)

I apologize for the terrible quality of this picture. I shrunk it so you wouldn't have to look at its dreadfulness as much.

If you're not a big fan of spice, I would recommend reducing the harissa to 1-1/2 teaspoons. If you want a slightly creamier soup, use low-fat yogurt like the recipe calls for. I was racing through Whole Foods trying to get these ingredients and everything else on the shopping list based on a glance at the Martha Stewart Living on the newsstand. I'm just lucky I didn't grab chili peppers instead of bell.

These aren't bell peppers.

These definitely aren't bell peppers.