Banana Granola Breakfast Cookies

I'm not the biggest "breakfast" person. It's funny, because when I was growing up my days were all about breakfast - whether it was greedily eating dry Shredded Wheat and calling it "hay" (I ate - and still eat - all cereal sans milk), sitting down to Sunday morning French toast, pancakes or waffles, or even nuking a bowl of leftover spaghetti with butter and cheese before going off to school. These days, the thought of eating before 11AM or so turns my stomach - I just can't deal with a full meal when I wake up!

That said, I totally get the importance of eating breakfast, especially as a teacher. No way am I going to head to the masses of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and energetic children every day without sustenance. So I made myself a compromise: breakfast cookies. They're a breakfast that I can tuck in my bag and eat while sitting in traffic (or while typing at my desk on the weekends). It's small, portable and buys me a little more time in the morning - plus I pack two of them so that I can enjoy a "second breakfast" at morning break.

My habit seems to be influential on the other staff (and my classmates) too: some of these Banana-Granola cookies wound their way into the bag of a co-worker, the rest went to the staff room and disappeared! They are moist and rich-tasting thanks to a boatload of mashed bananas, with a little crunch from granola and extra interest from dehydrated bananas. Of course, being breakfast, I wanted them to have some semblance of health too, so I opted for a mixture of dark brown sugar, maple syrup, Truvia and Pure Via Turbinado and Stevia Blend for a well rounded but lower-sugar result. Spelt flour amped up the fibre, and a few dashes of spice jazzed things up. 

You can opt to bake them all at once (keep them in the freezer though unless you're feeding an army) or do what I tend to do: make the batter, scoop out portions onto a wax or parchment lined baking sheet and freeze. Transfer them to a ziploc bag and keep in the freezer, then pop out one or two as needed and bake them while your coffee is brewing, you're in the shower, you're watching the morning news show... whatever. Just add two minutes to the bake time and you're ready to go. If you're really pressed for time in the morning, bake them the night before and place them on a plate covered with a napkin. No excuse for missing breakfast when it's sitting right in front of you!

Festive Bulgur Mix

I love my whole grains. Not only are they packed with nutrition, but they have such unique flavour profiles (compared to refined starches) that you can't ignore them on a plate. While there are a good amount of them that take a while to cook thoroughly, I've been able to find a handful of delicious and fast options to keep in the weeknight pantry.

One of those wholegrain staples is bulgur. You've seen it in breads of mine, and may have even eaten it in tabbouleh once or twice - but my favourite way to enjoy the par-cooked cracked wheat is in pilafs or as a base for stir fries. Fluffy and couscous-size, it's a base that can stand up well to intense flavours, especially those from Middle Eastern and African cooking. It's lickety-split to cook too, so it makes a great last minute side. To streamline the whole pilaf process even more, I sometimes mix up a few batches of the dry ingredients on the weekend. That way, the whole process doesn't take any longer than a pre-packaged side dish would and you know you haven't forgotten anything! For this particular mix, I jazzed up the grain with Middle Eastern / Mediterranean herbs and spices, dried fruit, almonds and pumpkin seeds.

 

Not only is it delicious warm (it makes a fabulous vegan meal with a can of chickpeas stirred in), it's more than passable as a room temperature salad (hello potluck staple!). My family has eaten it both ways, and the consensus from the omnivore is that it's best warm as an accompaniment to grilled meat like lamb, beef or chicken skewers. I call it good in any form!

100% Rye Sourdough

I come by my love of bread honestly. Not only does my mom crave slices of a good, hearty loaf (none of that Wonder stuff), but she's a fabulous breadmaker in her own right. She in turn learned at the hip of my grandfather, when the two of them would churn out 4+ loaves a week in order to feed the 5 person family. While the recipe wasn't extravagant (and certainly not expensive), it was good and filling, making fabulous packed lunch sandwiches for many years.

I can only guess where my grandfather honed his art, but family lore suggests it might have to do with an influx of old-world Jewish culture mixed with our family's Scottish heritage. Nobody knows for sure if there is actually Hebrew in our ancestry, but my grandfather, uncle and male cousins on that side of the family all have what we call the "Jewish nose" and even I (the pasty-white redhead) have been asked if I had Jewish roots. Whatever the reason, I always associate the best loaves (homemade or otherwise) with his chewy, robust whole wheats and ryes.

It is the dark, rich rye sourdough that wins my mom's favour when presented with an array at the bakery. I have played with rye flour in the past, but never exclusively used it in a yeast bread since it's low in gluten and makes for dense, dry outcomes. That said, my sourdough starter is fed almost 100% with rye flour, and I knew artisan bakers make pure rye loaves, so why not me? I found a promising recipe on Shipton Mill's website to start from, and added colour with cocoa powder and molasses, tenderness with pineapple juice, flavour with caraway seeds and texture (not to mention extra rye-ness) with rye flakes. Like all sourdoughs, the dough takes a good, long time to rise: 6 hours after the first mix, followed by 8 hours in the fridge and another 3 at room temperature before baking. Once cooled, the loaf is moist, dense but not heavy and definitely a perfect loaf to slice thin and put on a cheese or charcuterie plate. If cheese and cold cuts aren't your thing, thick slabs of this, toasted and smeared with jam, make a fantastic breakfast too! 

Like I try to with most of my breads (and especially sourdoughs), I use weight as my measurement. It solves the issue of settled flour and helps when you're modifying the baker's percentages, basically ensuring consistency in the final dough.

Shared with YeastSpotting

Mongolian Beef Stir Fry

Some nights it seems like there is no time at all to put together a decent dinner at home. I've been there - the clock is ticking and your stomach is grumbling, you're fretting because you haven't been to the store yet so all you have are bits of this and that leftovers and payday is still a few days off, making take-out a no-go. Those days, I turn to my trusty deep saute pan and basically empty the kitchen into a stir-fry: fast, easy and really hard to mess up, especially when you have a few key things in the pantry to rely on.

Obviously, you need some sort of starch to sop up all the juices and sauce from your concoction, and for that I almost exclusively pick a brown Basmati. Not only does it taste out of this world delicious on its own, but the grains stay more or less distinct, fluffy and fragrant (the word 'Basmati' actually means 'queen of fragrance' in Sanskrit). It's also one of the healthiest rices, with the most amino acids and essential nutrients as well as a fairly low Glycemic Index (45). Can you tell I freaking adore this stuff??

For me, veggies are the be-all and end-all of a good stir-fry, so I always try (try, mind you) to keep a bunch of stuff in the fridge. That said, when I'm cooking for one it doesn't always make sense to buy full packages of snow peas, bamboo shoots and the like, so I scope around until I find a frozen mix that looks good. No big deal. 

Then the crowning glory - the sauce. I've written before about my love of San-J's cooking sauces and tamari, not only because they're gluten free but they are consistently delicious! The company was gracious enough to reach out to me at Christmastime with a box of their product, and recently contacted me again to ask if I'd be interested in trying one of their new cooking sauces - Mongolian Sauce. We love Mongolian BBQ here and couldn't wait to give it a taste!

It was a twist of fate that the day the sauce arrived at my door was also a "grill night" at our house. I had originally planned to make a stir-fry with fresh ingredients and raw meat, but the leftover steak presented itself and made me wonder if marinating it overnight would help re-tenderize it, as well as infusing it with the sweet and spicy elements of the sauce. I whisked up a fairly simple blend of both the Mongolian and Szechuan Sauces, some red wine, beef broth, sesame oil and chili flakes, then sliced the cooled steak and popped it in. The next night, I stir-fried the beef with my go-to frozen veggies and poured the marinade overtop to form a sweet and spicy sauce that soaked into the rice, making the whole bowl one of deliciousness. I can't wait to try the sauce on tofu, or even grilled mushroom caps!

San-J is online - visit their website, facebook or twitter page for more info. Canadians can get some awesome coupons for the company's Tamari and Cooking Sauces on The Healthy Shopper site too.

Shared with Gluten Free Friday - turns out Cindy likes San-J too!

Fruity Yoghurt Snickerdoodles

I never had snickerdoodles growing up. I know - that seemingly iconic piece of childhood was totally absent from our cookie jar, in favour of my mom's shortbreads, chocolate chip cookies and banana bread. I do love cinnamon though - give me a chunk of coffee cake or a gooey cinnamon roll and I am one happy camper - so it made sense that one day I would finally get around to making cinnamon-sugar dusted cookies!

At school, everybody's been in "get through to the end of the year" mode (times 10) and I've noticed that more and more guilty-pleasure comfort foods are cropping up in the staff room. Obviously, the rich cakes, pies and other treats are not conducive to reducing the stress levels of anyone wanting to fit in their bathing suit anytime soon, and while I wanted to bring something delicious to add to the mix I didn't want to exacerbate the problem!

I have no idea where my inspiration for yoghurt-based snickerdoodles came from (since I was bad and didn't save the link) but I do know I made a few changes based on what I had at home and the number of cookies I wanted. I also wanted to reduce the sugar a bit - not so much that they didn't qualify as a treat, but enough so that the fruit in the yoghurt could bolster the overall sweetness and the cinnamon could stand on it's own. A touch of Truvia that had been sent to me for review fit the bill nicely and the cookies baked up just how I pictured snickerdooodles would be - puffs of "dirty" dough, fragrant with cinnamon and with a sweetness not like what plain sugar cookies emanate. The dash of oat flour, to me, really made the cookies feel homemade and special, without chunks or flakes of oats getting in the way of sheer cinnamon bliss.