Strawberry Banana Bites

Dramatic reenactment: every picture on the internet ever

A while back a sensation took the internet by storm. To be fair, it's not all that hard to take the internet by storm. Cats and babies do it on a regular basis. But this happened to catch my eye. People make fake ice cream by blending frozen bananas with other flavorings. According to vegan hipster adherents to the trend, it's totally incredible and it tastes exactly like ice cream, and isn't nature wonderful, and by the way if you're not vegan you're basically a war criminal but worse. According to literally everyone else, it's kind of cool. And it tastes...like bananas. If you're expecting ice cream, don't get your hopes up, but if you like bananas then go for it. You see, the thing is, I do like bananas. But since the ice cream thing is a flop anyway, I figured why not blend it up with something that actually tastes good with bananas? And also why bother blending it all up in to an ice cream shape if it doesn't taste like ice cream? Also, I may not have a blender.

Ingredients:

4 Bananas

1 lb. Strawberries

Some of the more mathematically gifted amongst you may have come to the realization that there's not a whole bunch going on in the ingredient department. That's because there doesn't need to be. Bananas are delicious. So are strawberries. They taste great together. End of story. Except I haven't told you how to make them yet, so more like beginning of story. End of the intro of the story? All I know for sure is that the story begins with bananas. As they ripen, bananas turn from green to yellow, and finally to brown. If you leave them too long, to black. If you leave them way too long, probably back to green again. This is important for us to know because bananas also get sweeter as they ripen, as the starch in them is broken down in to fructose. As you may recall, our recipe doesn't have much in the way of ingredients, so we want to make the ones we have count. This is all a long drawn out way of saying that you should make sure to use ripe, sweet bananas. There shouldn't be any green on them, and you should have some brown spots marring the yellow of your peel. Then wash your strawberries, lovingly chop off their green leafy heads, and throw them in a bowl with your bananas.

So what if I like it when my food tries to high five me?

Take your favorite implement of destruction, be it forks, your bare hands, or miscellaneous, and mash the crap out of your bowl of fruit. It doesn't need to be perfectly smooth, but you shouldn't have any major lumps anywhere. Think of it like jazz. If it's too rough, nobody will be able to appreciate the awesomeness. If it's too smooth it loses all of its character and becomes flat and uninteresting. Got it? Good, now let's never speak of this analogy again. Throw that nonsense in the freezer, and then take it out again after about 45 minutes. Mix it together again, breaking up any clumps and crystallization that may have formed. Then splorp it in to some ice cube trays, or the silicon molds you may have bought during your last adventure that you still aren't sick of. Freeze them until they're solid and then enjoy. They're delicious, fairly healthy, and technically frozen which makes them perfect for absurdly hot days. Speaking of which, it's supposed to be in the mid 90s in this weekend in Chicago. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you let me stay at your place this weekend, I'll totally bring you frozen fruit mush. Chicagoans need not apply. 

Yogurt Muesli

I grabbed this hipster cat picture for the muesli pun, but
it's honestly pretty adorable. 

Breakfast times are serious times. They say it's the most important meal of the day. Who this mysterious "they" are, and why they're so deep in the pockets of the French Toast industry has yet to be uncovered by Wikileaks. But unless you want to hear your friends and coworkers constantly lecture you about how terrible it is to skip breakfast, you'd better give in and start eating it. And making sure that you're eating something at least plausibly healthy, or else you're still in for idiots talking to you about your food choices. Isn't peer pressure fun? The problem here, aside from everything, is that while many breakfast foods are undeniably delicious, none of the good ones seem quick or simple to make. You can't roll out of bed 5 minutes before you have to leave for work and make pancakes, fresh squeezed orange juice, and an omlette. So we're faced with the burden of finding tasty, healthy-ish food that we can just grab and go in the morning. Which brings us to muesli.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Steel Cut Oats
1/4 cup Greek Yogurt
1/4 cup Walnuts
1 TBSP Orange Juice
1/4 tsp Honey
Assorted Berries

The first thing you're going to have to deal with when contemplating muesli is its dumb name. Based on some cursory internet research, there seem to be two schools of thought on how to pronounce it. Thre's team "stupid hipster name for a cat "(Mewsly), and team "describing someone who looks kind of like Bullwinkle" (Moosely). Which of these pronunciations is right? I stopped caring like a week before I even thought about making this. On to the actual food. The goal here is to prep this the night before, so you can just grab it and munch in the morning super quickly. Normally I'm not a fan of this sort of devil's math where you sacrifice free time at night for free time in the morning. But this stuff takes like a minute to put together, so it's actually pretty worth it. Mix your oats, yogurt, honey, and orange juice together in a container with a lid. In another container, crush up your walnuts and toss in some berries. Don't worry about crushing up your walnuts, because it's super easy. Walnuts are the cowards of the nut world, and they tend to crumble at the first sign of trouble, as opposed to better organized nuts such as almonds or pistachios. The point is, take your two containers and shove them in your fridge. This entire process should have taken you about 2 minutes. Then go do whatever it is you do at night. Sleep. Drink the blood of innocent. Whatever. The less I know the better.

Frozen berries make this even faster and
easier. You're welcome.

When you wake up in the morning, and the alarm gives out a warning, and you don't think you'll ever make it on time, you'll be grateful for the 2 minutes of work you put in last night. Because you pretty much did all of the work last night, and it wasn't even much work. Just grab your walnuts and berries, toss them in with your yogurt and oats, and consume. You don't even have to mix them together if you want to just go at it parfait style. Whatever floats your muesli boat. It's pretty simple. It's also pretty tasty, healthy, and technically food. Kind of everything you need to consume to not have to listen to the guy from mail room going on for 25 minutes about the health benefits of chia, or his acai bowls, or whatever other absurd fads that nonsense people with no sense of personal boundaries are into these days. Probably yak's milk mixed with powdered horseradish and chamomile tea. You laugh, but it's only a matter of time before internet hipsters are doing that. Anyhow, enjoy your morningtime food and freedom.

Kalamata salad

Life can be hard. It can just sort of wear you down until you feel trapped in an endless routine, demoralized and dissatisfied. I'm speaking about other people's lives, obviously, because I'm somehow on like my 4th vacation so far this year. And it's only May. It's been kind of a whirlwind of a year, and I'm still not entirely sure how/if I managed to afford it all. But here I am, sitting on a Mediterranean beach, playing guitar, and actively waiting for the other shoe to drop. Eventually this will all come to an end, reality will butt its stupid face into my business, and I'll end up cleaning chimneys or something to retroactively finance my life of raging excess and occasional Airbnb use. All I'll have left will be the memories, the recipes inspired by my travels, and probably cirrhosis of the liver. Good times.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Baby Spinach (the adult spinach leaf has a darker color and a rougher texture, making the infant Spinach the easier prey)
2 Tomatoes
1 smallish Red Onion
1.5 cups pitted Kalamata Olives
2 cloves Garlic
1/3 cup Lemon Juice
1/3 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1.5 tsp Dijon Mustard
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Black Pepper

The first thing you're going to have to do is come to terms with the fact that you're going to eat a salad. Sure, salad is essentially a pile of leaves and other detritus that was probably first eaten as some sort of prank, but it's also allegedly healthy. Eating it, instead of real food, can help you live a longer, healthier life. A long life...full of salad. Yay? Once you've come to terms with this grim reality, we can work on making our salad not suck. Peel your onion and then cut it into quarters. Then thinly sliced those quarters and disdainfully toss them into a bowl. Remove the white core from your tomatoes, then chop them (the tomatoes) in to chunks and add them in to your bowl of disdain. Make sure your Spinach is dry, then throw it in there too, along with your olives. You're pretty much done at this point. Say what you will about salad, but it's super easy to make.

Actual salad for humans

It's time to talk about dressing. Many people who want to eat more salad despite the fact that it's salad will try and disguise it with a ton of sugar and fat. While this is tasty, it kind of ruins the entire point of eating salad in the first place (health concerns and/or masochism), at which point you may as well just eat a burger or some ice cream, because it's got the same nutritional value and will taste much better. So we're going to get our deliciousness from less contradictory sources. Torture lemons until you've got your 1/3 cup of juice. Then combine it with your oil, mustard, salt, pepper, and a tsp of the juice your olives were sitting in. Then choppity chop your garlic into tiny bits and add it in to the party. If you let this dressing sit in the fridge for a day or two it'll get even better, but you can totally use it right away. Just mix the whole thing together, toss it on your salad as needed, and consume. Congratulations! You successfully outwitted nature, and ate something both healthy and tasty. Stupid nature.

Mayonnaise

In lieu of a priest, Egg and Lemon had their close friend Oil
officiate their weird, gross wedding ceremony. 

Mayonnaise gets a bad rap these days. We've spent decades just thinking of it as this weird, kind of flavorless sludge that we buy from the supermarket. I blame the corrupt media, fueled by the ever-more powerful Miracle Whip Lobby (Motto: when life gives you lemons, spend millions of dollars on advertising to try and get people to willfully shove lemons down their throats until either the lemon, or humanity, dies out). The fact of the matter is, back in pre-historic times they didn't have fancy store-bought jars full of over-processed, under-flavored, hyphenate-inducing goop. They just had their wits, and maybe a sharp stick if they were lucky. And now they're all dead. I still say that the store-bought mayo is a bad idea.

Ingredients:

1 Egg Yolk (There are a lot of store bought devices, of varying levels of grossness, that will seperate egg yolks and whites for you. Or you can be a man, and use your hands. Your call.)

1 Cup Oil (I like to go with a relatively neutrally flavored oil, like Corn, or Light Olive. But follow your heart. Your gross, weirdly flavored heart.)

1 TBSP Apple Cider Vinegar

1 tsp Dijon Mustard

1/2 tsp Salt

1/2 a Lemon

This is another one of those recipes that seems like an awesome idea at first. Until you've been whisking a bunch of junk around a bowl for what feels like, at the minimum, 2 presidential terms, and your arm is having serious doubts about whether it wants to move forward with you as its running mate. But it tastes good, so let's get cracking. Take your egg yolk, salt, and mustard, and whisk them together in a bowl until they get a little bit lighter and frothier than they started. Take a second bowl and juice your lemon into it, being careful to keep the seeds from falling in with the juice. Add in your apple cider vinegar, and pick out all of the lemon seeds that brought dishonor upon your family just now. Take half of this mixture, and add it in to the egg mix, whisking like a frenchman. Which is a phrase I invented just now that doesn't really mean anything, but sounds like it should be offensive for some reason. Why are we only adding half of this mixture in? Because we need some liquid to suspend all of the oil we're about to add in, forming an emulsion, along with several emotional scars. But if we add in all of the vinegar and lemon juice, we'd have a super wet mix to start off with. Which would make forming the emulsion with our oil a lot harder. We're already whisking for the duration of one of Kanye West's interviews where he talks about how much of a genius he is for wearing ugly clothes. Don't make this harder on us. Don't be that guy.

Now it's time for the fun part, and by "fun," I mean, "oh god, oh god, why?" Take your egg mix, and start whisking the bejeezus out of it. While you're doing this, start adding your oil in. At first, you want to add it in painfully slowly. Just a couple drops at a time. Add it in too fast and instead of mayonnaise, you'll just end up with oily eggs. Once your emulsion starts to take form a little bit, and the pain in your arm has started damaging your spirit in addition to your body, you can start adding in the oil a little bit quicker, in a thin but constant stream. (Protip: Apparently a measuring cup is absolutely terrible for this job. Especially if you have to hold it while you're beating your mixture, causing large waves of oil to constantly threaten to splorp out into your fledgling mayo, each time giving you new and exciting heart attacks. I've heard squeeze bottles might help with this.) Once your oil is about half done, add in the rest of your vinegar and lemon mix, and then get back to whisking. The hardest part will be the end, but not because your arm hates you, and just wants to die. Well, not just because of that. You'll see your oil coming to an end, and your arm will be aching, and you'll just have the strongest urge to just pour everything that's left in and be done with it. This is the voice of failure talking. Ignore it. 

Fries sold separately. Go find your own. 

Once your oil is finished, you're pretty much done! Except that you've got raw egg in there. And sure, chances are it didn't have any salmonella in it, but do you really want tiny fish swimming around in your blood? Upstream? The fridge will help keep the bacteria from spreading, but to really kill it off you need some room temperature acid. Fortunately, you've got lemon juice and vinegar in your mayo! So, the conventional wisdom says to leave your mayo at room temperature for a minimum of an hour, but some people recommend closer to a day. They move it to the fridge where it'll last for about a week. And it won't last a week, because this stuff is good. Slather it on a taco, make some tuna, potato, or pasta salad, or even just straight-up use it as a condiment on fries and whatnot. Bonus points if you mix in a little sriracha. 

Tomato Sauce

Look at those poor suckers. They have no idea what's about
to happen to them.

There comes a time in every true American's life when you get a great idea from watching TV. This has been the origin story of some astonishing technological advances in computers and medicine, I assume, and it's also how I decided to make some legit tomato sauce. Come to think of it, TV may have also influenced my idea for a new olympic sport. The good news is that this recipe is super easy to make, and delicious. The bad news is that it's vegan-friendly, gluten-free, and doesn't actually require any cooking, so whenever you make it you'll probably get a bad case of the hipsters. If the infestation is allowed to grow unchecked, they'll start following you around asking about your bespoke, gluten-free, vegan, rawfood, sauce, and going on about how you should really try adding kombucha, chia seeds, and ennui to it. Just call Orkin to spray a repellent around and you should be fine. 

Ingredients:

3 Average-Sized tomatoes (If you're unfamiliar with what an average tomato size is, get your time machine out and watch some vaudeville acts around the turn of the 20th century. Or go to a produce store)

28 oz. can Crushed Tomatoes

1/2 an Onion

3 cloves Garlic

1/4 cup fresh chopped Basil

2 TBSP fresh chopped Oregano

1 TBSP Olive Oil

1/2 tsp Salt

1/4 tsp Black Pepper

The first thing you're gonna need to do is prepare your fingers to be mangled. Because this is another time we're bringing out our homicidal friend, the box grater. Offer it a fatted calf to try and appease its fury. Then wash your tomatoes, and grate them into a bowl. Tomatoes are squishy nonsense things, so you're making the grater's job even easier than normal (It's job is to cause you pain). If, like me, through a string of heathen prayers, quick-wittedness, and sheer dumb luck, you managed to not cause yourself serious bodily harm, celebrate in whatever tradition suits you. Then open your can of crushed tomatoes, and splorp them down on top of your fresh tomatoes. Then finely chop your onions and garlic, and throw them in there. 

Best when served to an Italian or Sicilian friend who's
face you can rub it in.

Now it's time to talk about chopping basil. If you want even bits of basil, and don't want to take forever chopping it, your best bet is a chiffonade. Yes, that sounds like a French prank perpetrated on unsuspecting Americans during the second world war, like mimes and escargot, but don't worry. Just stack your smaller basil leaves inside of the larger ones, tightly roll them up into an adoreable tiny basil cigar. Slice your basil stogie into bits and add it, along with the rest of your ingredients, in with your tomato goop. Stir that nonsense together, cover it, and stick it in the fridge for at least an hour to let all of the flavors come together. And that's all there is to it. Just throw that stuff down on some fresh cooked pasta, use it to make lasagna, or use it to make some insane pizza. Because this sauce would make an awesome chicago-style pizza. (pro-tip: that's what we in the using-the-english-language-business call foreshadowing. It may have something to do with a recipe coming up soon). And that's all there is to it! Enjoy making some awesome food with that sauce. Maybe even some pizza.