Smoothie Muffins

Yep. You read that correctly. I just made what I'm affectionately referring to as "smoothie muffins." I initially was going to make mango muffins, but before I starting mixing the batter, I failed to check to see if I had ripe mangoes. I did not. Emergency plan: raid freezer. I discovered about a 1/2 cup of frozen mango, 3 giant frozen peach slices and about 10 strawberries. I pureed them, tossed it in the batter, and thought to myself, "What the heck? It's just fruit."

Smoothie Muffins (Makes 12 full-size muffins)
1 c all purpose flour
1 c wheat flour
3 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
3/4 c brown sugar (or honey if you prefer)
1/4 c applesauce (or veg. oil)
1 c almond milk (or regular milk)
1 egg (I used 1 T flaxseed and 3 T water instead)
1 1/2 c of whatever fruit you want

1. Preheat to 400 degrees F.
2. Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, combine sugar, applesauce, milk and egg.
4. Add dry to wet just until combined. Avoid overmixing. Fold in your fruit.
5. Spoon into greased muffin tin or baking cups and bake for around 20 minutes. Test with a toothpick a few times to make sure they're baked through.
I added a crumb topping that I had leftover from another recipe, but it's certainly not necessary.

Wheat Pancakes

Wheat flour is not my favorite substance to work with. Food made with it is generally tough and dense. This weekend's breakfast experiment was to make decent pancakes with wheat flour. Overall they were good. It's hard to compare them to buttermilk pancakes, because those are in a class all their own. But I will definitely make this recipe again.

Adam's pancake with fresh berry syrup:

I opted for apple butter and honey with a side of strawberries:

Whole Wheat Pancakes:
2 c whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt


2 beaten eggs
3 T brown sugar
2 c almond milk
1 T grapeseed oil
2 T nonfat Greek yogurt


Combine top set of ingredients in a large bowl. Combine bottom set of ingredients in a separate medium bowl and mix thoroughly. Add wet to dry. Try not to over-mix; it will be lumpy and you just want everything to be moistened. Cook on preheated griddle/frying pan on low/med heat until bubbles form and edges start to dry. Flip and cook until lightly browned.


I prepared these in grapeseed oil, but I highly recommend coconut oil instead.


Fresh Berry Syrup - from "The Dolce Diet"
4 oz water
1 c strawberries
1 c blueberries
Add water and fruit to small saucepan. Cover on low-medium heat. When fruit softens, reduce heat and mash with spatula.

Green Pear Smoothie

1 pear, cored
1/4 c blueberries
1/4 c apple juice
1/4 c almond milk
1/4 c nonfat Greek yogurt
3 T honey
cinnamon to taste
1 large kale leaf

If you're not used to green smoothies, you may want to add more honey. I could definitely taste the kale since the pear was not overly sweet. It really just depends on your individual taste, as well as how ripe the pear is.

Yes, more smoothies.

1/2 banana
1 mango
8 strawberries
2 T honey
1/4 c Greek yogurt (plain, non-fat)
1/4 c almond milk (or water/apple juice/etc.)
a few ice cubes
Fill to the top with spinach.

This was probably my favorite that I've made thus far. The mango was delicious. I had almost let it get too ripe, and it was extremely sweet.

I probably don't need to include pictures anymore, since pretty much all of them are green...

I've been on a major smoothie kick lately. Here are some of my other recent concoctions.

Dessert Fluff:
1 banana
1/2 avocado
1/4 c plain, nonfat Greek yogurt
1/4 c water
2 T honey
1-2 T cocoa
1 t cinnamon

Strawberry Kale:
1 banana
8-10 strawberries
15 raspberries
1/3 c plain, nonfat Greek yogurt
1/4 c apple juice
3 kale leaves (I removed the largest part of the stem)

Send me any of your favorite recipes!

Spinach Berry Smoothie

Here is this morning's smoothie experiment.

-7 strawberries, capped
-15 raspberries
-25 blackberries (this was probably too many, but I wanted to use the remainder of the box I had)
-1 banana
-handful of spinach leaves
-1/2 c almond milk
-1/4 c plain Greek yogurt

Throw everything in the blender. If you like iced smoothies, toss in some ice cubes. Next time, I will use fewer blackberries because I'm not a huge fan of seeds. This made 2 medium-sized servings. All in all, this was extremely tasty and very filling.

Living Lean

So hubs and I ordered Mike Dolce's book Living Lean. We've both read through the "book" portion, which is about 1/4 of the total. Another 1/4 is recipes. The remaining 1/2 is exercise recommendations and diagrams. We've tried 3 recipes inspired by the book thus far.
1. French Toast using Ezekiel bread
2. Pan-roasted chicken and broccoli
3. Honey glazed salmon
Once we've had some more experience with this, I'll have some more blog posts. Perhaps I'll even have hubs be a guest writer!

Banana Bread

Aside from zucchini bread, banana is my favorite. Today I wanted to share my banana bread recipe with you. I'm in the process of trying to tweak this into a healthier recipe, but it's just so good like it is. (Also, I need a lot of overripe bananas to experiment with, and that's not a common occurrence.)

Without further ado, I give you banana bread a la Aly.

2 c bread flour (you can use all-purpose too)

1 t baking soda

1/4 t salt

1 t cinnamon

1/4 t nutmeg

1/4 t ginger

1/4 t cloves

1/2 t allspice

1 stick butter

1/2 - 3/4 cup packed brown sugar (depending on how sweet you like yours)

2 1/2 c mashed bananas

2 eggs, beaten

1 t vanilla

Preheat your oven to 350 degress F. Spray a 9x5 bread pan with cooking spray, or you can grease it.

Large bowl: combine all your dry ingredients. (Top section of list.)

Medium bowl: Cream together butter and brown sugar. Once that's combined, add bananas, eggs and vanilla. Remember: if you don't have enough banana, throw in some applesauce. I almost always do that anyway because it keeps the bread super moist. If you use sweetened applesauce, I'd recommend only using 1/2 c brown sugar.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry. This goes against everything I was ever taught about baking growing up, but it seems to work best to get all the dry moistened. Stir as little as possible to combine the ingredients - the bread will be tough if you over-mix.

Bake for 60-70 minutes until a toothpick inserted in several spots comes out clean. (Make sure to test more than one place, because you might stick the toothpick into a chunk of banana.) Let cool for 10 minutes, then move to a cooling rack. 

Happy eating!