For this recipe, you’ll need a spaghetti squash, some sliced mushrooms, onions, garlic, jarred (or homemade) spaghetti sauce, chickpeas, and ricotta cheese.

First, we’ll slice the squash in half and remove the seeds and "goo" (that’s a scientific cooking term) in the middle.  Don’t toss those seeds, though.  You can bake them later for a tasty snack.

Place the squash halves face down on a greased cookie sheet and bake for about 30 – 40 minutes (depending on how heavy your squash is).

While the squash bakes, sauté some onions and garlic.  Then, add some mushrooms and cook them down.

When the squash is done, use a fork to pull the flesh off of the shell.  The spaghetti squash will string out just like… well, spaghetti.  Put this in a big pan.

Mix the squash with the mushrooms, chickpeas, sauce and ricotta cheese.

Then, you simply serve and enjoy.

I’ve made this dish quite a few times.  It’s relatively quick, easy and very healthy.  It also makes quite a bit.  One spaghetti squash can last make enough to last us for two or three dinners.

Yes, you read that last one right.  Using only bananas and one other ingredient, you can make ice cream!  That other ingredient isn’t even milk.

First, let’s start with the bananas.

Peel and slice the bananas.  Stick them into ziploc bags and put them into the freezer.  I usually put about 1 to 2 bananas per bag.  Allow them to freeze for awhile.  This might take a couple of hours, but you could also just put bananas in as you have them until you’ve collected enough.

Once you have quite a few bananas, you can make the ice cream.  Take out your bananas and a jar of Peanut Butter & Co’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter.

First, put the bananas in your blender.

I usually work in batches of 2 bananas.  I made a 4 banana batch once and it overwhelmed my poor blender.  With the bananas in, turn the blender on.  After awhile, the bananas will turn crumbly.  You might have to stop a few times to move bananas off the blender’s sides and towards the middle.

Finally, the whole thing will take on a creamy, almost soft-serve texture.

At this point, toss in the dark chocolate peanut butter.  One tablespoon per banana.

Turn the blender back on and puree the mixture together.

You now have soft serve dark chocolate peanut butter banana ice cream!  If you want your ice cream more like hard ice cream, just put it in a container in the freezer for about 3 hours.

There you go.  Hard dark chocolate peanut butter ice cream!

Given that this is only bananas and peanut butter, it’s probably healthy, right?  Well, I came up with this little nutritional chart to the right.  As you can see,

1 banana’s worth of the ice cream is under 200 calories, has only 7 grams of fat, and has 4 grams of fiber.  Plus, it has 35% of your daily requirement of B6 and 20% of your daily requirement of Vitamin C.  Let’s see plain ice cream do this!

Of course, it could be the healthiest ice cream in the world, but it wouldn’t matter if it tasted horrible.  Luckily, it tastes great.  I gave it to my boys and they loved it.  I toyed with hiding the secret, non-dairy aspect of the ice cream from them, but decided to let them in on the secret.  They still begged for bowls of it every night.  They even tried asking for it for breakfast.

“After all”, NHL reasoned, "it’s peanut butter and bananas.  It’s healthy!”

I’ve got to admit that I seriously entertained the notion of breakfast ice cream.  Sadly, for the kids, I eventually turned them down.  Still, I don’t mind giving them a bowl or two for dessert and they don’t mind gobbling it up.

First, I collected my ingredients: apples, sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, and salt.

Next, I peeled and sliced the apples.

After this, I added the sugar, salt, cinnamon, and lemon juice.

After mixing, I had my pie filling.

My pie crust had been defrosting during this, so I put the apples into the shell and topped it with another defrosted crust.

It didn’t look the best, but I knew that looks only matter so much.  I made a few slits on the top and into the oven it went.  Before long, the pie was done.  I was actually surprised at how good it looked.

Our mouths were watering.  Just look at that delicious crust.

After the pie cooled, I sliced into it and… disaster!  The apples had released their juices, flooded the pie, and soaked the bottom crust.

Taking the first slice out, the slice fell apart.

Obviously, I needed some kind of thickening agent in the filling.  Something to bind or thicken the juices so they didn’t just flood the pie.  The pie tasted terrific, don’t get me wrong, but next time I try this, I’ll tweak the recipe a bit to improve the results.  And, with over 15 pounds of apples left, I will definitely have the chance to try this again.

Have you ever made an apple pie?  How did you avoid a pie flood?

I’ve already broken off some sprigs and munched on the leaves.  NHL and I both loves doing this.  The taste is incredibly minty.  It doesn’t hurt the plant either as it just grows more faster than we can munch them.  We even gave a few sprigs to B’s parents and kept them alive in a cup of water for days.  Those peppermint pieces might just be appropriate for planting in a pot soon.

We’ve grown peppermint before.  A couple of years back, it was one of our only successful plants.  I used it’s leaves in hot water to make peppermint tea and even tried my hand at drying them (unsuccessfully).  I brought the pot into our porch during the cold winter months to try to save it for next year, but the cold must have been too much for the poor little thing.  It never did grow again.

This year, I have plenty of time to consider winter season options.  Until then, though, I need to consider what I should do with our plethora of peppermint leaves.  Most of the recipes I’ve found online call for peppermint candies or peppermint oil.  Never for the leaves themselves.  Perhaps I should puree them and mix them into brownies or into fudge.  Or add to our watermelon smoothies for a minty touch.  Or maybe I should break off a bunch of stems, grow them indoors in small pots and hand them out as gifts.

What would you do with a lot of peppermint leaves?  (And, if you live locally, do you want any?  I’ve got plenty!)

Don’t forget to enter my Outback Steakhouse $45 gift certificate giveaway!

For dessert after one of my grilling adventures, I had purchased a small watermelon.  As it happened, I decided against slicing it.  It sat on the counter for awhile until I sliced it up.  At that point, I figured that it wouldn’t a long (refrigerator) shelf life so I searched for some watermelon smoothie recipes.  I found this Watermelon Blueberry Smoothie recipe.

Today, after dinner, I decided to whip up some smoothies. 

Doubling the recipe, assisted by JSL and so excited that I forgot to take photos of the process (yes, really!), I put in the watermelon, honey, lemon juice and frozen blueberries into the blender.  After pureeing, I fought off JSL who couldn’t wait for smoothies.

We split the entire double-recipe batch among the four of us and drank up.  The verdict was unanimous: Delicious!  NHL and JSL both asked for seconds (thirds in NHL’s case) and drank until nothing was left.  This is definitely something we’ll be making again.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you make smoothies?  If so, what’s your favorite smoothie to make?

Don’t forget to enter my Kung Fu Panda/General Mills gift pack giveaway or B’s Dove Men + Care giveaway.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #91

For on-the-grill photos, see Grill Time and I’m Grilling Hidden Mickey Pineapples.

Don’t forget to enter my Dinosaur Train giveaway.  You could win Dino Poop and Hatchers.

Just as we were deciding to give up, I gave it one more try and success!

Before long, we had hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner.  We only had hot dog buns, so we split the burgers in half and put them on the hot dog rolls.

NHL, B and I each ate two hot dogs and one hamburger.  JSL ate one… hot dog bun.  (He’s extremely picky and barely tasted the hot dogs or burgers.)

With this initial success under my belt, I want to do two things.  First of all, I want to buy a chimney starter.  This should make starting the coals a lot easier.  Secondly, I want to try some other things on the grill.  Turkey burgers and chicken breasts are a sure thing.

Another possibility is salami.  My father used to slice salami, grill it and then serve it atop rye bread.  Delicious!

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you have/use a grill?  What do you grill on it? 

Don’t forget to enter my Dinosaur Train giveaway.  You could win Dino Poop and Hatchers.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #89

With spring here, I decided that we should grill.  I remembered that the instructions had said to heat the grill for one hour prior to first use.  Unfortunately, this meant that I couldn’t use the grill during the week.  (Waiting an hour and *then* cooking time seemed excessive.)  Weekends were perfect, but it seemed like every day brought rain.  No way was I going to be standing over the grill with an umbrella!

Finally, this past Sunday, we had nice weather.  B went to the store to get some hot dogs and hamburgers.  When she got back, I went out, put some charcoal in the grill and tried to light it.  Sadly, the wind quickly put out any flame I lit.  Undaunted, I recalled a trick about using newspaper.  So I got a single sheet of newspaper, arranged it among the charcoal and lit the paper.

Sure enough, I got a nice, big flame.  I also got pieces of paper shooting off.  Too late, I noticed some vines (waiting to be bagged) that had potential for catching on fire.  The hose was close, but not on.  Fail #1.  Luckily, nothing caught on fire, but lesson learned.  Next time, I’ll turn the hose on before I light the grill to cut down on any fire extinguishing delay.

The next fail came soon after.  I had the grill all ready now and going nicely.  I began to picture the hamburgers and hot dogs on there cooking away with me flipping them using… uh oh.  Where were my utensils.  During the winter, we put the utensils away.  For the life of us, though, we couldn’t remember where.  Taking turns (as we weren’t comfortable leaving the grill unattended), we looked and looked to no avail.  The utensils *are* in our house.  Somewhere.  But “somewhere” doesn’t help me flip burgers.  Fail #2.

It was too late to go out and buy new utensils, so I let the grill burn for the hour, snuffed the flames and put the grill away (after it cooled down).  The next day, I looked into some new utensils.  On the way home, I bought a new spatula, tongs, and grill brush from Lowe’s.  Tomorrow’s weather is looking good so here’s hoping that My First Grilling Take Two is more successful than Take One was.

Don’t forget to enter my Dinosaur Train giveaway.  You could win Dino Poop and Hatchers.

This time, instead of a bundt cake, I decided to make cupcakes.  As with the Apple Carmel mix, I was surprised by the filling.   It wasn’t just powdered chocolate.  It had chocolate chips and chunks inside as well!

During my cooking, I acquired a little helper.  Here’s JSL stirring the filling.

When it was all mixed, it took a lot of willpower to not scarf down the filling right then and there.  Maybe they should include 2 packets of filling in each box.  One to put in the cake and one to eat immediately!

Next, we mixed up the cake batter itself.

The cake mix went into the cupcake wrappers and then the filling gets placed on top.

Here’s the worst part… The waiting.

Soon enough, though, the cupcakes were done.  Notice how the cupcake rises around the filling, leaving most of it inside the cupcake.

Next, for the frosting.  Like the vanilla frosting before, this was simple.  Remove the bottle’s cap, microwave the bottle for 30 seconds, put the cap back on, and frost.

I’ll admit, my frosting method was haphazard, but I still think these look like some nice cupcakes.

Want to take a peak inside?  Here it is in all its ooey gooey chocolatey glory.

Of course, cupcakes can look like the most delicious things in the world, but if the taste doesn’t back it up, the appearance is worth nothing.  The taste most certainly backs up the appearance.  B wasn’t a fan of the filling, but then again she’s not a chocolate fanatic like my boys and I am.  They devoured the cupcakes they were given and NHL asked for more.

You might wonder why there’s no photo of NHL eating his cupcake.  That would be because in the time it took me to put down JSL’s cupcake, seat JSL, and grab a cupcake for myself, NHL had finished his cupcake.  I’d say that’s a thumbs up from NHL.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, the remaining cupcakes are calling me and I must try to resist their siren’s call.

Disclaimer: This post was written for Family Review Network & Duncan Hines who provided the complimentary product for review in exchange for my honest opinions.