Kitchen DOMINATION

I am having some serious cooking/baking triumphs this weekend, I'm on a streak!

First up I made this Cake Batter shake courtesy of Oh She Glows. I'm been very doubtful of the "frozen banana soft serve ice cream" stuff. I figured it was nonsense, that it would be healthy food poorly masquerading itself as ice cream. Which is just mean. But yesterday I had 2 bananas going bad so I figured, "why not?" If it turns out good then I have a whole new breakfast.

Holy crap you guys, this was SO GOOD. I made it this morning too, and while I was waiting for the oatmeal to soften in the fridge (the oatmeal soaks in 1 cup milk for an hour to soften it up) I was like "is it shake time yet, now? Now? SHAKE TIME!" There's 1/3 a cup of oatmeal in the shake, and today I upped it to a half a cup, which is the serving of oatmeal I normally make myself on the stove. It is a light breakfast that kept me full all morning. I added chocolate syrup instead of carob powder and used skim milk instead of almond milk. Oh also I used peanut butter instead of cashew butter. SO GOOD.

Then I made my husband and I spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, who was just getting back from an overnight cross country meet. I used this recipe from Julia's Healthy Italian Cooking and Ryan has already asked that it make a repeat performance, so they are officially on the rotation! I love adding stuff to our meal rotation that we normally have things on hand for-I suck at trying to buy and use up specialty/out of the ordinary stuff before it goes bad. Or I forget about it. I made so much we both have portions for lunch this week which excites me so much that I know I'm getting old.

Still riding high off of frozen-bananas-tasting-like-cake-batter, I made Oh She Glow's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Balls in preparation for a "blizzard". You basically make up some banana soft serve and blend in these cookie dough balls for a DQ-esque Blizzard, according to the recipe. These might not last long enough to make it into any blizzard, they are so delicious and the perfect little snack. I used almonds instead of cashews, white sugar instead of cane sugar and honey instead of maple syrup. These are the perfect little sweet bite that I don't feel guilty about.

Also yesterday I made Ryan homemade vanilla bean caramels, as he's a huge caramel fan. I would say that I wouldn't cook the caramels to such a high temp again-I'd pull them off the heat after they hit 335/340, because these caramels are so hard and chewy that they could yank a filling out! They soften up after you jaw on them for a few seconds, but I like a softer caramel. This was my first time making candy and using a candy thermometer, and it was much more straight forward than I thought it would be! I won't shy away from similar recipes in the future.

Whew! I've had some major cooking failures lately so it's nice to have some new recipes that work for us.

What have you cooked lately?