YES, you read that right. TWO ingredients! I saw a friend post a photo of her 2 ingredient creation last weekend and I immediately set out to make some for myself and the hubby. I was extremely happy with the results that I've already made them twice this week. So much more effortless than normal pancakes, very delicious, and the best part: guilt free! Even the hubby whose least favorite food is eggs devoured them. 

You Will Need:
- 2 eggs
- 1 large banana

Now these are the basic ingredients. You can make the pancakes using just the above
 2 or you can add a few more optional ingredients if you have them on hand, such as:
- baking powder (1/8 teaspoon) - highly recommended as it makes the pancakes fluffier
- ground cinnamon (1/4 teaspoon) - also recommended as it adds a nice flavor
- fruit (I tried them with frozen blueberries and pomegranates - yum!)
- chocolate chips
- whatever you like in your pancakes

Throw the eggs and banana (and baking powder and cinnamon if using them) into a food processor or blender and blend together. If you do not have one of these devices, just mash the banana and then add the eggs (and optional ingredients) and stir together.  If using fruit or chocolate chips, add while the pancake is cooking rather than mixing into the batter (see next step).

Lightly grease a griddle or non stick pan with oil or cooking spray and heat on medium heat (if you only have a stainless steel pan, read on). Pour a little bit of batter into the pan to form circles. These pancakes are best made small and thin. Add fruit and/or chocolate chips on the top of the pancake right after you pour the batter in, otherwise they will stick and burn to the pan (I learned this the hard way).

The last six weeks were spent in Italy, Greece, and Paris with my husband Perry finishing off our extended honeymoon (which explains my absence from blogging). We spent lots of time wining, dining and cooking (oh yeah, and relaxing) and we learned lots of new recipes to add to my collection. From our many hosts, my family in Greece, and just from the various inspirations from the many places we visited, I collected enough recipes, notes and ideas to keep me busy in the kitchen for weeks to come. I will be sharing these recipes as I recreate them so keep checking back or follow me on Twitter to be informed of any updates.

The first recipe was introduced to us on the last stop of our trip: Paris! Our host Eleni, a Greek national studying in Paris, had a fantastic kitchen full of great ingredients, Greek honey included! Greeks love to mix honey with other ingredients and in their deserts. Honey with yogurt, honey with almonds, honey with raki...and now we were about to discover honey with apples. Eleni made this for us the first night we arrived...and we ended up making it for Eleni and her boyfriend Monsuy for the following 3 nights we were there....we are hooked! The best part is, this is relatively healthy and very simple to make AND super satisfying to the taste buds and the belly!

You will need:

- Apples. I use 1 per 2 people because you get quite a large amount once it is sliced. Also, we used Granny Smith apples as the tartness goes well with the honey and cinnamon
- Honey
- Cinnamon

Directions:

1. Slice the apples into thin slices. I start by slicing the apple in half and then half again so you end up with four segments (see photo below). I then remove the seeds and slice each quarter into thin slices.

2. Place the slices on a plate. Try to not layer them too much so that each slice gets a bit of honey and cinnamon on it (think of it like making nachos and cheese...you always go for the tortilla chips with cheese on it, don't you?! So make sure every apple has a bit of the honey and cinnamon on it!)

3. Drizzle honey on top of the sliced apples

4. Lick the spoon. You don 't want that honey to go to waste!

5. Sprinkle cinnamon on top of the apples with honey. There you go! A nice and simple treat or desert that takes 2 minutes to prepare!

Notes:

This is a great snack and/or desert for the summer. For the colder months, you can place the above recipe in the oven and roast the apples (with the honey and cinnamon on top). I tried this as well and it was also nice but I do prefer it colder. What I did like about the roasted recipe though, was that the honey turned syrupy which was nice to "mop up" with the apples . You can also drizzle some lemon juice on top of the apples when roasting for a sweeter taste. Also, a different variety of apples (besides Granny Smith) may taste nicer when roasted as we found they didn't work so well (because of the taste). If any of you try this recipe with a different variety, let me know how it turns out!

Enjoy and happy cooking!!


Click on the photos below for descriptions

Ok so I am SUPER excited about this recipe that I just tried out and have to share it with all of you! It is perfect if you are coeliac/ have a gluten intolerance and they are relatively healthy as there is no sugar, no flour, no oil, and no eggs! I saw the recipe from Jump on the Skinny Bandwagon circulating around Facebook and I am always intrigued by recipes that substitute certain ingredients for ones that you would never think of (such as cauliflower pizza dough).

Here is the recipe as copied from the circulating status on Facebook. See below for my notes and things I did differently:


Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups canned* chickpeas, well-rinsed and patted dry with a paper towel
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons (165 grams) natural peanut butter (can use PB2 from gym to make healthier, check your labels )
1/4 cup (80 grams) honey (agave would be amazing too!)
1 teaspoon baking powder**
a pinch of salt if your peanut butter doesn’t have salt in it
1/2 cup (90 grams) chocolate chips

* My can was a 400 gram can, 240 grams without the water, and I used all but a few tablespoons

** If you need grain-free baking powder, you can use 1 part cream of tartar + 1 part baking soda + 2 parts arrowroot.

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350°F / 175°C.

Combine all the ingredients, except for the chocolate chips, in a food processor and process until very smooth. Make sure to scrape the sides and the top to get the little chunks of chickpeas and process again until they’re combined.

Put in the chocolate chips and stir it if you can, or pulse it once or twice. The mixture will be very thick and sticky.

With wet hands, form into 1 1/2″ balls. Place onto a piece of parchment paper. If you want them to look more like normal cookies, press down slightly on the balls. They don’t do much rising. Bake for about 10 minutes.

Yields about fourteen 1 1/2″ cookie dough balls.

My notes and things I did differently:

First of all, I don't have a food processor so what I did is I used a blender (you can also use a magic bullet) to grind up/puree the chick peas. But you have to make sure to only do a little bit at a time as if you put in too many chick peas, the blade won't be able to grind them all. So out of the total amount of chick peas used, I divided them into about 4 portions to do the blending/grinding. When you blend them, the chick peas can tend to go to the side of the blender so shake the blender a little bit every so often to move them around and back in the area of the blade. Then, once each portion is grinded, I pour them out into a mixing bowl. You may not be able to get them perfectly ground up and may notice some bits of un-blended chick peas but I found that this provided a crunchiness to the finished product and wasn't bad at all.

Then I added the rest of the ingredients (the honey, peanut butter, baking powder, vanilla extract...all but the chocolate chips) into the chick pea mixture. I then used an electric mixer to mix all the ingredients (but the chocolate chips) together. And wow did it ever look like cookie dough! I then added dark chocolate chips and mixed the cookie dough around with a spoon. I only used about 70-80grams of chocolate chips. You can use as many as you think your batter may need but I thought 90g worth of chocolate chips would be too much for the amount of batter I had. Just a side note: make sure you use gluten free baking powder if you have a gluten intolerance.

Here is what the dough looked like:

Now, we have a fan assisted oven so I preheated the oven to 160 degrees for the fan oven.  The recipe also says to form the dough into balls but I decided to try shaping them like cookies for the first batch and dough balls for the second batch to see the difference (I was curious as to why the recipe said to make them as dough balls and not cookies).

Make sure when you are working with the dough and forming them that your hands are wet as it helps make it less sticky and form them easier.

I found that at 160 degrees (fan oven), they took about 20 minutes to bake rather than the 10 it says in the recipe. But if you have a regular oven then it may only take 10 minutes. I kept checking on them and they were still quite soft and didn't seem to be cooking but after about 20 minutes, I decided to take them out (both the cookies and dough balls) and let them sit for a couple of minutes and they became firmer. While they are cooking, you will notice that the cookies crack (similar to that of a ginger snap) but they still manage to stay together. I am pretty sure you don't need to worry about overcooking them as they don't seem to burn easily.

The cookies were a complete success and absolutely delicious and quite peanut-buttery(obviously). The recipe does not yield many cookies, but I assure you that they will fill you right up and you definitely do not need many. They are VERY rich (but maybe that is because I used dark chocolate chips) and I made these before making dinner. After eating 2, I was absolutely FULL without a need for dinner, so feel free to form them quite small. If I use dark chocolate chips again, I will probably put a smaller amount as they are very rich.

As you can see in the photo below, the cookies I made were average size so it may be a good idea to make them smaller. The dough ball size is actually perfect (and maybe that is why the recipe encourages the dough to be formed into a ball rather than a cookie) but I found that it doesn't affect the baking process if you flatten it out and shape it like a cookie.

I have become a big fan of this recipe and will definitely be making these cookies again in the future. Highly recommended! They also take very little time to make. It must have taken about 10 minutes at the most to prepare the batter. And the best part about this recipe: You can lick the beaters all you want as there is no raw egg in the mix!

Let me know if you try them and how they turn out or if you have any questions!

Photos and calorie count below. Click on the images for a description!

Enjoy and Happy Cooking!

I was quite curious about this recipe, so I gave it a try about a year ago.

No sugar, no eggs, no milk! So perfect for those lactose intolerant folks out there!

I followed this recipe from BBC GoodFood:


Ingredients:

• 450g (1 lb) ripe bananas,mashed
• 50g (2 oz) chopped nuts
• 100ml (4 fl oz) sunflower oil
• 100g (4 oz) raisins
• 75g (3 oz) rolled oat flakes
• 150g (5 oz) wholewheat flour
• 2.5ml (0.5 tsp) almond essence
• pinch of salt
  
  Method:
  
  1. preheat the oven to gas mark 5, 190c (375f).
  2. mix all the ingredients together in a mixing bowl. the consistency should be moist.
  3. spoon into greased 450g (1 lb) loaf tin and bake in the oven for 50 to 60 mins or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
  4. cool for 10 mins until cool.

It serves 10 depending on how big the pieces are. I cooked mine in a loaf tin and yes it could serve 10 but the pieces would be quite thin.

I input the ingredients into MyFitnessPal, a calorie counter app that I sometimes use to, well...count calories! Anyways, I input the serving amount as 9 so if you dish out 9 servings from the final amount, it equals to 219 calories per serving. If you have 5 servings out of it, that is 395 calories per serving. If you would like to do the math for another amount of portions, the entire loaf is 1973 calories. Divide 1973 by the amount of portions you get out of the final product and you will get your calorie count. So basically, measure out your portions accordingly ;-)

My notes about this recipe:
I found it to be a very simple recipe to make. I read the comments on the recipe page which have great suggestions and I did as one had done: I only put half the amount of oil and used water to replace the other half. It is very moist and quite rich with the almond extract and I also added vanilla extract to experiment. And I threw in about 50g of dark chocolate chips (so I guess there is sugar in those-oops!). I also didn't put in many walnuts and I omitted the raisins completely as I am not a huge fan of raisins. I may try the honey and carrot idea that someone suggested in the comments. If anyone else tries this, let me know how it turns out!! Happy Cooking!

And here are the rest of the nutritional facts about this "Healthy" Banana Bread as calculated by MyFitnessPal (all will be approximate) and again, these facts are for the ENTIRE loaf so don't freak out too much. Again, if you would like to know the nutritional facts per portion, divide the numbers by the number of portions you get out of the finished product! Enjoy!