Look at your trees! Pear delight!

We love to go on afternoon walks around our neighborhood and recently noticed two trees at one neighbor's yard. Approaching the trees to get a closer look at the drooping branches, we notice mini bosc pears growing, two to three bunches per branch. Feeling them, the fruit's skin was still hard, so we waited, watching them daily, eagerly planning ways to use them when the fruit ripened. We'd mull over ways to use them- roasting pears wrapped in foil in the oven with blue cheese chunks and balsamic vinger to caramelizing wedges in the saute pan with sliced onions to pureeing them as a pearsauce cousin to apple sauce. Today we saw two squirrels nibbling on the pears, so we knew the fruit must be ready. Sure enough, the fruit felt ripe. Glancing at our neighbor's house for any sign of movement and seeing none, we grabbed several and stuffed them in our pockets and walked onward, grinning up to our ears. We gave them a scrub at home and bit into delicious fruit, truly picked right off the tree. What a purely delightful feeling to be full of pears! We can't wait until tomorrow's walk!

Pumpkin Banana Loaf

Inspired from a recent browsing at the bakery at The Fresh Market, a southeastern chain specializing in local fresh produce, we decided to make our own pumpkin banana loaf. The bakery offers "nut breads," dense short loaves with flavors of banana nut, zuchinni nut, and an intriguing pineapple coconut. While easy to have put a loaf in our cart, we decided to make use of the extra bananas and opened pumpkin can in our refrigerator. We found a Low Fat Pumpkin Bread with Pepitas by Skinny Taste, but wanting to use our bananas and not having pepitas (pumpkin seeds), we adapted the recipe to as follows.

Pumpkin Banana Loaf
1 3/4 c. flour
3/4 c. sugar
1 tsp b. soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 egg
1 banana, ripe, mashed
1 c. pumpkin (from a can of pure pumpkin)
1 tsp. vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350. Spray a 9X5" loaf pan.
2. Stir dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Mix in a separate bowl the wet ingredients. Add the wet to the dry, mixing until just combined. May need a little bit of water to loosen the batter; if so, add 1 Tbsp add a time. Careful not to overdo it or else it won't bake properly.
3. Pour into pan.
4. Bake 38-43 minutes.

Baked Eggplant with Red Apple Balsamic Vinegar

We took a day trip to Tampa and what wonderful shops they have! Stopping at a Starbucks, we noticed next door Joe and Son's Olive Press, a store specializing in high-end extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegars, and speciality oils like walnut oil and sesame oil. Even thought the store had been closed an hour, the owner motioned us in and explained in detail the lineup of products that were stored in staineless steel containers. Encouraged to sample the oils, vinegars, and tapenades, we were intrigued especially with the basalmic vinegars, trying whites such as vanilla honey, cinnamon pear, and coconut and reds in berry flavors, like trend-setting blackberry, candy-like blueberry, and the more classic fig. We picked the Red Apple Basalmic, a smooth, tangy, sweet, balsamic that smelled like sweet candied apples. The owner poured, corked, and sealed the bottle using a hair-blower-like gun. For the small bottle at 200 milliliters, it was a moderately priced splurge at $10.99. Back home, we used the vinegar in a baked eggplant foil packet in the following recipe, Baked Eggplant.

Baked Eggplant Packets
1 large eggplant
2-3 Tbsp red apple balsamic vinegar
Cut the eggplant into half-moons and divide into two foil packet sheets. Pour 1.5 Tbsp of balsamic into each packet and close up the packages. Bake an hour at 375. Make sure to use a spoon to scrape out all the caramelized sweet and meaty eggplant. The balsamic is amazing- not acidic but not too sweet.

Banana Chocolate Chip Cake Bites

Looking for a moist biteful of banana muffins with chocolate-chips? This recipe, Banana Chocolate-Chip Cake Bites, is just the answer. We adapted Hungry Girl's recipe by usng a ripe banana instead of applesauce, almond milk for the soy milk, and 1 egg for the egg substitute because of our pantry and refrig inventory. Also we doubled the recipe, which yielded twenty-four mini muffins. Using a tablespoon ice cream scooper for the dough made it easy and fast to scoop the batter out as well as produce equal sized muffins for equal baking. The banana flavor melds well with the maple syrup, almond milk, and a dash of cinnamon. Enjoy at breakfast, snack, dessert, or any time!

Banana Chocolate Chip Cake Bites

2 cups, flour
1/3 cup, brown sugar (packed)
3 sweetener packets
3 tsp, baking powder
1/2 vanilla unsweetened almond breeze
1/4 c, sugar free maple syrup
1 egg
1 banana, ripened and mashed
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup mini semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray 2 12-count mini-muffin pans.
2. In a bowl, stir together the dry ingredients (first 4 ingredients).
3. In another bowl, whisk together remaining ingredients except the chocolate chips. Add the flour to this wet mixture, stirring until just combined. Divide evenly into prepared muffin cups. Sprinkle chocolate chips on top.
4. Bake, about 9 minutes.

Almond Nut Butter Cookies with Dark Chocolate Chunks and Cherries

Almonds, dark chocolate, and dried cherries are super stars in flavor, seeming to have an affinity towards each other. They are also powerhouses in nutrition, being packed with antioxidents and vitamin E. Delicious in their natural form as trail mix, the threesome also play a star role in our cookies, Almond Nut Butter Cookies, a modification of got milk? the cookie book's recipe "Peanut Butter CCCs." Our adapted form has MaraNatha All Natural Roasted Almond Butter Creamy, chunks of dark chocolate chopped from a large Hershey's special dark chocolate bar, and dried cherries. These cookies pack a powerful nut flavor, but look like chocolate chip cookies with a soft, chewy texture from the chocolate and dried fruit and with crunchy edges. Add dried apricots, dry-roasted peanuts or almonds, and milk-chocolate to create a different personality to almond butter cookies. These cookies hollar for a cold glass of almond milk or beckon to be snacks during a long bike ride or hike.

Make the dough ahead of time and refrigerate before baking the cookies to allow the ingredients time to combine and enchance the flavor. You can go ahead and bake all the dough and have cookies ready to go in your freezer. Just toast the cookies in the toaster oven for a minute for a freshly-baked taste. Or, you can save the dough in the freezer and bake small batches at your whim and make your house frequently emit the tentalizing aroma of warm-baked cookies. To cool off our house from the heat of the oven doubled with the Florida summer temperatures, we keep our windows and balcony door wide open, so our neighbors pause, sniff the air, and come knocking on our door, begging for some treats. Dare we say, we've become the most popular neighbors in town!

Almond Nut Butter Cookies with Dark Chocolate Chunks and Dried Cherries
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup creamy almond butter
3/4 cup packed ark brown sugar
1/4 cup grandualted sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/3cups dark chocolate chunks or chips
1/2 cup dried cherries
(optional additions are dry-roasted peanuts and almonds, coarsely chopped, dried apricots, and milk chocolate or semi-sweet chocolate morsels)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
2. In a medium bowl, using an electric mixer, beat the butter, almond butter, sugars, and vanilla until well combined. Beat in the egg. Scrape down the bowl using a rubber spatula and beat for a few more seconds.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour and baking soda. Add the dry ingredietns to the wet mixture and mix on low speed just until absorbed. Combine the chocolate chunks and dried cherries in a small bowl and stir into the dough.
4. Using about 1 Tablespoon of dough for each cookie, gently shape the dough into bowls and drop them about 3 inches apart onto ungreased baking sheets. Using a 1 1/2inch diameter ice-cream scoop and leviling the dough off across the top before dropping onto the baking sheets makes perfectly uniform cookies. Bake for about 12 minutes, or until the cookies begin to color. Do not overbake. Let sit 2 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

Pumpkin Pie in the Middle of Summer

Pumpkin pie? In the middle of summer? Yes, we love pumpkin all times of year. We keep a can in the refrigerator for a favorite snack of pumpkin spooned into a bowl, sweetened with sweetener and cinnamon, and then chilled almond breeze poured on top. But today we were craving pumpkin pie. Inspired by the ease and low-calorie option offered by Hungry Girl, we adapted an easier version with fewer ingredients. We used real sugar instead of Splenda and used 1 egg instead of Egg Beaters. We used half the amount of maple syrup as well. Oh and the most dramatic change- we went crustless (HG's recipe calls for ground up FiberOne cereal and butter). A most fabulous pumpkin pie-like custard emerged from the oven after 45 minutes. After an impatient wait for the pie to cool and firm up in the refrig, we were delighted with yummy, creamy pumpkin pie. A long squirt of Reddi Whip adds to the drama with the color contrast with white decorating the orange pie and texture differences with the cream even lighter than the velvety pumpkin.

Pumpkin Pie-Custard

1 can (16 oz) pumpkin
1 can (16 oz) evaporated skim milk
1 egg
3/4 c. sugar
2 Tbsp sugar-free maple syrup
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
2 tsp cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Mix all ingredients until smooth. Pour into a glass pyrex dish.
3. Bake 40-45 minutes until just set in the middle.
4. Chill 4-5 hours.
5. To serve, cut into slices or spoon into bowls. Add a generous amount of Reddi-Whip or Whip Cream. Add a last dusting of cinnamon.