I am always on the lookout for new ways to use up food rather than throwing 
it away, and it makes me feel great when I can avoid waste. One of the foods I have the hardest time with is bananas. It seems I am always fighting against them for some reason…those suckers just get ripe faster than I can use them and I hate throwing them out! But, as you may recall from my last post about using “too-ripe” bananas, there is only so much banana bread one family can stand!
Not buying them is not an option for us…my hubby, the triathlete, has one almost daily in his smoothies, and my youngest grandson will eat them until you make him stop (or until he…well…you know). I have tried estimating how many we need for the week and purchasing accordingly, but most weeks I either run out or get stuck with 2 or 3 “too ripe” bananas!
So, what can I do with those darn overly-ripe bananas? Some people say to stick them in the freezer whole and use them for banana bread in the future. Now maybe it’s just me, but there is something about seeing those lifeless, blackened bananas in my freezer that just creeps me out! However, I really like the idea of freezing them for later, so I came up with this solution….banana cubes!!
As I mentioned before, my hubby has a protein smoothie almost every day, and I always put a banana in it. So, I decided to see if I could mash the ripe bananas into a kind of puree and freeze them in ice-cube trays. Well, I tried it and it worked beautifully! Just put the bananas in a dish, mash them up with your potato masher, spoon them into an ice-cube tray and freeze! I freeze them in sets of two per baggie and just pop them into the blender with my other ingredients. They work like a charm, don’t turn brown, and help make his smoothie cold, thick and delicious!
So next time you wonder what to do with those pesky “too-ripe” bananas, try making some banana cubes and using them in a cool, refreshing smoothie! Here is my smoothie recipe:
Daryl’s After Workout Smoothie
8 oz. cold soy milk (or regular milk) 1 (4 oz.) container soy yogurt (or your favorite yogurt) 3-4 whole frozen or fresh strawberries 2 banana cubes (or 1 whole banana) 1 scoop vanilla-flavored protein powderAdd all ingredients to blender and pulse on puree setting until blended. Enjoy!
ya’ll get the idea that somehow my comfort food obsession has passed (as if!), I decided it was time to go in search of another HHM member comfort food recipe to review. So, I clicked over to the 
just meant to go together, a fact that is perfectly illustrated after one bite of BnB Finder’s 
Just when you thought you had recovered from Thanksgiving you realize that the holidays are only weeks away. While a wonderful time is spent with family and friends, holidays are often overshadowed by gift giving mayhem.
I am always on the lookout for new ways to use “too ripe” bananas. Even though I try to use them before they get too ripe, it sometimes happens in spite of my efforts, and I feel guilty for throwing them out. But there’s only so much banana bread two people can eat, and banana pudding is not the ideal use for bananas that are past their prime. So what to do?
Fall is slowly making an appearance in North Carolina and this past Saturday was quite cool and drizzly. As you may have read on my blog recently, this is the time of year when we start craving comfort foods again at my house, and since the weather was making me inclined to stay indoors, I started looking around for a member recipe to prepare and review. Anne Coleman’s (AnniePooh) 