I’ve been working this year to improve my diet and shift my relationships with food as I’ve written about previously. Many days I do well. Unfortunately there are many others when I still succumb to the lure of junk food. The 3 day water fast I mentioned in the last post did seem to help me reset my taste buds and refocus my efforts. Since then I’ve been doing quite well and resisted all heavily processed foods. Still there have been days I’ve been tempted…
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One of my weaknesses is my sweet tooth. Hence I’m frequently looking for healthy sweet foods, and I try to keep them around so my cravings don’t lead me to cave in to things with hyper sweet processed sugars which adversely train my taste buds to find natural fruits less satisfyingly sweet. I wrote before about the two sweeteners that are actually healthy for you, as in the more you eat the healthier you are. These are molasses and dates (or date sugar which is just dried pulverized dates). Lately I’ve been keeping what I’ve been calling date cookies on hand. These are the sort of thing I was writing about in the post on “A healthy cure for a sweet tooth”. In that post I mentioned that mashed up bananas would probably be good in them too. I’ve since tried that to good success. Right now I’ve got some I made with autumn berry puree which are pretty good too. I want to make another batch using even more autumn berries. Don’t know what autumn berries, sometimes also called autumn olive, are? That should probably be a future post, hopefully soon. (I’ll try to remember to come back and make a link in this post when I write it.)
I do like to vary my diet some so I have a couple other decadent sweet goodies I make which I thought I’d share with you today. First up will be the simplest to make. I’d call them banana chips, but those tend to have a bad reputation with most. I’ve bought my share of these in the past from the store. Have you ever read the ingredients label on them? I admit to finding it a baffling mystery of the universe how processed food companies can take bananas, add oil, sugar, and extra “flavoring” to end up with a product that has minimal sweetness and little flavor. It’s very strange.
To avoid being too closely associated with those I’m calling mine banana chewies instead. This is also a more accurate description of what I make as they tend to be chewy rather than crisp. However, they are sweet and packed with banana flavor! It’s like a candy banana chew. They are dead simple to make too, containing just one ingredient, bananas.
I like to go to the local discount salvage food store in the village by me. They usually have bananas. Better still they usually have very ripe bananas at a discount in order to sell them faster, I’ll buy these if they have them as I feel like they work best for this, and saving money in the process is always a plus. Once I have the bananas I need to peel them all.
Next I will use my large knife to slice them up into disks and load them into my dehydrator trays. I cut them fairly thick as I’ve found that once dehydrated thin cut ones can be really hard to remove from the trays. Related to that, here’s another tip. It works so much better to use the flexible “Clean-A-Screen” tray inserts for this because the chewies have a tendency to stick to the drying screens. With the flexible inserts you can fairly easily bend the insert and peel the bananas off. I’ve also found it easiest to use a wide knife. The bananas tend to stick to the knife and if it’s wide enough it’s then easy to transfer and slide them off right into the trays as I slice them.
To make it worthwhile running my dehydrator I generally do several bunches of bananas at once, loading up a stack of trays. What’s nice is that even at a regular retail price bananas are pretty cheap. I think I paid all of $3 for the batch you’ll see in this blog post.
Once the trays are full I just start dehydrating. I tend to run my dehydrator at about 135 degrees F during the day when the solar panels are getting power and turn it down to 95 degrees F at night when I’m running off the battery bank. If you were plugged into the power grid you could probably just leave them at the higher temperature. Anyway in probably 2 or 3 days depending on conditions and operating temperatures the banana chewies are ready to go. Oh, and you can certainly sample them as they dry to see how they’re doing. I tend to sample a lot, just because I want to.
In my experience the more ripe the bananas were going in the chewier they are coming out. The less ripe bananas tend to be crisper, though that is highly relative. They are still chewy. As I peel them out of the trays I toss them into an air tight container so moisture in the atmosphere doesn’t soften them too quickly. I’ve found they keep pretty well in a tight container at room temperature. It’s essentially just dried fruit after all. Related, dehydrated fresh pineapples are like candy as well. I’ll do these when pineapples are on sale for a great price.
The next thing I wanted to share is so totally decadent it’s hard to believe it could be healthy. I should note though that when I say healthy I’m not saying low calorie. This is full of calories, but they aren’t empty calories. They are full of nutrition. I’m talking about a chocolate dip. More accurately though I should say it’s a cocoa dip since it’s the cocoa powder that’s good for us. All the refined sugars and fats generally used in making chocolate is what’s bad for us. In this recipe I’m using dates for the sweetener and nuts for the fats.
I should note that what I’m making is adapted from Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s book “Eat to Live”. In it he has a recipe for what he’s calling Almond Chocolate Dip. I’ve reduced the ingredients and increased the cocoa powder.
To make this I suspect you do need a high powered blender. That’s what I always make mine in. I’ve got an old Vita Mix I bought used which has been working well for me.
So I like to use about 1 1/3 cups raw nuts. My preference is raw cashews but as I was a bit short on them this time I added in a few raw walnuts. Dr. Fuhrman says you can also use 2/3 cup raw almond butter instead. If you used a nut butter you might not need a high power blender. I’m just guessing on that though.
After the nuts I add in the date paste which is just ground dates. You could make this yourself. I happen to really like the Ziyad brand Baking Dates I’m fortunate to be able to get at my local grocery store. I use about half the 13 ounce package.
Next I add 1 cup of water. If I happen to have any sort of non-dairy milk around like almond milk or soy milk I’ll use it, but I won’t go out and purchase a carton of it just for this. In Dr. Michael Greger’s “How Not to Die Cookbook” his recipe for making a whole food plant based nut milk is blending raw almond butter with water. Well, hey, that’s what I’m going to be doing right, blending nuts and water? So I don’t see why I should go buy a more processed and expensive product to use instead of just plain water for my cocoa dip. Water seems to work just fine.
If I have any vanilla extract I usually add in a bit of this, but it’s not needed. The critical element is naturally the cocoa powder. In Dr. Fuhrman’s recipe it calls for 1 tablespoon. I’ve found it’s much better using 3 to 4 tablespoons! There’s much more chocolate taste that way, as well as increasing the health benefits of cocoa by using more.
Once everything is in the blender I just blend away until it’s as smooth as I’d like it, generally just a couple minutes with my Vita-Mix. Finally I use a rubber spatula to scrape the dip out of the blender and “taste test” liberally.
Naturally it goes quite well with the banana chewies, or various sorts of fresh fruit. I’ve spread some on my autumn berry fruit leather and rolled it up for a delicious desert. I’m also known to just eat it straight with a spoon! I suspect you won’t have any trouble finding ways to use this!
I must admit I still feel a bit guilty eating this as it just seems too tasty to be healthy for me, but all the ingredients are good for me. It’s a whole food plant based desert I suspect most anyone would happily devour.
Studio Snippet
Since my last blog post I have finally finished up the commissioned pieces I’ve been working on. Today I thought I’d share an image just after the silver rim got soldered on one. Because the piece is so large I have to use my big annealing torch to solder. My normal acetylene soldering torch doesn’t have tips big enough to burn hot enough. In the photo you can see a couple whitish/grayish areas. Those spots are where there is more detailed chasing work I was worried excess solder might spill over and flow into. To protect from this I’m using Ronda Coryell’s Masking Mud. It makes the area dirty so solder can’t flow there.
After the soldering, I cleaned up everything, did the patina, polished the rim, and finished it off with gold leaf on one piece and palladium leaf on the other. Earlier today I delivered them to the gallery. Hopefully they meet with the clients approval!
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