vegan banana muffins!

while i'm on a banana-posting roll, i think its time i share with you my awesome vegan banana muffins. these were a necessity. because i bought a bunch of bananas, went to philly for a week for a conference, and came back. and the bananas were still there.

i give you 'exhibit a' (or should it be 'exhibit b'?):

yup. lovely. good for nothing, except baking. so, i found a recipe for healthy muffins that used up four of them. thank you, recipezaar.com! these were quite simple, and mostly bananas. here they are all mashed up with spices and sweetener and stuff:

and here they are just before baking. you'll notice the super-cute addition of a sliced banana piece on top of every muffin. this, my friends, was all me. i am so creative. that, and i didn't want to waste the last banana.

look how pretty they are coming out of the oven:

you know, when piled together, the banana slices kinda make the muffins look like one-eyed alien creatures, do they not?

banana oatmeal breakfast cookies!

around the time of the lentil soup, i decided healthy cookies were in order, and went with 'vegan cookies invade your cookie jar's' banana oatmeal breakfast cookies. also, i had all the ingredients, including brown rice syrup and flax meal. because i am cool.

they also have oats and cranberries and, surprisingly, bananas.

remarkably, in making these cookies, i ran out of oatmeal, bananas, oil, cranberries, pecans, and agave. good job, nicole. here they are, pre-oven...

and post. yes, they look like blobs, but they're actually quite nice. bonus: you can taste the dough raw, which is not a bad thing.

neko smoothie!

i have a bit of a cold, and this is sad, because i don't want one. well, i never want one, but i particularly don't want one now, because i have a concert to go to tonight: neko case is playing two hundred feet from my apartment.

this is very exciting for two reasons:

1) its neko case, and i lurve her

2) it two hundred feet from my apartment, and that's part of the appeal.

oh - and there's a third...

3) the club is TINY. there is a real chance my height won't work against me for once and i'll see the "stage" and we'll make eye contact and stuff.

anyhoo, the sicky thing. the sicky thing could, in all likelihood, impair my ability to enjoy myself and sing very loudly. in order to combat this, i've been having smoothies the last few days for breakfast as part of a healthy regimen. here is one of them...

they are comprised of a few ice cubes, a banana, some frozen, organic berries, organic spinach, and light organic soy milk:

did i mention the spinach? lots of it. this was just for me:

i tried to get an action shot of the blending. it sort of worked:

look at the results - you can see sort of see flecks of green amongst the slightly blurry, brown sludge:

drink up!