cooking ala mel

healthy recipes and the occasional craft

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Blueberry Banana Bread (Gluten Free)

I am one week away from my “summer,” having my off-block from rotations in July.  I’m counting down the days until lots of family time, reading my large stack of books I have yet to get to, and plenty of kitchen fun!  We also have a short Vegas trip booked towards the end of July, which I am still surprised to say I’m actually pretty excited for.  To kick off the summer and berry season, I got tons of fresh blueberries.  I also had plenty of extra ripe bananas on the counter (which were kinda stinking up the place – I hate the smell of ripe bananas), so blueberry banana bread it was!


I’ve made plenty of blueberry quick breads filled with gluten (with zucchini, banana, and regular blueberry), so I figured it was time to finally make one gluten free.  I decided to stick with almond and coconut flours to keep it high in fiber and protein, and I sweetened it almost entirely with bananas (with just a hint of liquid stevia – Trader Joe’s has a good one that I don’t notice any aftertaste from).  Nice and healthy. [Read more…]

Cheesy Garlic Beer Bread

After a couple weeks of rotation and settling into our new place, I finally got to really test out my new oven this weekend.  I’ve sort of deemed macarons my ultimate tester of the temperature and hot spots of ovens, and I’m really excited to say that this oven seems to be perfect!  I baked them a little too hot, so the feet exploded a little bit, but there weren’t any cracks, which was a major issue in our last apartment due to the uneven heat in the oven there.  I’m going to try one more time before posting a recipe, as I need to perfect them, but I am soo excited to finally be able to have yummy macarons!  In the meantime… beer bread.  With cheese.  And garlic.

I made myself a batch of my cinnamon raisin bread, and I also wanted to make a loaf out of this recipe from The Beeroness.  I totally planned on rolling it up like a cinnamon swirl bread, cheesy beer bread style, but my filling was a little too runny.  After letting the dough rise, I just decided to stir the filling into the bread so it turned into a kind of doughy batter, and the cheesy garlic goodness was alllllll throughout the loaf.  It worked out just as well! [Read more…]

Breakfast Cookie Bars (Gluten Free)

Oh, hey there!  Remember me? 😉  Things have been super hectic with finishing my last EVER classes as a pharmacy student, immediately starting my first P4 rotation, and packing up our apartment to move into a townhouse.  I’ve hardly been in the kitchen at all other than to cut up some fruit or throw together a sandwich for lunch, which has me going a bit stir-crazy.  I started doing the big pack of our kitchen today (which is absolutely insane – the amount of boxes for the kitchen is exponentially higher than any other part of our apartment), and because I had small amounts left of things like peanuts, chocolate chips, coconut… I decided I had to make the kitchen a mess before packing it all up.  Makes sense, right?  I got myself a snack for the week out of it, too, so definitely a good idea. 😉

These bars are a peanut butter oatmeal cookie-like base, with lots and lots of mix-ins.  Feel free to throw whatever you have in there, whether it be any kind of nut, candies, pretzels, dried fruit… the possibilities are endless!  I stuck with peanuts, coconut, brown rice puffs, chocolate chips, and a hint of banana.  All fantastic things for a breakfast bar, yeah? [Read more…]