Kitchen Creativity For Breakfast

If you’ve been reading my blog here at all, you’ll hopefully discover I love to be creative in the kitchen, and while I have a number of recipes to share with you all, I often do much of my cooking by just winging-it.

This morning’s breakfast was another example of that, and it turned out well enough that I thought I would share it. I had a few slices of a really nice cinnamon raisin bread from Panera and I’ve often thought it would make for some good French toast… this morning I finally got around to trying it out…

French Toast & Ham

But since I generally don’t keep pancake syrup around, and well, honestly, as much as I love a nice pancake with good syrup on it, it just sounded waaaaay too sweet. I have strawberries and blueberries in the freezer, so I could have made a nice fruit based topping, but neither of those sounded like they would go good with the bread. Then I spotted the banana on the counter. I also have some of the over-ripe ones in the freezer (great for making smoothies or a soft-serve dessert!)… and from there things just started clicking in to place.

I took about half of a frozen banana (though you could use fresh too) and broke it in to chunks in my Magic Bullet, added a few spoonfuls of Greek Yogurt and a couple tablespoons of milk. If you aren’t using Greek yogurt, you can likely skip the milk. I figured I would need to thin it out to blend well. I also added a touch of vanilla and a bit of brown rice syrup for a hint of sweetness. Though in hind-sight, the banana likely would have been enough.

I heated this up in the microwave, because I didn’t want to put a cold topping on the French toast. And when I took it out, well… it was thinner than I had hoped. It was very tasty banana-milk, but not what I really wanted for topping my breakfast. Glancing around the kitchen as the French toast was finishing up on the griddle, I spotted my jar of peanut butter (it lives on the counter because I do use it almost daily).

Peanut butter and banana… mmmmm… yes, that would add some great flavor and help thicken things up a bit. And it almost worked! I didn’t want to overpower the banana with the peanut butter, so to the half-cup or so I had at this point, I added just about a tablespoon of peanut butter, but it was still thinner than I was looking for…so what else could I do? Well, ch-ch-chia to the rescue! Besides adding a nice touch of omega 3s, it would help thicken things up a bit. About a teaspoon added to half of the topping worked just right.

Cinnamon Raisin French Toast

Now at this point, it probably sounds like I went through a lot of trouble for this little breakfast… but really, all told the whole process took me about five minutes. And while it seems like things kept not-working for me, in the end it was really tasty… it was easy… and it was all made from whole food ingredients, not coming out of some processing plant.

One of the things I try to emphasize with the people I work with is to not be afraid to experiment in the kitchen. I couldn’t tell you anything about what wine to pair with what sort of meat, but I know the flavors that *I* like, so the odds are that if I have a few things in the kitchen that I already know I like… I can pair them up in new ways and get something pretty decent. And I think if you give it a chance, you’ll come up with something pretty decent too.

 

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