Peanut Butter Banana Waffles

Wow. That's a nice stripe you've got there. How did you manage that?

Oh yes, that. Well, some people live dangerously by riding motorcycles, or going skydiving. But me? All I need to do is use an appliance or the Wusthofs. In this case, the rotisserie attachment on the new grill. Stupid new grill.

I see. Can I ask you another question?

What's that?

What have you got against bananas?

Um, I can see how one might believe I have something against bananas, but what I've really got is a finicky toddler. He requires a lot of variety, the little tyrant, so if I don't feel like picking up his banana slack, then I just have to get creative.

I've been enjoying vegan blogs lately. I feel like vegans get really creative in the kitchen. So I went poking around a nice vegan blog and found a recipe for Peanut Butter Banana Waffles.

Oh, no, those sound terrible.

I know, right!

First, I must put the pesky toddler into action so he helps me assemble the ingredients. (I am not a vegan, so whatever vegan ingredients that were listed that I didn't have, I simply replaced with a non-vegan substitute I had on hand.)

In the dry corner: 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1/4 cup whole wheat flour, 1/4 tsp baking powder, 1 tbsp cocoa powder, and one pinch of cinnamon.

In the wet corner: ripe bananas, 1/4 cup organic peanut butter, 2 tbsp cream cheese, 2 tbsp canola oil, 1 cup organic milk, 1 heavy tsp pure vanilla.

(Now that I've done these waffles once, the next time I would use plain organic yogurt in place of the cream cheese, and probably an egg instead of the canola oil. And I don't know why Blogger sometimes makes my pictures sideways but I don't know enough to fix it!)

So, a wet vs. dry? I take it that this means more than one bowl this time.

Yes - and look what I find when I get out the mixing bowl for the dry ingredients:

Oy - that toddler! Now he really had better get to work. Here he is getting ready to mix the dry ingredients:

Moving on to the wet ingredients in the stand mixer:

He loves to watch that mixer go!

Time to slowly introduce the dry ingredients to the wet:

And then we mixed until smooth. We preheated the waffle iron and sprayed non-stick butter flavored spray before adding a heavy 1/2 cup of the batter.

It took 3 - 4 minutes per waffle for them to cook - keep a close eye on them! And you must remember to spray with non-stick spray in between each waffle or you will have a disaster on your hands.

But - if you are a good waffle monitor and conscientious non-stick spray user, you should get 5 or 6 waffles to eat with warm syrup and sliced banana.

Yum!