Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Bites

TÜRKÇE İÇİN TIKLAYIN
PER ITALIANO

Today we will be making some sweet, healthy chocolate bites without compromising yumminess.

They are so incredibly easy to prepare you won't believe how good they are. You can have one or two when you crave for something sweet, you can give them to children as an healthier sweet-snack alternative, or you can serve them in your house parties.

We need only 3 things for this recipe. Banana, peanut butter and dark chocolate. Yes, that's all really!

Let me share with you a few tips:

It is very very important to have enough ripe bananas to have the right sweetness and flavor. The bananas with some dark spots are usually ideal for this. They shouldn't be neither green nor overripe.

I am using my own homemade sugar-free oil-free peanut butter, made with 100% of peanuts. I shared the recipe with you guys some time ago. I highly recommend it.

It is possible to prepare peanut butter with raw or toasted peanuts. As raw peanuts are preferable health-wise, using toasted peanuts instead will enhance the flavor of your butter.  So, it is up to you. The peanuts in the photos of my peanut butter recipe are toasted. In my recent peanut butter instead I used very lightly, almost barely toasted peanuts. This is to explain where the difference of color between two butters comes from.

I used dark chocolate with %72 cacao.

With the given ingredients and having my bananas sliced about 0.7 cm thick, I've got 22 Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Bites.


Ingredients:
2 enough ripe bananas (I weighed mine to be precise. They came 350 g unpeeled, 225 g peeled in total)
Peanut Butter
150 g dark chocolate (70% cacao)


Preparation:

Persimmon Marmalade, Dried Persimmon Rolls with Chocolate and other ideas...

TÜRKÇE İÇİN TIKLAYIN
PER ITALIANO

Hello Friends,

This is going to be a post full of pictures and ideas.

Golden, delicious persimmons are in season these days so I don't want to lose any more time to share this post with you.  

1) Our first recipe is Persimmon Marmalade.

We prepare this recipe with only 3 ingredients: Persimmons, lemon and chia seeds. It doesn't contain any added sugar on the contrary to the traditional marmalade recipes.

Persimmons, which to me look like some kind of golden tomatoes, are very sweet when they are mature. They are packed with vitamins, antioxidants and fiber.
Our marmalade has also chia seeds which are an excellent source of Omega 3, protein and fiber.

The trick here is that it is absolutely essential to have very ripe persimmons in order to obtain the taste and the texture we desire.

Under-ripe persimmon fruits are astringent and unpalatable to most of the people because of their high tannin content. As they mature the tannin gradually disappears and the fruit gets sweeter and more aromatic. 
If you have immature fruits you need to allow them to ripe before to use. When they are ready the flesh will become completely soft, almost liquid.

Ingredients:
500 g very ripe persimmons
20 g fresh lemon juice
50 g chia seeds

Preparation:

Rich Tomato Conserve

TÜRKÇE İÇİN TIKLAYIN
PER ITALIANO

Hello everyone.. It's been a while...

I've been busy preparing tons of tomato conserve these days as you can see some of them in the photo ;)

Several years back, 2012 to be precise, I shared a tomato conserve recipe which was from the Italian Thermomix cookbook. In the course of time I've made a few changes to the recipe.
I don't like wasting good stuff so I abandoned removing seeds and draining the juice of the tomatoes. I use the entire tomato as it is, with peel and all.
Furthermore, I've added more vegetables to the mixture. We like it more this way.

Today I'd like to share with you my latest version.

A very important note before the recipe: If you are new into homemade conserve world I'd like to encourage you to read a more detailed article on sterilization and pasteurization methods. Even though I'll explain in the recipe how I do it, I am not an expert. Therefore reading and learning about the details, tips, food safety and health concerns would be the wise thing to do.

Here comes the recipe... 

It yields 2 jars of 500 ml.

Ingredients:
1100 g ripe tomatoes
100 g red bell pepper
70 g onion
70 g carrot
50 g celery stick
1 clove of garlic
5 basil leaves
A few sprigs of parsley
1 tsp salt
1 tsp oregano or thyme


Preparation:

Peanut Butter

TÜRKÇE İÇİN TIKLAYIN
PER ITALIANO

One of the easiest things you can prepare with your Thermomix is 100% pure Peanut Butter. There is no hydrogenated fat, no sugar, no salt, no additives! It is made with natural roasted peanuts.

My husband and I are recently hooked on this yummy peanut butter. We often enjoy it on our toasted bread together with banana slices. 

When I was little, my first encounter with peanut butter was Hollywood movies when the mother of the family prepared breakfast or school lunches for the kids. It wasn't something very popular in Turkey, it still is not as much as it is in USA even though you can find many products in the market today. The same goes also for Italy, where I've been living for more than 10 years. There is not much peanut butter love going on here either. The popularity level in America remains untouchable I guess.

Peanut butter is a great source of protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals. Even though it is high in fat and calories, still considered healthy.( Here is what Walter C. Willett, M.D. Professor of Nutrition from Harvard School of Public Health says about it.)

100 g of peanut butter is around 580 calories and contains 25 g protein, 20 g carbohydrates, 50 g fat.


Ingredients:

400 g dry roasted unsalted peanuts

Preparation:

Long Fermented Whole Wheat Bread

TÜRKÇE İÇİN TIKLAYIN
PER ITALIANO

4 years ago I published a delicious Mixed Seed Bread recipe. 
Since then I baked it countless times. Over time made a few modifications. Today I'd like to share with you guys its latest version.

I currently leave out the white flour. It wasn't much anyway.
I use organic whole wheat flour and whole wheat rye flour. Being stone ground, they are higher in nutrients and fiber, thus much better choices for your health.

A small note..  According to Mayo Clinic as well as many health experts, "Multi-grain" and "whole grain" are not interchangeable terms. Whole grain means that all parts of the grain kernel — the bran, germ and endosperm — are used. In contrast, multi-grain means that a food contains more than one type of grain, although none of them may necessarily be whole grains. The same goes for other variations, such as the term "seven grain". 

Another modification to the recipe is that I've increased the length of leavening time so I've reduced the amount of the yeast.

Ingredients: 
400 g water
60 g grape molasses
5 g fresh yeast
350 g stone ground whole wheat flour
200 g stone ground whole wheat rye flour
12 g salt
20 g water at room temperature
100 g sunflower seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds*
50 g sesame seeds
50 g poppy seeds
Oil

* Do not mistake cumin seeds in the recipe with ground cumin. You can replace cumin seeds with caraway seeds if you wish.


Preparation:

Sun Dried Tomato Pate

TÜRKÇE İÇİN TIKLAYIN
PER ITALIANO

Last year we decided not to keep doing unhealthy diets anymore in the name of (supposedly) healthy living. Instead, we agreed to adopt an essential healthy lifestyle change.

As we all are told many times by the experts and printed on our brains, there are two building blocks for this topic:
1.) A healthy balanced diet 2.) Regular physical activity

The difference of opinion among popular diets (Vegetarian, Vegan, Raw Vegan, Paleo, Low Glysemic Diet, Gluten-free, Atkins, Dukan, Mediterranean...etc) arises of how to achieve that healthy diet. This division of opinions often leaves us, the general public, with confusion.

We researched and tried to read a lot on different takes on the topic. We decided to steer clear of any nutrition trend but adopt an alimentation that we see fit at the moment for ourselves. Happily we've got our effort's worth. The "well-known" secret is being constant.

Stefano, my husband, suffers from hypothyroidism and is on medication. As people familiar with the condition may know, hypothyroid patients often find it difficult to lose weight. They suffer from lower energy levels and get exhausted more easily. We tried different diets in the past, including one by a dietitian, nothing seemed to work until recently.

Even though I didn't have problems with my thyroid neither I had much excess weight, I didn't feel myself fit enough. I had some kind of constant fatigue issue, no matter how much I rested I often felt exhausted.

As a result of our lifestyle change Stefano has lost 9 kg and myself a modest 2 kgs at a slow but consistent pace, without starving ourselves to death. Our LDL and total cholesterol reduced, HDL increased. We've started to feel more energetic. 
How did we succeed this? (I would like to share our own experience with you guys thinking it may interest some but, by all means, do not ever take me as an expert on the topic! )

- Firstly, we started to practice sport regularly, 3 - 4 times a week. I will talk about it in detail in my next post.

As for our change of alimentation...

- We increased protein intake in our diet as we noticed we didn't have as much protein as we thought we did. When losing weight you will want to lose body fat but maintain lean muscle. Protein helps you do that. By the way, there is often a misperception as if Protein = Meat. We increased our protein intake by consuming protein rich foods such as legumes (lentils and beans mostly) and eggs more often, we didn't start eating more meat.

- We have red meat not more than once a week. We rather eat fish or chicken. We are one or two days a week vegeterians.

- For breakfast we eat a mixture of oats, yogurt, raisins, goji berries, cinnamon and nuts. Mostly on the days that we do more physical activity we have protein shake.

- We haven't cut out bread, pasta and rice from our diet but reduced. We rather choose whole grain  varieties when we eat.

- We eat plenty of fruits and vegetables.

- We avoid any refined, processed and convenience foods.

- We don't consume any low/reduced fat or calorie diet products. We rather have full fat alternatives, obviously paying attention on the amount and calorie intake.

- We use extra virgin olive oil for salads and cooking. We add nuts, often toasted sunflower, pumkin and flax seeds, to our salads.

-  We cut out soda and artificial sweeteners altogether. We reduced sugar almost to none (if we don't count 1 teaspoon of unrefined brown sugar that Stefano adds in his espresso) 

- We have a daily treat. We eat 1 - 2 mini square of chocolate which obviously has minimum 70% cocoa ;) They come in many flavors: orange, lemon, mint, licorice, caramel, cocoa beans, ginger, chili, rum and many others.
Very strict diet plans are very hard to stick to. They fail you in so many different levels. You either fall off the vagon very soon or, as soon as you stop dieting you go back to your old eating habits and end up overeating all the things you starved yourself. Therefore we had better not to be too harsh on ourselves ;)

- We drink a lot of water, at least 2 liters a day, plus green, black and herbal teas.

- Even though we don't have any regular, planned snacking between meals, if we feel like to have a snack we opt for one portion fruit or a few unsalted, toasted nuts such as almonds, walnuts, brazilian nuts, hazelnuts and cashews.

- We get two Omega 3 pills a day. (Ours have 500 EPA / 250 DHA) Among its countless benefits they are told to promote weight loss by boosting your metabolism and help you burn fat, increase your HDL cholesterol and lower triglycerides.

- And finally we loosen ourselves once a week. We have one cheat meal. That special meal we enjoy whatever we please such as pasta, pizza, brunch, dessert...etc. It probably goes without saying that we eat reasonably.
This freedom is important for the long-term sustainability of your nutrition plan as well as preventing your body to go in hunger mode which would make you store more fat by slowing down your metabolism and so you'd end up burning less and less calories every day.

- As for physical activity we opted for walking and running. I will talk about that experience in my next post.

Today I'd like to share with you one of our favorite pate recipes...

Ingredients:
600 g water
250 g sun-dried tomatoes
Salt, if needed*

25 g basil leaves
1 clove of garlic
180 g extra virgin olive oil

* My dried tomatoes were already salted so I didn't add any. 


Preparation: