Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

Banana Nut Muffins with Loacker Chocolate Chucks

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Loacker Cremkakao chocolate bar.This Loacker Cremkakao chocolate bar is super delicious all on it’s own. Loacker is a family owned business out of Italy and their factory is located at the foot of the Alps near the Austrian border. For 90 years they have been making a variety of light and crispy wafer cookies. In fact, they are the number one wafer cookie in the world! This is their first venture into the chocolate bar business and keeping true to their roots, they have incorporated a thin crispy wafer in the center of this decadent chocolate. (Isn’t that cool?) Loacker Banana nut muffins - chocolate bar.One bite and you’ll be looking for more, which will hopefully be available very soon as these bars are just being introduced into this country. You, spring box buyers, are the lucky ones to taste these first! Stay tuned for where you can buy more as I know you’ll be asking.

Loacker Banana nut muffins - finished on a plate.

Meanwhile, I made these decadent Banana Nut Muffins with Loacker Chocolate Chunks for a Sunday morning treat. These were beyond delicious!!

BANANA NUT MUFFINS WITH LOACKER CHOCOLATE CHUNKS – makes 12 muffins

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups all purpose flour
11/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg (preferably freshly grated)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 Loacker 3.07 oz. Cremkakao chocolate bar, cut into smallish chunks

In a bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs.

Smash the bananas and vanilla together.

Loacker Banana Nut muffins - chocolate cut up.

Your chocolate bar should look like this.

Sift the flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg together. Add to creamed mixture, alternately adding the banana mixture, starting and ending with the flour. Loacker Banana Nut muffins - batter in bowl with chocolate.Loacker Banana Nut muffins in the oven.Fold in walnuts and chocolate pieces. Butter non-stick muffin cups or use paper liners; fill 12 cups with batter, distributing evenly. Bake at 350° for 23-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Loacker Banana Nut Muffins cut in half.

Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack. Serve warm with LOVE. Delizioso!!

The Loacker Cremkakao chocolate bar was in our MARY’s secret ingredients spring box. The summer box will mail on June 25th. 

A September Sunday morning

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After the huge storm last night, including tornadoes in Long Island and parts of Connecticut, we awoke in the country to a most spectacular day today! Blue sky, billowy clouds, and a downed, huge, heavy tree branch that just missed one of our cars were the first things we saw this morning. Yikes!Toasted bagels with smoked salmon, Ben’s homemade cream cheese, tomatoes from the garden, thinly sliced red onion, and capers.
This was our breakfast, an absolute favorite of mine. Smoked salmon, Ben’s homemade cream cheese, tomatoes from the garden, thinly sliced red onion, capers and toasted bagels. We finished it off with a fruit salad of black mission figs, mango, red grapes and banana. Can’t beat that!
Fruit salad with black mission figs, mango, red grapes and banana.
Although there is nothing here that I made, except for putting together the fruit salad, I just had to share it with you because it was all so pretty in the dazzling sunlight this morning.

See the view from our dining room window below. Hope you had a great weekend!
View from dining room window.

Fruit!

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So after enjoying all these wonderful meals and special treats and drinks during the holidays, I am waking up to discover that I am really fat.

Not really. But, you know, when you put on a pair of favorite pants and think they’ve suddenly shrunk in length (even though they were fine the last time you put them on), then you have to fess up to the fact that it’s the size of your hips that’s hiking them up and you know, Spanx can only do so much. So I’ve gained a few pounds and it feels really uncomfortable.

I’ve now gone back to “clean eating” – less meat, little or no carbs and having a piece of celery or a half of apple if I’m starving before dinner. It’s working. I’ve already lost 3 of the 5 pounds.

I think fruit is a wonderful thing. Some doctors have told me it’s too sweet, it has too much sugar. But it’s a natural sweetness, right? It’s refreshing, satisfying that sweet tooth craving and makes all things “right”, as my mother used to say. She would have a piece of fruit at the end of her lunch every day as well as pack an apple, orange or pear in our lunch for school. I have kept that habit up, only we have a small bowl of fresh fruit salad at the end of our breakfast everyday. What I do is make a very large fruit salad on Sunday morning, and then it lasts us for the week, making it super easy to serve up for a workday morning.

You can, of course, combine all sorts of things but I don’t recommend bananas, unless you eat them right away, as they don’t hold up. Leave your strawberries whole so they don’t break down as quickly and serve them up sooner than the rest. A pineapple is wonderful, along with grapefruit, oranges, apples, and red or green grapes. Blueberries, blackberries, mangoes and kiwi are nice as well, but need to be eaten first too.
Fruit salad with grapefruit, blueberries, bananas, and basil.

And here’s a great tip, squeeze some fresh lime juice all over your salad and then top it off with torn fresh mint leaves. I have found that the mint leaf edges will not darken as quickly if you tear them, as opposed to cutting or chopping them.

So start your new year with fruit!
Fruit salad with kiwi, orange, grapes, grapefruit, and pineapple.

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