Category: Lowfat

Butterscotch Bars

It’s been an interesting year, hasn’t it? I’ve been on a bit of a bender lately, getting rid of (or at least, reducing) paperwork that’s been piling up and holds little interest for me. I have so much that I had to buy more paper (as in, paper file folders) to store all that paperwork in which seems redundant, but living in a place where paper…

It’s been an interesting year, hasn’t it? I’ve been on a bit of a bender lately, getting rid of (or at least, reducing) paperwork that’s been piling up and holds little interest for me. I have so much that I had to buy more paper (as in, paper file folders) to store all that paperwork in which seems redundant, but living in a place where paper still rules supreme, and digitizing takes as long as filing, I’m stuck filing and storing.

One change in the world of paper has been food blogs, which started out for many as being places where you could “store” and share your favorite recipes. But I’ve noticed over the last few years that food blogs have become a lot slicker, more polished, and often “aspirational.” While I’m jealous of those who have the talent, and patience, for writing for search engines, and arranging flowers on top of multi-layer cakes, I really just enjoy cooking and baking.

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Low(er) Fat Banana Bread

I know I’m late in the game and I have a gazillion excuses. Banana Bread became the recipe of the lockdown. It seemed everyone had some overripe bananas that needed to be used up, which isn’t all that uncommon even in the best of times. While I’ve had my own Banana Bread recipe on the blog for a while, but with many people had trouble…

I know I’m late in the game and I have a gazillion excuses. Banana Bread became the recipe of the lockdown. It seemed everyone had some overripe bananas that needed to be used up, which isn’t all that uncommon even in the best of times. While I’ve had my own Banana Bread recipe on the blog for a while, but with many people had trouble finding butter and eggs, a lot of us were baking and cooking with, and eating, whatever we could scrounge up in our pantries, refrigerators, kitchen cabinets, and freezers.

I usually have plenty of bulk chocolate for baking on hand, but was caught short when even grocery stores unexpectedly ran out of bars of baking chocolate. Fortunately, a local bakery came to my rescue with chocolate, but I had a small bag of chocolate chips on hand, which aren’t easy to come by around here (they sell them at G. Detou,) and decided to put those to use, along with some rapidly ripening bananas.

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Cranzac Cookies

When the lockdown was announced about a month ago, I thought of all the great things I would finally be able to do. I would finally tackle those five- to seven-season tv series that everyone told me that I just had to watch, that require a hundred-hour commitment to get through them. (Breaking Bad and The Wire, I’m looking at you…) I would have the…

When the lockdown was announced about a month ago, I thought of all the great things I would finally be able to do. I would finally tackle those five- to seven-season tv series that everyone told me that I just had to watch, that require a hundred-hour commitment to get through them. (Breaking Bad and The Wire, I’m looking at you…) I would have the time to go through all those folders of paperwork that pile up like a fallen cheerleader formation when you live somewhere where paperwork is as common (but not as welcome) as wine.

Or I might finally tackle The Goldfinch (769 pages) or finish A Little Life. I only made it to page 30 (of 720 pages) of the latter before my brain felt like an Escher print.

Yet none of those things have happened. I ended up launching a daily Apéro Hour on my Instagram IGTV channel and found myself doing a lot more cooking and baking and writing. I try to squeeze in a little exercise either following videos on YouTube or taking online Pilates classes, and ended up revisiting some vintage recipes, including my variation of one by Marcella Hazan. But I dug into my own personal cookbook archives to make these Cranzac Cookies, and I almost wish I didn’t, because I could not stop eating them. Continue Reading Cranzac Cookies...