Yesterday, B and I began cooking some of the desserts for our Thanksgiving meal. B made her Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake. I made Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Ice Cream. We will soon head out to B’s parents’ house where we will spend the day playing, watching movies, and cooking the rest of the food for our meal tonight.
Here’s wishing you and your family a very Happy Thanksgiving!
The news programs and blog sites have been a buzz recently about Congress declaring Pizza a vegetable. Not some eggplant, pepper, spinach, and broccoli laden version of pizza. What was being referenced was your typical school lunch slice of pizza.
I have bad memories of school lunch pizza. I clearly remember a girl taking her fist and punching her pizza. The indentation she made was clearly visible… until the pizza began to “recover.” It morphed its shape back to the pre-fist-punch shape. This pizza apparently had healing capabilities or was cooked with a liberal dosage of rubber. Possibly the latter considering that kids also used to bounce the meatballs around the lunch room. (I wish I was joking. And, yes, I usually brown-bagged it.)
So pizza a veggie?
Well, despite the reactionary tone, Congress didn’t exactly make this declaration. They did do something nefarious to anyone who wants kids to get nutritious school lunches, though. Currently, an eighth of a cup of tomato paste counts as if it had the same nutritional value as a half cup of vegetables. Most other veggies need to be half of cup’s worth before they are counted as a serving. The Obama administration wanted to remove the tomato paste exception. Congress blocked this.
Some, mostly the food companies, hailed the decision pointing to the fiber and other nutrients that tomato paste contains. I’ve used it in my cooking from time to time, too. So I wondered. How nutritious is it?
The Washington Post tried stacking tomato paste against various fruits. They found it fared pretty well. Still, they pointed out, fruits and veggies vary wildly in their nutritional content. As they put it: “A half-cup of avocado is quite nutritionally different from a half-cup of zucchini.”
I got to thinking that the best thing to compare tomato paste with are actual tomatoes. After all, tomato paste isn’t claiming to be zucchini or spinach or apples or oranges. So why stack it up against those. Let’s see how 1/8th cup of tomato paste compares to 1/2 cup of tomatoes. Thankfully, Calorie King let me easily look this information up.
So 2 tablespoons (1/8th of a cup) of tomato paste contains nearly twice the calories and much more sodium as the “equivalent” (as defined by Congress) amount of chopped tomatoes. (They could use low sodium tomato paste, but let’s be honest here. They’ll likely use the regular stuff.) It also has nearly twice the sugar, twice the carbs and none of the calcium. Tomato paste does best chopped tomatoes when it comes to potassium and slightly beats it out in dietary fiber. Still, I don’t think the calorie/sodium/sugar tradeoff is worth less than 1 gram of added fiber.
Tomato paste clearly doesn’t stack up, but perhaps it has more vitamins? Calorie King didn’t display this information, so I found another website, Self Nutrition Data, that did.
Here is the nutrition data for 1/2 cup of tomato paste. (They didn’t let me modify the amounts.)
Now, here is the information for 1 cup of chopped tomatoes.
They look sort of the same until you realize that you need to divide the tomato paste percentages by 4 and the chopped tomato percentages by 2. Here’s a handy chart with the final “serving size” percentages:
|
Vitamin A |
Vitamin C |
Calcium |
Iron |
|
| Tomato Paste (1/8th cup) |
10% |
12% |
1.25% |
5.5% |
|
Chopped Tomatoes (1/2 cup) |
15% |
19% |
1% |
1.5% |
You can see that tomato paste still falls short in vitamins A and C. It has a slight lead in calcium which is interesting given that Calorie King showed it as having 0mg. (I’m guessing that was due to rounding for a 1/8th cup serving.) It also has a decent lead in iron.
So, should pizza (or, more accurately, tomato paste) be defined as a vegetable. Most certainly not. First of all, there is the nutritional data that I showed above. Perhaps, the best reason comes from NHL, though. My third grade son, upon hearing this, declared: “But tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables!” He’s right. They are. You might as well declare apple pie a veggie. Perhaps we need to hire Jeff Foxworthy to run a special of his TV game show for Congressfolks. We’ll call it: Are You Smarter Than A Third Grader?
Three weeks ago, B and I got to experience that all-too-rare event known as “date night.” We ditched dropped the kids off at B’s parents’ house and went to Outback Steakhouse.
I had called ahead, but, due to circumstances beyond our control, we wound up arriving about an hour later than our reservation. Even so, we were seated rather quickly.
After placing our order, we were presented with two big loaves of bread. I knew we had a big meal ahead of us, but it still took all of my willpower not to devour this bread. I took a little taste, but that made it worse. It tasted so good!
Before long, our appetizer, Spinach Artichoke Dip, arrived. This tasted heavenly. The dip itself was wonderful, but the addition of the garlic toast pieces was incredible.
Next up was the main course. B got steak with shrimp and a baked potato. I had a mahi dish with rice and veggies.
I can’t speak for B’s dish, but mine was very tasty. I wound up finishing all of mine up while B had some of her meat (and the rest of the bread) packed up to eat for lunch the next day.
When it came time for dessert, we were too stuffed to eat any more. Still, we ordered the Sweet Adventure Sampler Trio. This comes with samples of three different desserts. And by samples, I mean what might be regular sized portions of each dessert anywhere else. Since we were full, though, we ordered it to go. I was quite amazed when our server showed us how they had packaged the desserts. Each segment of the desserts was in a different container. (I’ve got to apologize for the overexposure of some of these shots. The white packaging made photographs hard to take.)
First up was the Chocolate Thunder from Down Under: A chocolate pecan brownie topped with vanilla ice cream, warm chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and chocolate shavings.
Once combined, they formed this delicious dessert:
After this was the carrot cake (with coconut and pecans) and the classic cheesecake.
Both of these were good, but the brownie was by far my favorite. All in all, we had a great time at Outback Steakhouse. While steak is not my thing, they have enough other options that I look forward to going back there again.
Disclaimer: B received a coupon for a free steak from an online promotion and I received an Outback Steakhouse gift certificate during a blog tour.
It’s inevitable. You buy a bunch of bananas and though you use many, one or two start to turn brown. Not just normal brown, though. Those are still good to eat, but threatening-to-go-mushy-any-day brown. Time to toss out the bananas and buy a new bunch, right? Wrong. Well, maybe buy a new bunch, but don’t toss those old ones. Any baker will tell you that many a great banana-based recipe can use ripe bananas. Banana bread. Banana pancakes. Banana pudding. Banana muffins. Ice cream.
Yes, you read that last one right. Using only bananas and one other ingredient, you can make ice cream! That other ingredient isn’t even milk.
First, let’s start with the bananas.
Peel and slice the bananas. Stick them into ziploc bags and put them into the freezer. I usually put about 1 to 2 bananas per bag. Allow them to freeze for awhile. This might take a couple of hours, but you could also just put bananas in as you have them until you’ve collected enough.
Once you have quite a few bananas, you can make the ice cream. Take out your bananas and a jar of Peanut Butter & Co’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter.
First, put the bananas in your blender.
I usually work in batches of 2 bananas. I made a 4 banana batch once and it overwhelmed my poor blender. With the bananas in, turn the blender on. After awhile, the bananas will turn crumbly. You might have to stop a few times to move bananas off the blender’s sides and towards the middle.
Finally, the whole thing will take on a creamy, almost soft-serve texture.
At this point, toss in the dark chocolate peanut butter. One tablespoon per banana.
Turn the blender back on and puree the mixture together.
You now have soft serve dark chocolate peanut butter banana ice cream! If you want your ice cream more like hard ice cream, just put it in a container in the freezer for about 3 hours.
There you go. Hard dark chocolate peanut butter ice cream!
Given that this is only bananas and peanut butter, it’s probably healthy, right? Well, I came up with this little nutritional chart to the right. As you can see,
1 banana’s worth of the ice cream is under 200 calories, has only 7 grams of fat, and has 4 grams of fiber. Plus, it has 35% of your daily requirement of B6 and 20% of your daily requirement of Vitamin C. Let’s see plain ice cream do this!
Of course, it could be the healthiest ice cream in the world, but it wouldn’t matter if it tasted horrible. Luckily, it tastes great. I gave it to my boys and they loved it. I toyed with hiding the secret, non-dairy aspect of the ice cream from them, but decided to let them in on the secret. They still begged for bowls of it every night. They even tried asking for it for breakfast.
“After all”, NHL reasoned, "it’s peanut butter and bananas. It’s healthy!”
I’ve got to admit that I seriously entertained the notion of breakfast ice cream. Sadly, for the kids, I eventually turned them down. Still, I don’t mind giving them a bowl or two for dessert and they don’t mind gobbling it up.
It’s been way too long since I’ve done a Cooking With TechyDad segment. It’s not that I haven’t been cooking. I’ve just been sticking to tried and true (and somewhat boring) recipes. Picking 39 pounds of apples gives me the perfect excuse to try something new. We had some frozen pie crust in our freezer so I figured this would be the perfect time to try making an apple pie.
First, I collected my ingredients: apples, sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, and salt.
Next, I peeled and sliced the apples.
After this, I added the sugar, salt, cinnamon, and lemon juice.
After mixing, I had my pie filling.
My pie crust had been defrosting during this, so I put the apples into the shell and topped it with another defrosted crust.
It didn’t look the best, but I knew that looks only matter so much. I made a few slits on the top and into the oven it went. Before long, the pie was done. I was actually surprised at how good it looked.
Our mouths were watering. Just look at that delicious crust.
After the pie cooled, I sliced into it and… disaster! The apples had released their juices, flooded the pie, and soaked the bottom crust.
Taking the first slice out, the slice fell apart.
Obviously, I needed some kind of thickening agent in the filling. Something to bind or thicken the juices so they didn’t just flood the pie. The pie tasted terrific, don’t get me wrong, but next time I try this, I’ll tweak the recipe a bit to improve the results. And, with over 15 pounds of apples left, I will definitely have the chance to try this again.
Have you ever made an apple pie? How did you avoid a pie flood?
