Chunky Monkey

So here's the deal with bananas. I like having them on hand for breakfast, especially on work mornings (plain oatmeal + banana + honey is the formula for survival from 0600 to 1300, mark my words). In that case, though, I want them yellow. Bright yellow. Not spotty. So I only buy about 3 if I'm at the store in order to finish them before they get too brown, which means I have to break them off from the giant bunches. You know what that means? That means I end up breaking open the peels on the bananas I plan to put back.

...And then put them back on the shelf with their broken stems hoping no one saw me.

The point is that last week at HEB I went a little crazy craze and just threw the whole bunch in my cart and planned to deal with it later.

What do you do with brown, spotty, gross-looking bananas? And one single egg left in the fridge? And the chocolate chips leftover from these cookies? And half a little jar of peanut butter? And a long shift coming up on Friday?

Chunky Monkey. The Chunk Monk. The Monk of Chunks.

Baker friends are looking at this ^ picture and wondering how these bananas became so wonderfully perfect for baking. Non-baker friends think I'm trying to poison them. On Wednesday night while Lora and Dirk were over, they taught me the trick of putting the brown spotty bananas in the freezer til I wanted to use them the next day. So I did, took them out in the morning, and found them like this in the afternoon. Something about the ice crystals breaking down and making the bananas super mushy and sweet. THEY. WERE. READY!

An added bonus of the freezer trick is that it took literally no time to mash them up.

This step smells like my favorite smoothie. (Cut up a banana and freeze it in a baggie, then blend it with a cup of milk and a spoonful of peanut butter. You're welcome.)

The dry stuff was boring-looking, so here it is blended with the good stuff.

I forgot to take a "before" picture of the muffin tins.

The "after" picture is making me wish I'd had enough bananas to double the recipe to keep more for myself.

Baked goods (and chocolate in general) make nurses and hospital staff happy (sane). There's a reason my manager Mary keeps a giant jar of candy in her office. So I brought 20ish of these muffins to put in the break room for a little Friday pick-me-up hoping everyone would love them as much as I do. And, I decided (after someone asked if I was going to give them a heart attack with these), these muffins are good for you. In 20ish muffins there's only a few tbsp of oil and one egg, the peanut butter has good fats and protein, and bananas are bananas. I used 2% milk (can't rock the skim milk in baked goods, though that's what I usually drink, and what the crap would I do with the leftover whole milk?), the amount of sugar in these is comparable to what a lot of recipes have in just 12 muffins, and chocolate chips are good for the soul.