Foodie Friday: Bubbles and Bananas

It's Foodie Friday! Foodie Friday is my weekly feature that gives you a window into my kitchen. I love to cook, I love to eat, I love to read cookbooks, and I love to inspire people to give vegan food a chance. Thus, Foodie Friday was whipped up and baked to perfection.

I already shared my Easter goodies with you, so it's an abbreviated version of Foodie Friday this week.

I saw an episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay on Food Network last week in which the featured dish was pad thai, and my instantaneous craving told me that I had to try making the 1,000 Vegan Recipes version again soon. This time I doubled the amount of sauce called for in the recipe because last time the rice noodles soaked it right up. It was delicious, and the extra sauce won Jason over.


In my coffee shop days during high school and college, I made myself a lot of Italian sodas. What's not to love about them? They're bubbly, colorful, and sweet! While browsing the shelves at World Market recently, Jason asked if we could make our own Italian sodas at home. Of course we can! So we came home with bottles of strawberry and vanilla Torani flavored syrup. Here's how you make an Italian soda: fill a normal-sized drinking glass with chilled club soda, and pour in two ounces or so of your desired syrup flavor. Yes, it really is that simple! I used 1 1/2 ounces of strawberry syrup and a 1/2 ounce of vanilla syrup. My favorite Italian soda flavor of all time is kiwi. I haven't had it in years, but trust me: It is divine. I might have to order myself a bottle online if I can't buy some locally.

Jason has a bad habit of asking me to buy him food items and then ignoring them until they're decomposing on our counter. This week's rotten food of choice was bananas. If you know me at all, you know that I hate throwing away food. HATE. It is so irresponsible and such a waste of money!

I was not going to let those stinky bananas get the best of me. I consulted my cookbook shelf to find a banana bread recipe for which I already had all of the ingredients, and I settled on the one in The Compassionate Cook, a charming, no-frills little paperback chock-full of simple yet delicious recipes. I used my wide-mouth loaf pan to make a Jason-sized loaf. He liked it so much that it's already gone. Maybe getting me to bake was his plan with the bananas all along.