Soup to Dutts

I've been on a bit of a lemon kick lately. I've been adding lemon essential oil to my drinking water, and yesterday I attempted to make lemon bars for the first time. I made them for my community group meeting which was later that evening, but the bars didn't get eaten because we all decided to meet up for dinner at Chick-fil-A instead. Knowing I wasn't going to get my lemon fix for the day in the way that I'd planned, I decided to finally try CFA's new frosted lemonade, a blend of their yummy lemonade and their also-yummy soft-serve (a.k.a. Icedream ® ). (image from  Chick-fil-A ) I've often thought that Icedream would be great mixed with some other beverage; it's a little more watery than other soft-serves, which made me think that it would blend more smoothly and make the finished product easier to drink. Well, I was right about that! It was fabulous, texture-wise...in other words, I didn't have to make a fish face to drink it through a ...

I'll be honest: I'm not a huge fan of combining chocolate and fruit. I don't know what it is, but something about it just doesn't taste right to me. Unless that fruit is a banana. Bananas are creamier than most other fruits, so I guess it meshes better in my mind, I dunno. So, this week we happened to have some very ripe bananas, which pretty much automatically means banana bread is on the way. And we also happened to have some leftover chocolate chips (from a fantastic chocolate mousse that Tom made on Valentine's Day). So I found a recipe that looked like it could be easily tweaked to add chocolate chips, and the result was an oat-y banana bread that had just a touch of sweetness. It's also relatively low-fat, thanks to the use of applesauce instead of oil or butter. And I should mention, it comes with a lot less drama than that disaster of a banana chocolate chip pound cake I attempted last year... So, it didn't rise as much as other banana bread...