Food...Food...and More Food

A post all about food! We have been eating some of our favorites this week and I thought that I would share them with all of you. Lauren absolutely LOVES dates. If she could, she would eat them all day. Unfortunately, like all fruit, they have a lot of natural sugars in them and we don't like hyper Lauren so we have to restrict her 'date intake'. The other day I was so proud of her in the grocery store when we were walking through the produce section and she was yelling and pointing, 'apple, banana, grapes, booberries'; glad she knows her fruits instead of candy bars. Evidence here...

This is how she responded when she knew she was put on a strict date diet

Now comes the horrible part of the story. I usually get our dates from the bulk section at Whole Foods but haven't made a trip there in quite some time. Jewel had a nice deal on some good-looking, plump, dates and Lauren spotted them in the grocery store and started screaming 'yum'. Anyways, I gave her one and Kyle gave her three. It wasn't until the last one that Kyle gave her that she spit a little something in his hand...a pit!! That means that she ate three of these suckers...

Now onto the next treat. I really love a good grilled cheese and am looking for fun variations often. My internship supervisor told me about this and I had to try. Here is a fig (similar but not the same as a date)

Put it through the mini-food processor until it was chunky

Put a few slices of brie on my bread (with butter)

Topped the brie with some thin apple slices

Put the fig chunks on top of that

Grilled it up and yummo!

Lauren kept saying 'more please' in sign language. Here she is mid 'more'.

and mid-'please'

Now onto dessert. I am big ice cream lover. I usually have to eat a heaping bowl every night before I go to bed. Since I have been slowly cutting processed foods out of my diet and eating less sugary things, ice cream just hasn't tasted quite the same. So...I made my own! Take about 1 1/2 frozen bananas and plop them into a food processor.

Keep on low and occasionally scrape down the bowl. If you want a 'dippin dot' texture, you can stop here. Otherwise it is a good time to add anything you might like in it.

I added a few carob chips and spoonful of almond maple butter. Cold Stone has a banana ice cream so think about what you would add to that.

Mix it all up on low again until the desired consistency is reached

Because there are no preservatives, you really need to eat it that night otherwise the banana will start to brown up. A yummy, healthy treat that you don't have to worry about your kiddos eating.