Prompt: Fruit Recipes

[runpunkrun]

Pull out your fruit recipes, folks. It's fruit week. Give us your strawberry chia jam tarts, your Chinese chicken salads, your oatmeal banana smoothies. If it has fruit in it, it qualifies.

To fill this prompt, you can:

1. Slide into the comments of this post and share a link to a recipe and why you like it.
2. Write up a favorite recipe and post it to the comm.
3. Try someone's recipe and reply to their post (or comment) with any changes you made and how it turned out.

If you like deadlines, you have one week to fill this prompt!

If you don't like deadlines, there's no deadline, and you can participate whenever you want.

As always, these prompts are just in case you need a little inspiration. During this time, you can continue to post to the comm even if it isn't related to the prompt.

Here's what's going on in the comments:

• Apple slices instead of crackers from jesse_the_k
• Microwave poached pear, vegan apple crumble, apple cake, and chicken salad from rosefox
• Raspberry Coulis from runpunkrun
• Melon with smoked meats, mango with chili, salt, and lime from j00j

Barely-a-Recipe: Spiced Bananas

[greywash]

Extremely unglamorous but very very tasty. This is a good alternative to banana bread et cetera if you have some bananas that are a little past their prime, or about to be a little past their prime—it keeps for four or five days in the fridge. You can also actually use it to make a bunch of slightly underripe bananas perfectly edible, but I wouldn't try it on super green ones. It also is plenty sweet enough—to my taste at least—to double as a no-sugar-added dessert.

The (not-a-)Recipe:

Bananas (how many—how many've you got? they'll cook down quite a bit, so I usually allow 1.5-2 bananas per person)
Pumpkin pie spice (alternately: separate canisters of ground ginger, cinnamon, and cloves)
Lemon wedges (optional)

You can make this in either the microwave or the oven (at 350°F); I usually use the microwave for speed. Slice the bananas into discs and put in a large dish that can go in the cooking vehicle of your choice (I use a Pyrex mixing bowl). Sprinkle them generously with pumpkin pie spice (if you're using separate ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, use cinnamon the most heavily, and be very very cautious with the cloves—just a sprinkle will do). Note that it's fine to put the bananas in in multiple layers, but if you do, make sure you sprinkle each layer with the spices. Cook until bananas are soft—they will sort of self-mash—stirring occasionally. For 5-7 bananas in my microwave, this takes about 5 minutes total; it'll take more like 20-30 in the oven, depending on how deeply you layer them. Serve warm, optionally topped with a squeeze of lemon.

If you're serving this as a dessert, this is good with whipped cream or ice cream (or iced not-cream), which also lightly conceals how genuinely hideous it tends to be. I also put it on oatmeal a lot, since it's a way of getting around the general fragility of a banana, if you shop of a weekend and then plan on eating oatmeal for the whole week. I also like it (warm) with (cold) yogurt and granola.