Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston may be ancient history, but there’s one American super-couple that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon: peanut butter and banana. Today’s recipe takes the classic sandwich and, well, turns it inside out to create a savory snack or a meal on the go.

The Ingredients: Everyone knows bananas are high in potassium, but their high fiber content and the variety of sugars they offer (glucose, fructose, and sucrose) make them ideal sources for extended energy. They are also high in iron. Besides being the one of the tastiest snacks, peanut butter is also one of the healthiest: it’s high in monosaturated (good!) fats that help prevent bad cholesterol from building up. PB also contains nutrients like niacin and calcium.

The Recipe:

3 large, very ripe (read: disgusting and brown) bananas

2 eggs

1/2 cup butter or substitute (my fave for baking is Earth Balance)

1 1/2 TBS sour cream or buttermilk

1 tsp lemon juice

1 cup sugar

1 cup natural peanut butter

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

2 cups flour

Note: For a real peanutty punch, replace 1/2 cup of flour with peanut flour

Instructions:

1. Place bananas, eggs, butter, sour cream, and lemon juice into a food processor (or mix by hand) until smooth.

2. In a separate bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, and baking soda.

3. Pour your banana mixture over the flour mixture and stir until both are incorporated. Then mix in your peanut butter.

4. Pour your batter into one big loaf pan, two small ones, or into papered cupcake pans for muffins. Bake at 350 degrees for 55 to 65 minutes. Your creation should be brown on top, but poke with a fork to make sure the middle is baked, too.

5. Cool in pan for five minutes after baking before removing.

If you want to change up an old favorite, substitute almond butter for the peanut butter and almond flour for the peanut flour. However you prefer to whip this recipe up, your friends and family are bound to go nuts over it!

Need an excuse? Try the economy.

What is the most stressful moment of a relationship?

Katy Perry shares her thoughts on marriage.

What’s your hangover cure?

Victoria Beckham is too busy for Ugly Betty.

Get that perfect sunkissed look for Spring.

Which means it’s time to bust out those fall recipes and all things pumpkin.

I’m a huge fan of pumpkin bread; it just tastes like fall. This recipe is my absolute favorite – it’s always moist, it’s the perfect combination of spices, and it’s easy enough that I can do it. So get the oven ready, bask in the scent of it, and then dig in.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup butter or margarine, softened

• 3 cups sugar

• 3 eggs

• 3 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 tablespoon baking powder

• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves

• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground nutmeg

• 1 (16 ounce) can solid pumpkin

DIRECTIONS

1. In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add eggs; mix well.

2. Combine dry ingredients; stir into creamed mixture just until moistened.

3. Stir in pumpkin.

4. Pour into two greased 9-in. x 5-in. x 3-in. loaf pans. Bake at 350 degrees F for 1 hour or until bread tests done.

5. Dig in. Just try not to eat the whole thing in one sitting.

What the heck is the difference between all those flours?

Well, I’m here to tell you. Flour 101, here we go!

All-purpose: As you might gather from its rather clever name, all-purpose flour can be used for pretty much anything and everything. People on gluten-free diets can’t have it, but if you don’t have to worry about that, you can use all-purpose for baking, cooking, bread-making… whatever. It’s all good.

Wheat: Wheat flour is like all-purpose’s healthier and less versatile cousin. It has fiber and protein that all-purpose doesn’t have, but it can be a pain to bake with because it tends to produce very dense items. In many recipes, it’s OK to sub up to 1/3 the total amount of all-purpose flour with wheat flour.

White whole-wheat. Now this is good stuff. White whole-wheat flour has all the nutrition of wheat flour with the lightness of all-purpose. I wouldn’t use it to replace the full amount of all-purpose in any recipe, but you should be able to sub in at least half the amount. These delicious muffins use entirely wheat flour, and white whole-wheat gives them a nice, fluffy texture.

Self-rising. Using self-rising flour is a little bit like using yeast for pastries and other sweet things. The idea is that the flour has leavening agents already mixed into it, so your baked goods will be high as the sky when you take them out of the oven instead of falling flat and being mushy in the middle. To make self-rising flour yourself, just add 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder and ¼ tsp salt to 1 cup of regular flour.

Bread. Bread flour has a lot of gluten, more gluten than all-purpose, so that your bread will stay strong and keep its shape while baking. On the negative side, you probably don’t want to use it for anything except making bread, so if you don’t make a lot of bread, this flour might not be worth your while.

Rye. Rye flour has a low gluten content and is good for making sourdoughs and breads like pumpernickel or, gasp, rye.

Corn, rice, or nut. These flours aren’t widely used, but they are great for people with gluten-free diets.

Cake flour. Cake flour is as soft as a pillow and very light. It’s primarily used for making cakes (who would have guessed?) and soft, cake-like cookies. A lot of gluten tends to make things tougher, so cake flour has just a little bit of gluten to guarantee a light texture for baked goods.

And one product plug: Flour is kind of a generic cooking substance, so you won’t find a ton of variation across brands. But King Arthur is, in my opinion, the best, and they have a wide variety of excellent flours to choose from.

[photo from cookbookcatchall.blogspot.com] 

1) Pay rent to keep a roof of some sort over my recently highlighted head.

2) Social spending, as in, how many nights a week do the remaining funds allow for.

Please note that these are not necessarily considered in that order, which can cause trouble.

Depending on whether your college town is ridiculously expensive (see: going to college in a major city) or suuuper cheap (see: anyplace where drinks are less than $4.00 each or has promotions like “dollar long island night”), your bank account is going to take a very different sort of beating by means of your social budget.

But food is an essential, and when takeout can cost more than your bar tab, grocery shopping to save some green is a great habit to have.

Some tricks that I’ve picked up, courtesy of undergrad:

1) It costs more to eat healthy. And no, this does not stand as an endorsement of the lettuce-and-cheap-vodka diet! What we’re getting at is the fact that you can cut down the cost of your basic essentials. If you want to be a label whore, fine, but keep it to your wardrobe. Store-brand basics, like cereals, are much cheaper than brand-name foods. Same goes with frozen veggies and canned foods—the ingredients are basically the same, only a little less pricey.

A dollar saved is an extra dollar toward the cute bartender’s tip. Desperate for a cheap, salty snack? Pretzels are usually pretty cheap and are better for you than your basic chip.

2) It’s not as cute as your sorority or fraternity labeled bottle-opener keychain, but use the stupid discount keychain cards. They actually do save you money.

3) Buy a Brita and stop with the bottled water already. You’ll save more than you think, and if you have roommates, you can go in on it and make it even cheaper…

4) Since you’re shopping for one, make a point to try and buy portions you’ll use. A trick for things like bread, which can go stale pretty quickly, is to keep it in the freezer and use as you need. Let it thaw on its own or pop it in the toaster or microwave, depending on your intention. Likewise, don’t buy a gallon of milk if you’ll only drink a half gallon by the expiration date… make sense?

Any other suggestions for how to save? Let us know!

[adorable photo from icanhascheezburger.com] 

• Spraying your oven with water will make your bread crisp and brown. Getting a nice crust on homemade bread is tricky, but steam is the key. Fill a clean spray bottle with water, then lightly spray the bottom and sides of the oven right after you pop in the bread. You can also create steam by warming up a pan in the oven and then dumping a little bit of cold water in the pan as you start to bake the bread.

• You can make better rice by rinsing it. Most types of rice contain excess starch, so if you think ahead a little bit, you can get far better-tasting rice. Soak the amount of rice you’re using in clean, cold water for 20 minutes before cooking it. When it’s done soaking, drain it and rinse it thoroughly a few times. The result: a less sticky, nicer-tasting batch of rice.

• Stainless steel will get rid of garlicky fingers. If you’ve been chopping and chopping cloves of garlic and your fingers have the scent to prove it, rub them for a minute on the side of a stainless steel knife or the bend of a stainless steel faucet. Use some muscle! Then lather up with soap and wash your hands normally. When you’re finished, that garlic smell should be almost totally gone.

[Image courtesy of 4hisglory.wordpress.com]

Something about grilled cheese is so fantastically comforting. It’s crunchy, yet gooey. It’s not too hot, it provides the perfect amount of warmth. It can be dunked in tomato soup, or can stand alone. And anyone from the age of 8 onward can make it! Just be careful not to burn it.

A recipe for grilled cheese may seem foolish, but it can be an art form. And yummy as the diner-style ones are, you can make a healthy one in two seconds. And it’s still delicious.

Sammich for one:

2 slices of 2% milk American cheese

2 slices whole wheat or multigrain bread

non-stick cooking spray

frying pan

Assemble your sandwich (I have faith you know how to do this). Spray the exposed bread on each side with non-stick cooking spray and put them in the frying pan, letting the bottom piece of bread toast and allowing the cheese to start getting melty. Flip as you deem appropriate to toast the other side and melt the rest of the cheese. I prefer my bread to be a golden brown but some people are pickier about the crunch factor.

Feeling experimental? Switch up your cheeses, try a pepper jack if you like things spicy! Try adding tomato, or make your sandwich a double-decker by adding another layer of cheese and bread to a cooked grilled cheese.

Also, a yummy fattening fix is to use butter instead of non-stick cooking spray.

Any other ideas to improve on this classic? Let us know!

You’ll need:

3 slices of bread (switch up as you prefer, but it can be done with wheat, white, multigrain… up to you. Rye may not be the best choice here)

1 egg

milk (I prefer skim, but use whatever floats your boat)

ground cinnamon

nonstick cooking spray or butter

Optional:

Powdered (confectioner’s) sugar

blueberries/strawberries/fruit of your preference

Crack your egg into a bowl and break up the yolk with a fork. Add a splash of milk and stir until blended (think a little thicker than scrambled-egg consistency). Sprinkle in a pinch of sugar and a little cinnamon and stir one last time.

At this point, take a small frying pan either sprayed with nonstick cooking spray, or coated with melted butter, and heat over medium/medium high.

Dunk each slice of bread, one at a time, into the egg mixture, thoroughly soaking it but without making it soggy, and place into the pan. Sprinkle a little extra cinnamon on the sides facing up, and wait a couple minutes before turning over. If you like crunchier french toast, leave a little longer before flipping.

To serve, stack ‘em and dust with powdered sugar. Accessorize further with butter (real or even the spray, low-to-no-calorie spray stuff) and syrup, and you’re ready to knock out that hangover. If you have a little fruit on the side to garnish, adding a berry here or there to your fork with a bite just makes it all the more heavenly.

Yeah, yeah, it shouldn’t be that hard. But somehow nothing seems quite satisfying enough, quite interesting enough when I have to think so hard about my food.

I am not the kind of girl who diets. In fact, I’ve never been on a diet in my entire life (excluding this “Passover diet” that I go on every year for a week). And I’ll tell you, I don’t like it. If I had to be so careful about what I ate all the time, I would definitely be a much bigger bitch.

Which is really making me a better person. Because now when someone is rude to me on the train, I can think, “oh, they must be on a diet,” and let it go. Thanks, Passover!

In any event, the last couple of days were annoying. I missed out on free Beard Papa cream puffs, on free cookies, on going out to (not free, but still) pizza with friends, etc. etc.

I ate Pinkberry frozen yogurt for lunch one day when I was in a rush and couldn’t think of anything else that was fast.

I was not always nice to my boyfriend.

But he’s forgiven me and now Passover has, at last, passed.

So tonight I ate pizza and cake for dinner.

And now I feel sick.

But I’ve learned something: cutting out bread from your diet sucks. And, if you’re me, it causes you to eat more junk food out of desperation. So don’t do it! Eat bread! EAT BREAD!!!

And so ends my Passover Diet chronicles. Please hold for Yom Kippur fast (COMING SOON to a Jew near you!).

Anyway, Day 3. I woke up hungry. I ate leftover lox (with nothing else because I am super gross) and drank coffee. Then I went about my daily business.

I didn’t get a chance to eat again until the early afternoon and by then I was starving, I mean like in a dizzy, light-headed kind of way. Usually I can wait a bunch of hours before eating again. But then again, usually I eat bread.

So I had chicken and broccoli for lunch and felt better but still hungry.

Round it off with an apple and I’m doing really great, right? Actually, maybe I’ll lose weight on this after all. Coincidentally, of course.

Buuuuut then I felt hungry and depraved and ate a whole bunch of chocolate. Twice.

Happy Passover. Hand over the bread.