Memorial weekend fun!
The man room is almost complete! It looks awesome!
Mark gave me these for our anniversary. Love it!
Baby Brynn showed up to the weekend BBQ. Mark monopolized her for two hours and nobody else got to hold her.
Annual anniversary banana photo (and Francois the photo-bomber!)
I keep buying bananas from Costco even though I know I just can’t possibly eat them all before they turn brown. Sometimes I go on strange food kicks and this is one of them.
After having great luck with banana bread, I decided to take it a step further and make these Skinny Monkey Cookies. At first I did not like them. They looked like rich chocolaty deliciousness but tasted like slightly chocolate bananas. As it turns out, I still like slightly chocolate bananas- just not when I am expecting rich sugary chocolate. But on the plus side, I can adjust my expectations for a 47 calorie cookie.
Skinny Monkey Cookie
It gets even better. The ingredients in this bad boy are bananas (duh) and applesauce, hence the skinny bit of the name. Even though I am willing to try a brand new recipe in search of another cookie to eat for breakfast, I am not willing to take an extra trip to the grocery store. So it an ironic twist of laziness, I made the applesauce from scratch to avoid going to the store.
I forgot how much I liked home made applesauce. So the benefit of this story is I like my semi-chocolaty banana cookies and I really enjoy home made applesauce. Both excellent ways to get my sweet fix without turning into a larger version of myself. Thank goodness for skinny cookies and natural sugars.
Leftover applesauce and cinnamon.
I really like bananas. They are tasty, they go well with some of my other favorite things, coffee and oatmeal, and they are yellow which I appreciate.
Mark does not like bananas. He doesn’t like it when we purchase bananas, even if they are for me and he does not have to eat them.
Sometimes when we get bananas I eat all of them. But when we get them at Costco, even though they are an excellent deal, I have a hard time eating 15 bananas before they go bad. (I said I really like bananas – I am not a crazy bananas for every meal person!). So I needed to find a way to get Mark to eat bananas with me. Kinda like the zucchini situation. Unlike zucchini, I could not shred a banana into his lasagna. I don’t think. If you have successfully made banana lasagna let me know.
In any case banana bread it was. But Mark doesn’t even like banana bread so I had to find something that was enough like cinnamon bread that he would go for it. Ta-da! Banana bread with Mark’s stamp of approval. I used this recipe, but I didn’t have milk so I used vanilla creamer (don’t worry it worked), and added a little bit of nutmeg.
So good!
We ate it on the front porch. That made it even more fun. 
I was so excited to go to the fair and bring our fun camera and extra lens. BUT then I left the battery sitting in the charger! And I didn’t realize it until we got there and I tried to take a picture of a cow. Oops! So fair pictures are with Mark’s iPhone. Which actually takes pretty awesome photos for a cell phone. For a cell phone. So that’s why some of these are a bit grainy.
I am pretty sure fair food is the same everywhere. Fried. Greasy. Best if served on a stick. But Northern California has rows upon rows of fair food. And the Stanislaus County Fair had all the delicious, greasy food we could hope for. And according to my pictures absolutely EVERYTHING is over-sized and on a stick. My skin felt gross almost immediately, but it was so tasty it was worth it! At least for one night.
Exhibit 1: Monster Corn Dog (even though Mark and I both took pictures with it, we actually split just one – and it was plenty!
Even the fries were huge!!
Me & Monster Corn Dog
Mark & Monster Corn Dog
The fries in the background and foreground are one order - just split on different plates. SO BIG!
I had my first frozen banana ever. I have no idea why I never tried these before. It was SO good!
Chocolate covered frozen bananas. So good!
