Necessity and the family dog are the mother of invention.

Our dog, as sweet and loving as she is, can be a real jerk sometimes. The past two weeks, she's taken to waking me up multiple times between 1am and 4am, just to hang out. She's a momma's girl and lets my husband sleep. We've tried taking her for long walks to make sure she's not waking me because she has to go out. She just wants a buddy to hang out with. I've been getting out of bed, going downstairs with her,  watching her go to her bowl to grab a mouthful of food, and leaving pieces of kibble on the floor. When she's full, she happily trots back upstairs without a care and plunks herself back into bed. Sometimes she gets up the stairs first, hops up into bed next to my husband, and sprawls in my space. It's like living with an inconsiderate frat boy. 

Since the dog is cutting in on my sleep,  my breakfast includes a shake of some form. I usually mix it together with the immersion mixer in a wide-mouth mason jar, since I can't ever get all of the stink out of the plastic drink bottles. No matter how much baking soda I use, it's just not a skill that I've mastered.


Banutter Shake
8 oz unsweetened milk substitute (soy, almond, coconut, etc.)
1 tbsp creamy peanut butter
1 banana


Berry protein shake
8 oz unsweetened milk substitute
half a cup of berries
1 scoop of some gluten-free protein powder

Sometimes I use a chocolate protein powder, sometimes it's vanilla. Sometimes the berries are fresh, sometimes I wait until they go on sale or ripen in the garden and then I freeze them on a cookie sheet and use the frozen berries in the shake. Regardless of what goes in the shake, the 8 oz of unsweetened milk substitute is key.

Last night, my overly social dog decided that we should hang out at 3:00am and again at 3:42am. Since I was exhausted, I slept through the alarm clock that I forgot to set for 5:30am and well, my morning was thrown into a tail-spin.  Lunch was a mixture of take-out containers form the weekend tossed together in a rush to get out. I decided to just take the ingredients for my shake and make it when I got into the office.

Somewhere between packing the immersion mixer and the Capri Sun pouch, I forgot the most important part of my shake in a mason jar on the counter: the coconut milk. I opened the lunch bag to find a sea of plastic boxes, a thing with a plug, a jar of peanut butter and a banana. If you've ever tried to put room temperature peanut butter on a slightly chilled banana, you know that the peanut butter doesn't exactly stay on the banana. So much for the shake.

One of the wonderful things about being gluten-sensitive is that it's pushed me to expand my palette and experiment with more exotic cooking. Two of my favorite recipes (a veggie curry recipe and a Senegalese Peanut and Spinach stew) both rely on peanut butter. When peanut butter is heated, it melts. The resulting texture is similar to that of fondue, making it ideal with things like...bananas!

I heated two tablespoons of peanut butter in a microwave safe bowl for 30 seconds, making it just melted enough but not so molten that it would scald the roof of the mouth. The banana was then sliced into small pieces and dumped into the bowl.  The peanut butter, now somewhat cooler, evenly coated the pieces of banana and voila! Breakfast was served. I'm planning on experimenting with this a little more by adding a quarter of a cup of a gluten-free, unsweetened breakfast cereal, like Chex or Rice Krispies, just for a little more texture. We'll see how that goes!