Mini Chocolate Nanner Muffins

My grandad grew up during the Great Depression. This comes out in weird ways sometimes, like in the form of beer can whirligigs or the old TV he always has lying around just in case. My grandad also grows a lot of his own produce. In his later years, he's started growing produce for sport rather than sustenance. My poor grandma is left trying to figure out how to use everything he grows in the kitchen. And she, also a child of the Great Depression, feels the need to bake, cook, freeze, or jar all of it. Corn, berries, zucchini (so much zucchini), and lately champagne grapes (in Southern Idaho! my grandad is both talented AND crazy). My grandma finds a way to use it all, and I have a cache of creative hand-me-down recipes to prove it. But before I get to those, I'll give you a fruit saving recipe for something you probably already have lying around: rotten bananas.

Mini Chocolate Nanner Muffins

Preheat oven to 400 and beat the following together in a large bowl:
1/3 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 large egg
1 cup overly ripe bananas, mushed

Add:
2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Don't over mix! Let your batter stay lumpy as long as all the dry ingredients are wet.

Evenly split batter into a lined mini muffin pan (you'll have enough batter to fill it at least twice). Once the batter is in, put a Hershey's kiss in each, pressing it into the batter until the edges are covered. I usually leave one muffin in the center of the pan kiss-less, at least the first pan per batch, so that I can do a toothpick test or two.

Bake roughly 10 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Check the mini muffins often after the 10 minute mark if they're still too wet; they're real small and the line between done and burnt is really thin. Pull the muffins from the pan as soon as you can manage to get them out without burning off your fingerprints and let them cool on a wire rack.

If you don't have a mini muffin pan or you just like your muffins normal-sized, you can mix in 1-1 1/2 cups chocolate chips to the batter instead of the kisses to achieve the right chocolate to banana ratio.

Kathy's Krazy Chicken

Guest Blogger Lawral the Librarian (aka My Librarian) introduced this and many other delicious "meal in a bowl" recipes to the kitchen. From time to time she might drop in with a recipe or two that won't disappoint. Enjoy! - CMolieri

This is a recipe that my mom made all the time when I was little. It is GREAT potluck fare, and having grown up Baptist, I know potlucks. The actual recipe appeared in a Blackfoot Baptist Church fundraiser cookbook, or maybe a Campfire Girls fundraiser cookbook. Whichever book my mom found it in, it is long gone now. Kathy, whoever and wherever you are, I am so glad you spilled Coke in your bbq and decided it was good!

Ingredients:

• 6 lbs chicken - I usually use boneless breasts; my mom used bone-in drums and thighs. Whatever you use, just make sure it's skinless
  
• 2 bottles of bbq sauce - I prefer a bottle of Kraft's regular or Mesquite with a bottle of Honey or Brown Sugar
• the "recipe" calls for 1/2 a can of Coke, I usually use the full can. I cannot stress to you how important it is to use regular Coke and not diet. I don't know why, but the diet makes this whole thing taste nast.
  

Directions:

• Throw everything in the crock pot or countertop skillet and cook it till it's done!

Now seriously, I use a full can of Coke to make everything a bit saucier and cook it in the crock pot on low for roughly 8 hours and then serve it over rice. Left in the crock pot that long all the chicken will fall apart and it will end up tasting as American as Apple Pie (and goes really well with it too) but will look like Indian food. I like my food this way; it fits better in the ice cream bowl I take most of my meals in.

My mom uses only half a can of Coke so that the sauce is more likely to cook down into something un-runny enough that you could actually eat it off a paper plate. She cooks it in the countertop skillet for about an hour at around 350. This way the chicken is still cooked all the way through but still in whole pieces which she pulls out of the sauce. If the chicken is actually going to a potluck, only a little bit of the sauce is kept to keep everything moist during transport and the rest gets chucked. If we're eating at home, Mom also serves this with rice, using the leftover sauce as a kind of rice gravy.

Now that we're getting to the colder months, I love cooking "outside" recipes like this so I can pretend it's warm enough to picnic (or potluck). I hope you all have fun putting Coke in your food!