4 Ingredient Banana Protein Waffles

I feel like it’s been awhile since I’ve shared a breakfast recipe, so I thought this would be a good one.  Super easy; no special equipment (except for a waffle iron) and common ingredients.  You can literally throw this together in minutes,  they are yummy, plus they reheat nicely in the toaster, so it’s a win-win-win!  Nothing to complain about here, unlike the meal my parents had recently.

The place my parents live has a “restaurant” where they can have any or all of their meals.  They typically prefer to do dinner, but sometimes they have other plans.  My sister and I both suggested to them that they might want to occasionally eat lunch there on those days; a radical idea for my father to consider.  Pulling teeth with an eyelash curler would be easier than getting my father to try something new. We are still trying to find golf shirts with a pocket like they made in 1972 for him.

After literally years of suggesting this to my him, they(he) finally decided to take the plunge,  go crazy and eat lunch instead of dinner in the dining room. It was a summer solstice miracle. The planets all aligned, Stonehenge hummed and glowed orange. Time portals opened into the days of yore,  and ancient ruins predicted the coming of more crop circles.

We both asked him the next day how lunch was.

“Good,” he replied.  “Your mother had a hamburger and I had a reuben.  It was nice to not have to worry about the time.  We could have sat there all afternoon if we wanted to.” (The amount of time that you spend at a table is apparently a HUGE concern around there.  You have to make the dinner reservations early enough so that you can be back in time for Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, but not too early as it cuts into the afternoon marathon of The Thin Man reruns on TMC, or heaven forbid, snack time.)

Two days later, we were talking about food (again) and I said something about lunch. My mistake. Note to self.  Don’t poke a sleeping bear.  Ever.

“Ugh.  Worst lunch ever,” he griped.  “your mother’s hamburger was like shoe leather.  She could have strapped it to her feet and walked out on it.  My reuben was burnt.  How do you burn bread?”

“Wait,” I interrupted, ‘”I thought you said the lunch was good.  Did you go down a second time? Are we talking about the same thing?” (Also, my mother likes her meat rare, so anything that isn’t bright red and can fight back when she bites into it is too well done for her -blech!)

“Yeah, yeah.  The same lunch. I don’t know who made the sandwiches, but it must have beens some stranger they took off the street who had never been in a kitchen before.” (yeah, pretty sure that’s not what happened.)

“So why did you tell me that it was good?” I asked (poke, poke)

“Well, I thought about it afterwards and decided that it hadn’t been so great after all. I wasn’t thinking about how burnt my sandwich was and that they didn’t know what they had for dessert without checking in the kitchen.” (Yes, I can see why you would be concerned about that since you haven’t eaten dessert since you gave up sugar in 1957!)

“Did you tell them about it at the time?” I asked (when will I ever learn to keep my big, fat mouth shut?)

“I was going to, but it doesn’t do any good,” he grumbled.

“And you know this…how?” I prodded. “And does this mean you won’t be going down for lunch again?”

“Well, I’ll have to think about it, and maybe next time I’ll complain,” he conceded.

Oh, you mean to someone other than me?

Ingredients:

• 2 ripe bananas
• 1/2 cup Greek yogurt
• 1 cup oat flour
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• maple syrup (up to 1 TBS)  — optional

Directions:

1. In a small bowl, mash the bananas until smooth and creamy (very ripe bananas work best in this recipe – they are easy to mash and sweet)
2. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well to combine.
3. Cook the waffles according to your waffle iron directions.

Enjoy!