With warm weather FINALLY here (for good I hope!), and school soon to be out for the summer, I’ve had campfires and cookouts on the brain! Because what’s more fun than roasting hot dogs over an open fire? Not much- except maybe s’mores….but we’ll save that for another time. 🙂

Have you looked at the ingredient list on packaged hot dogs recently? If you research it like I did, you’ll find that they contain very little real meat (most of it is leftover pork trimmings), and are packed full of water, salt, and nasty preservatives to bulk the dog and hold it together. Can you say G-R-O-S-S? When I occasionally enjoy a hot dog, I buy National Hebrew. They are kosher and don’t have artificial by-product, coloring, or flavoring. Still not great, but better than other brands.

If you are attending lots of cookouts this summer and have met your quota of traditional all American hot dogs, then you will want to keep this recipe in mind! We just totally remade the hot dog into a nutritious banana dog that everyone is going to love!

I present to you- the Banana Dog!

This is a perfect way to still let your kids feel included in the campfire, while ensuring a nutritious meal. Or something to give them to do on a rainy day when they’re stuck inside like today.

Things you’ll need:

• Bananas
• Long clean sticks or wire coat hangers (if you’re roasting them- they are good plain too!)
• Hot dog buns
• Peanut butter
• Plastic ziploc bags
• Jelly, jam, or preserves
• Yogurt
• Apples

I didn’t have a campfire handy today, but all you would need to do for a “roasted” banana, is slide the banana onto your stick and roast it until it is nice, caramelized, brown, and sticky. Mess-free campfires are no fun anyways.

First thing’s first, place your banana in the hot dog bun like you would a normal hot dog bun. Mine broke as I was taking the peel off, so I glued it back together with some peanut butter- adapt and overcome.

This is where your ziploc bag is going to come in handy. Take a spoonful of peanut butter (I used HEB dark chocolate peanut butter because who doesn’t love chocolate, and you grind it yourself so that’s really fun too). Put the peanut butter in one corner of the bag and snip a small piece of the corner off. Now just squeeze the bag until the PB starts coming out and squiggle it along the length of your banana.

And there’s your banana dog. If you want to up the cute factor, you can include apple fries and a yogurt dipping sauce like I did. For the apple fries, just cut your apple in half and then slice the ends off so you have 2 straight edges. Then cut them long ways until you have skinny apple fries. So cute!

I was convinced I had vanilla yogurt, but didn’t realize that I only had raspberry until I got home. So I went with what I had, but vanilla yogurt mixed with a tablespoon of peanut butter would be the perfect dipping sauce for these fries.

Quick and easy, nutritious and delicious!