Category Archives: Food

Recipe: Chocolate Banana Bread

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Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup toasted walnuts or pecans, coarsely chopped
  • 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup cocoa powder
  • 1 cup granulated white sugar
  • 1 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup (white optional) chocolate chips
  • 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
  • 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled
  • 3 ripe bananas (approximately 1 pound), mashed well (about 1-1/2 cups)
  • 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
  • Turbinado sugar for garnish

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and place oven rack to middle position. Butter and flour (or spray with a non stick vegetable/flour spray) the bottom and sides of a 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pan. Set aside.

Place the nuts on a baking sheet and bake for about 8 – 10 minutes or until lightly toasted. Let cool and then chop coarsely.

In a large bowl whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

In a medium-sized bowl combine the mashed bananas, eggs, melted butter, and vanilla. With a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, lightly fold the wet ingredients (banana mixture) into the dry ingredients until just combined and batter is thick and chunky. Fold in the nuts and chocolate chips. Scrape batter into prepared pan and sprinkle the top of the bread with coarse brown sugar (optional). Bake until bread has risen and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 55 to 65 minutes. Place on a wire rack to cool and then remove the bread from the pan. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Makes 1 – 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf.

Bisquick Biscuits

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I love traditional Bisquick baking mix. I was raised on it. I’ve used it for as long as I’ve been cooking.

Something I hadn’t heard of popped up on my Amazon Gold Box last week that purports to be a “just add water” Bisquick. (Regular Bisquick requires milk.) This new product comes in small packets. The price was right, so I bought some. It arrived on Friday.

I like biscuits for Sunday breakfast, so I whipped up a batch this morning. The results were interesting. On the negative side, the raw dough is nasty. There are little lumps of a fatty substance, which I assume are the chunks of hydrolyzed fat that turn brown when cooked. The dough also isn’t as salty as regular Bisquick. You definitely won’t be tempted to eat the raw trimmings left from cutting the biscuits.

On the plus side, this gives a nicer biscuit than regular Bisquick, though not as good as my made-from-scratch. It’s a much looser crumb, and those little fat chunks brown nicely, giving a mottled texture to the biscuit. The result looks almost exactly like the picture on the package, a rarity in the food world. The biscuit itself tastes fine.

This also comes in various flavors. One packet makes six small or four large biscuits. It’s made by Betty Crocker (General Mills.) For the allergic crowd, it does contain wheat, milk, and egg ingredients. It also contains partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, in fact, quite a bit of it. (So does regular Bisquick.)

General conclusion: I won’t throw away the rest of the box, but I probably won’t be buying more either.

New Bread Recipe

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This is an interesting technique for breadmaking. It’s a very wet dough that doesn’t require kneading. I’m making a batch now…. I’ll update when it’s done.

Borrowed from The NY Times. (That link will die pretty quickly; the Times thinks that making people pay for their archives is good business. Whatever.)

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

Ingredients:

  • 3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
  • ¼ teaspoon instant yeast
  • 1¼ teaspoons salt
  • Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.
  1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
  2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours.
  3. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes.
  4. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

Recipe: Zucchini Bread

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Not a regular update, just my zucchini bread recipe:

Makes 2 normal loaves, or approximately 20 normal-sized muffins, or about 50 mini-muffins.

Preheat over to 350. Grease pans.

Dry ingredients:

1-1/2 c white flour
1-1/2 c whole wheat flour
1 t cinnamon
1 T baking powder
1 t baking soda
1 c raisins (optional, and you can also use other dried fruits if you’re adventurous)
1 c nuts (optional, but I usually use walnuts)

Wet ingredients:

3 eggs
3 c shredded unpeeled zucchini (carrots can be used for different effect)
2 t vanilla (optional, but it’s better with it)
1 c buttermilk
1 c sugar
1/4 t salt

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl.

In a different (larger) bowl, beat eggs with sugar and salt. Add buttermilk and vanilla. Add shredded zucchini. Stir until mixed. Dump in pre-mixed dry ingredients and stir until dry ingredients are just moistened. Put into pans and bake, 15-20 minutes for muffins, up to an hour for loaves.

Cooking

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I recently stumbled across a list of weblogs that are hosted on one of Salon’s systems. While most of them are annoyingly typical weblogs, a couple of them are real gems. The Julie/Julia Project covers the daily adventures of a woman named Julie who is cooking her way through Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking, one recipe at a time.

If you’re not a foody, let me just say that TAoFC is Julia’s magnum opus and one seriously daunting cookbook. It is, however, also the definitive reference to just about everything about French cooking for non-French speakers.

Illegal imports

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Next up on Prime-Time News: the market for illegal imports. Nope, not drugs, not Al-Qaeda fugitives, not anthrax. Kinder Eggs.

What’s a Kinder Egg? A milk chocolate egg, about the size of a duck egg (for you city folks, that’s slightly larger than a jumbo chicken egg) with white chocolate insides and a prize in the center where the yolk would be.

Sun-dried tomatoes

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Yep, as expected, I’ve got about eight trillion Roma (paste) tomatoes, all at once. And of course, they’ve come ready to harvest the same week my sister is visiting from the east. My other sister and I aren’t too interested in canning them this week, so I have to do something with them. I’ve found some recipes for sun-dried tomatoes here, here, and here.

Oddly enough, recipes for sun-dried tomatoes are fairly difficult to find on the web. Recipes that use them are everywhere, but recipes to make them are few and far between. And many of the ones that you do find start with “place the sliced tomatoes in the oven…” which doesn’t exactly meet the “sun-dried” criteria!

Updates

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No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. It’s just that it’s been too hot here in southern California to do much gardening. (And it’s only August! September and October are typically also very hot and dry.) I’ve also been working on a couple of non-gardening home-improvement project. For the past month, I have done no new gardening– instead, I’m reaping the rewards of the gardening I did when it was cooler. The garden looks awful but is yielding prolifically.

The corn came and went on schedule. It was excellent. There’s nothing left of it but a couple of jars of corn relish, and the leavings in the compost heap. All my taste-testers agree that the Ruby Queen variety was better than the Chubby Checkers type.

My tomatoes are growing well, though the plants themselves are having a tough time in the heat. My sister and I have canned quite a few quarts of tomatoes, tomato sauce, catsup, and salsa. By the end of the season, we should be all set to overwinter without any fresh tomatoes.

I bought some seeds for a heat-tolerant tomato variety called “Heatwave II” which supposedly can handle full sun and up to 100 degrees F. I’ve only just planted them in peat pots, and they’ll be transplanted to the regular garden in a couple of weeks. If they bear according to the instructions, they should start producing by the end of September. Which will be excellent timing, because I doubt any of the other plants will still be alive by then.

Some of my peppers are doing quite well. The red bells and the true jalapenos are producing, but the “false alarm” jalapenos haven’t done much yet. The yellow bells have a very bad whitefly infestation, and those plants will be coming out as soon as the current crop ripens.

The second crop of figs has begun to ripen. As expected, they are more prolific than the breba crop, but not as nice (they’re smaller and tougher.) Most of these will be used for canning and cooking. Here’s an excellent recipe for pickled figs.

It’s a bit cooler today, and I plan to lay out some sprinkler lines in what was the cornfield. The next crop to plant in that area will be eggplants, some of the Heatwave tomatoes, and some pickling cucumbers. All those should be heat tolerant enough to make it through the rest of the summer here in the southern California semi-desert, but they need more water than the corn did.