Bitchin' Banana Bread

I ended up with a ridiculous surplus of bananas. Not shockingly, they went a little bit sketch. There is one word for this situation: Awesome.



My solution to this non-problem is adapted from the ABC Children's cookbook



To participate in the awesome, you will need:

3 sketchy bananas
3/4 c. of sugar
1/2 c. of vegetable oil
2 eggs
2 c. all-purpose flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
2 t. vanilla extract
3/4 c. chocolate chunks (I really, really like the 365 organic mini-chunks from Whole Foods. Feel free to substitute whatever you want.)
1/2 c. chopped walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F and grease up a bread pan. (I use PAM)
2. Put the sketchy bananas and the sugar in a bowl and mash them up with a wooden spoon. I like to leave mine a little bit lumpy.
3. Add the vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla and stir until the liquids are incorporated.
4. Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and stir until incorporated.
5. Now mix in the chocolate chunks and walnuts.
6. Pour the batter into the baking pan and put it in the oven for 60-70 minutes.
7. Lick the bowl.
8. Test the bread with a toothpick or cake tester. When it comes out clean, your bread is done. Take it out of the oven and set the bread, in the pan, on a cooling rack and let it set for 10 minutes. (Fair warning, if it comes out dirty after 65+ minutes try sticking a clean tester somewhere else. You probably hit a banana vein.)
9. Turn the bread out onto the cooling rack and let it cool to room temperature.
10. Slice and enjoy.

When you've had your initial fill, wrap the banana bread in saran wrap and it will keep for longer than it will last. I also have it on good authority that it freezes well, but I haven't had any last long enough to test this myself.

Spicy Pineapple Teriyaki Flank Steak

Let's get something straight: There are few things that I enjoy more in life than picnics and barbecues. Any chance to combine them is even better. This lovely meal was pre-meditated grilling combined with impromptu picnic. Does it get any better?



This also serves as an excellent reminder that my memory of recipes is somewhat (read: extremely) unreliable. I ended up with a couple of un-identified greenish-yellow peppers. This made me think of a recipe for flank steak that I just knew was a spicy-fruity-teriyaki in Cooking at the Academy. Fun fact: there is a recipe for flank steak in that book, and it bears precisely no resemblance, aside from the cut of beef, from what I was imagining.

Left to my own devices, I came up with the following:

2 peppers
1 can crushed pineapple
1 1/2" ginger, peeled and grated
1/3 c soy sauce
1/8 c brown sugar, packed

I started by seeding the peppers by cutting around the tops with a thin-bladed knife and pulling out the seeds by the stem:


Next, I sliced the peppers into thin pepper rings, roughly 1/8" thick. I threw those in a large, well-sealing plastic tupperware-thing along with the crushed pineapple, and then grated the ginger into the mixture. Then I added the soy sauce and brown sugar, put the lid on, and gave everything a good shake to mix the ingredients.

At this point, add the flank steak, making sure to bury it well in the marinade. Put the tupperware in the fridge and leave it there for at least a few hours, and up to overnight.

When you are ready to cook, heat up the grill, fish out the flank steak, wipe off any excess marinade, and grill to your heart's content. Keep an eye on the meat so that you get it to whatever level of doneness pleases you. I generally go for a true medium, where it is still pink inside, but is warm throughout.

When your meat is cooked how you like it, pull it off and let it rest for a couple of minutes on a cutting board to let the juices re-distribute and then slice it against the grain. Serve and enjoy.

(Food safety hint: NEVER EAT A MARINADE WITHOUT COOKING IT. If you want to make a sauce from the marinade, strain out the chunks and BOIL the marinade. Would you lick raw hamburger? Then why would you use a marinade as a sauce?)

Door County's Finest

My coworker, PK, came in today and set down a giant (seriously) tupperware on the lunch table.

Inner Voice: Cherries?

PK: My friend went to Door County this weekend and gave us a bunch of cherries.

Inner voice: Cherries!

PK: But they are not really good for eating...

Inner voice: Jam?

PK: they are really sour, not sweet like regular cherries.

Inner voice: Jam!!!

PK: I was wondering if you wanted to do anything with them, like make a pie or something.

Outer voice: I will bring you jam tomorrow!

After a quick consultation with the almighty Google, I found a man after my own heart. The link is David Lebovitz's non-recipe for cherry jam. I think I may follow his example of non-recipes, because frankly, I seldom really cook by them. Writing up the hummus I felt like I was focusing so much on trying to figure out how much of whatever I was using, I couldn't replicate my standard hummus because I was using too much of my engineer-brain and not enough of my food-brain. I'm thinking future posts will be more in the vein of knitting recipes, where the focus is getting the end product by trying on as you go and making any necessary alterations, than chemistry experiments, which tend to be explicit about the steps while strictly prohibiting putting things in your mouth.

Ingredients:
Bucket 'o Door County's Finest
Lemons
Sugar
Almond Extract

I started by pitting the roughly 10-12 cups of cherries , and then chopped them into bits, ending up with roughly 5-6 cups of this:



(I highly recommend putting your phone on hands free and catching up with your calls for this part. I also highly recommend a cherry pitter. It is a unitasker, but it does its job very, very well.)

To the cherry bits, I added the zest and juice of two lemons and then threw the whole mess into an enameled cast-iron pot, brought it slowly up to a simmer, and then cooked it, stirring, for about 25 minutes (in an un-air-conditioned apartment, in July, no less. This has been killing my desire to cook of late. A donkey cart full of cherries solves all of life's problems).

After everything was nice and soft, I measured out my cherry mush (in my case, 3 cups) and added 3/4 as much sugar as there was mush (which was 2 1/4 cups). Usually I don't put in nearly as much sugar as recommended because I don't like super-sweet jams, but these puppies were sour and two lemons sure didn't help. After stirring in the sugar, I put everything back on the heat, this time cranking it as high as it would go. I brought the now-rather-sticky goop back to boiling, stirring the whole time, and kept it going strong until it was jelling on the my frozen spoons (I put all of my tablespoons in my beer-mug in the freezer before starting this bit). After pulling everything off the heat, I added a tiny splash of almond extract, because cherries and almonds were meant to be together (now I want scones).



I canned two using a water bath, and the half-jar is in the fridge, silently willing me to make bread tomorrow.

I seem to have a tendency to over-thicken my jam. This doesn't bother me texturally, but I am somewhat disappointed to get 1 1/4 pints of jam from a metric arse-ton of cherries, awesome though that jam may be. I consulted my sister, and she recommended actually using pectin next time, or at least using my candy thermometer to make sure I'm not boiling past jelly, i.e. 220 deg. F.

In conclusion, JAM!!!