cooking ala mel

Banana Nut Bread

February 5, 2011

I like green bananas. I like those green bananas that have to sit on the counter for days and days before they turn the slightest bit yellow. This is probably because I’m an extremely impatient person. When I was younger and my mom would buy bananas, I never could wait until they turned yellow. So I developed a taste for them green. I can’t eat them anymore if they’re perfectly ripe; they taste like they’re rotting to me. How do you eat your bananas? I know a lot of people that love to wait until they get really brown..yuck yuck.

Anyway. So I usually like to eat a banana with my breakfast, but the bananas we had got a little bit funky. They were still green, but they also had a lot of brown, and they tasted like they were already rotting. Or, well. Ripening. So of course, I couldn’t eat those bananas, and I still had quite a few. I made banana bread instead. I can have ripe bananas in my banana bread. And boy was it delicious!

This gave me a good reason to use up some of my whole wheat flour (which I’ve been trying to get rid of). I like white whole wheat a whole lot better now. I know the recipe says it yields 8 servings, but it ended up lasting us a whole week, and we were not skimping on eating it, so I’d take that with a grain of salt. But if it means eating more banana bread, sure, it’s eight servings. 🙂

Banana Nut Bread
yields 8 servings
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
1 t baking powder
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t nutmeg
1/4 t ground cloves
3 large, very ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs
1/3 cup honey (or 1/2 cup sugar)
1/2 cup milk
2 t vanilla
1/2 cup nuts

Mix wet and dry ingredients until just incorporated. Pour into a greased loaf pan. Bake at 350º F for about 50 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean. Wait 10 minutes before removing from pan and placing on rack to cool.

Spaghetti with Chicken and "Really Red Pepper" Sauce

February 5, 2011

Alex is really, really good at coming up with flavors. In the kitchen, I usually do the cooking, the actual hands on cooking, while he’s usually the one to come up with the actual dish. He also does the dishes. 🙂

We roasted up a red pepper the night before and were really excited to do something with it. We wanted to make some sort of red pepper sauce but knew we wouldn’t have quite enough pepper to be able to make anything you’d traditionally see. Alex got thinking and decided to throw a bunch of things together to season up some chicken, and I blended up the peppers with a little bit of red wine vinegar and sautéed the mushrooms and just let him do his thing. We ended up with an extremely flavorful pasta with chicken, mushrooms and a spicy red pepper sauce. I definitely think this is going to be made again and again.

Spaghetti with Chicken and “Really Red Pepper” Sauce
yields two servings

For the sauce:
1 red pepper, roasted & sliced
2 T red wine vinegar
1 clove garlic, roughly chopped
salt, pepper & italian seasoning, to taste
1/4 cup water

For the chicken:
2 t tabasco
2 t red hot
2 T worcestershire sauce
3 T olive oil
1 chicken breast, sliced
4 oz. mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
chili pepper flakes, italian seasoning, salt & pepper, to taste

Roughly 7 oz. cooked spaghetti

Heat oil, tabasco, red hot, worcestershire in large skillet over medium high heat. Season with chili pepper flakes, salt, pepper and italian seasoning. Add onions, garlic mushrooms and chicken and cook until chicken is cooked through and mushrooms have cooked down.
In a food processor, blend all of the ingredients for the roasted pepper sauce. Add the mixture to the skillet with the chicken and heat on low until fully incorporated. Serve over the cooked spaghetti with some crusty bread. For an extra kick (like this dish really needs it), use chili oil.

Chocolate Layer Cake

February 5, 2011

For my friend Jaclyn’s birthday, my roommate, Lin, and I decided to make a chocolate layer cake. I don’t think I’ve ever really made a cake before on my own other than a carrot cake, which was definitely only one layer, so this definitely turned out to be an interesting experience.

Now, let me tell you how impatient I am. I think of something I want to do, and I will not rest until it is done. Right away. While things get done more quickly that way, and the determination that comes with it is great, it didn’t work out so well for this cake. Lin and I didn’t wait long enough for the cake to cool in the pans, so removing it caused it to fall apart a bit. We made the icing while it was baking, so it sort of hardened up a bit before we really could ice it. And then we didn’t really have enough to cover the cake. We thought we failed. Beyond failed. We pretty much gave up on it. We didn’t even remove it from the wire rack for fear of it falling apart even more. It may not have looked pretty but wow. That icing was so rich and delicious. Not too sweet like most icings are. The cake was moist. They paired perfectly together. Although it was rather hideous, the flavor was great – I’ll probably try this cake again.

Chocolate Layer Cake with Chocolate Frosting
makes 1 two-layer cake

For the cake:
2 cups sugar1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa
1 1/2 t baking powder
1 1/2 t baking soda
1 t salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 t vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water

For the chocolate frosting:
2 cups powdered sugar
4 T cocoa
4 T butter, melted
4 T strong, hot coffee
1 t vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350°. Spray two 9” round pans with cooking spray. Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla. Beat on medium speed for 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water and pour equally into 2 pans. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes and remove from pans to wire racks. For the frosting, beat all ingredients together until smooth. Frost the top of the bottom layer of cake, place the top layer on, and frost the top and edges.