A Perfect Loaf of Bread

Double batch. Absolutey unbeatable. In fact, I should quit right now, because nothing will ever top this. SO worth every once of sweat!

Experimental (Moosewood) Banana Bread

In retrospect, I don't know why this seemed like a good idea, but I was having a brief spell of actually being able to follow recipes, so I decided to give the Moosewood recipe for banana muffins a shot.

It looked innocent enough to begin with, and actually tasted fairly good.

It was similar to my normal recipe, but had a whole egg, and egg white, and half a cup of yogurt (= sour milk). It turned out to be, predictably, wayyy too moist. I may need to continue the experiment and put it back in the oven.... It still looked innocent, and oats on top are super cute. I loved the cracks in the top of the loaf.

Moral of the story: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Red Bean Love

This why you should always have canned red beans, cooked brown rice, and frozen onion and bell pepper on hand. And half a tablespoon of honey, for the very end.

Cheap, healthy, and out-of-this-world-delicious. All hail broccoli Gavroche!

Recipe for red beans, Cuban style: saute garlic and onion and green pepper for a few minutes.

Typical sensationalist story-telling Cubans masquerading as Italians! The nerve!

Then add tomato sauce and oregano; after a few minutes add beans and a bay leaf or too. Cook for 45-450 minutes, adding more water if things dry out. Add a little bit (about 1/2-1 tbsp) of honey after you turn the heat off and stir well. Serve hot (or cold to college students) over brown rice. Make lots and lots and lots or they will disappear insantly.

Untitled Improvisations

Here are two delicious fast things to do with a saute pan. They're somewhere between risotto and stir-fry, and have infinite flexibility. The 28th and 29th saw improvisational cooking at its best.

Day 1:

Saute some of the minced garlic in olive oil until fragrant, then add chicken. Cook until just brown on the outside and set aside. Saute more minced garlic, then chopped onion, carrot, and celery (about a cup each?) and saute some moe. Without adding water, add about 1 c chopped tomatoes and boil with 1 tsp oregano, dried basil, rosemary, thyme, and a bit of black pepper.

Add chicken and rice (how much depends on how many veggies you use). Cook, stirring often, until the chicken is cooked through and everything is nice and hot and well blended. Serve with heavy whole wheat bread. :)

(Sorry it's a crappy picture; the flash was misbehaving and I was hungry!)

Day 2:

Brown the chicken in sauted minced garlic like day 1, but with the addition of Famous Dave's Country Roast Chicken Seasoning. Remove, add more olive oil and minced garlic to the pan, and saute the already cooked broccoli for a minute, then add cooked brown rice and browned chicken to the pan. In lieu of canned cream of whatever soup, I added a 1/4 c (skim) milk and about 3/4 c grated cheese (mostly cheddar, but also some romano to use it up), and lots more of the chicken seasoning.

(Easy, efficient way to grate cheese. These guys are infinity times better than the box kind.)

(This guy reminds me of  Gavroche singing "Little People" from Les Mis)

Cook, stirring often, until the chicken is cooked through and everything is nice and hot and well blended to creamy deliciousness.

Because It Wasn't Hot Enough

The plan was to make bread on the weekends. Oops.

This time, having conferred with a professional bread baking person, things worked much better. I used less water, and therefore less flour, slightly less yeast, and baked the bread at 400 instead of 350. I also kneaded it less, because 20 minutes, besides being REALLY hard sweaty work, might have been overdoing it. Most exciting, I finally got loaf pans! The loaf wasn't as *big* as I wanted, but I can attribute this to the size of the recipe since it was the perfect consistency.

And because of the loaf pans (I think having direct metal contact makes a difference) and the increased temperature, it was darker than before. So pretty!

And then, since the apartment wasn't hot enough, I decided the time had come to make granola! (Since I sillyily mistook granola for granola bars, that'll be happening soon too. Stay tuned!) Here's the mountain of granola; it reminds me of Vesuvius, in, maybe, 78 A.D.

Here's the recipe. As with most things, it's my rendition of a recipe I found somewhere among teh interwebs.

in bowl:
2 c rolled oats
1/2 c wheat bran (actually a bit more)
1/2 c wheat germ (actually a bit less)
1/3 c sunflower seeds (this was too much!)
1/3 c sliced almonds
3/4 tsp cinnamon (could be more)
1/2 tsp salt (probably unnecessary)

in pan:
3 tsp brown sugar
3 tsp water
2 tbsp butter
1/4 c honey

boil syrup, pour over dry stuff
spread in greased jelly roll pan and bake at 350 for 25? minutes

In the future, I'm going to try using a combination of applesauce and/or mashed banana instead of the oil.

I eat it as cereal, but you can also mix it with cottage cheese, yogurt, or make parfait!

Also pretty!

Bruschetta & Roasted Zucchini (& Heavy Pasta Estate)

Lesson learned: bell pepper has a nasty way of taking over everything. And unless you're prepared to use too much oil and salt, let the zucchini stay out of pasta. Actually, I think tonight taught me that I should stop trying to put things in pasta besides spices. (I was pretty disappointed with the pasta, so someone please come eat the leftovers for me! If you want to know what I did, leave a comment.) At least I can make food look dang good!

The proper way to prepare zucchini (imho) is as follows: wash zucchini, slice 1/4 slices, place in bowl big enough you can comfortably stir them, with olive oil, salt, and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Put on greased cookie sheet and roast at 450-475 for 10-15 minutes (but watch them in case your oven is different). Devour.

The tomatoes in the photo are the only decent store-bought tomatoes around. They come from Arizona but somehow taste exactly like they're freshly picked from the backyard. They're absolutely mind-blowing. So was the bruschetta I made with them, superfruity olive oil, fresh garlic, and the basil my plant donated:

(I dried out my leftover Italian bread with the zucchini I roasted, it got reaaally dry. The tomatoes softened it up perfectly however, and it was interesting rubbing the garlic cloves (I cut them in half first to use the inside of the cloves) on the very dry bread because the bread was so hard it was like rubbing garlic on a cheese grater. Now I know the best way to make really legit garlic bread!

Bruschetta recipe:
Slice bread, put plain bread on ungreased cookie sheet and bake/roast at 450ish for 10-15ish minutes. When cool enough to touch, paint with superfruity olive oil with a pastry brush (or your fingers). I put the olive oil in a small dish to make it more accessible and to avoid having to pour it (because I would accidentally pour too much). Then scrap bread to taste with the cut side of a (crushed) garlic clove, and top with tomato basil mixture. (Tomato basil mixture = roughly chopped tomatoes, torn fresh basil leaves, s&p&olive oil to taste, refridgerated for a while to marry flavors (I actually used the the freezer to cool it faster). Keep away from you roommates unless you want it all gone very quickly!

Hummus & Veggie Sandwhich

It was the perfect Sunday lunch. It was also the messiest sandwich I have eaten in my entire life. (Not that I let that keep me from reading while I ate it!) It also reaffirmed my belief that the key to the perfect hummus & veggie sandwich is hot hummus on crusty bread. If your bread isn't crusty and your hummus isn't hot, just put the whole thing in a panini press, which will make it also compressed enough to not break your jaw eating it.

I used the Italian bread because I was out of wheat (I'm supposed to make more this afternoon but am getting tired of being sweaty...) and stuck it in a 500 degree oven for 5-7 minutes to try to toast a bit. Next time I'm toasting it with olive oil in a frying pan (like how you make grilled cheese) and hopefully that'll work better. In assembly, you use the hummus to hold down the garlic sprouts and shredded (I gleefully recently discovered how well the big round holes on the cheese grater work for shredding baby carrots!) carrots. Then you sandwich the tomato slices in the lettuce to keep them from soggifying the bread. I recommend making this kind over overstuffed un-panini-pressed sandwich with fresh, strong bread that won't fall apart.

Just like I wanted to say last week that there's nothing like cleaning up the homemade sauce on your plate with homemade bread, there's REALLY nothing like a hummus and veggie sandwich on homemade bread, with homemade hummus, and homegrown veggies. Someone please make my tomato plants hurry up!