Trust me, you don’t want a photo of this dish. Though it turned out tasty, it was butt ugly.
Peel the avocados and cut into chunks. Then sort of throw all the ingredients together in a bowl and stir together. Don’t stir too much, though, or you’ll get lumpy guacamole. Enjoy.
How do I describe the flavor of this bread? Something along the lines of OMG I never want to buy store-bought wheat bread again. The flavor is nutty and sweet and strongly of molasses, the texture’s nice and dense, the aroma is so, well, bready. This bread is so substantial, just a little butter on it and an apple to the side, and you’ve got a lovely meal. (And if you opt to add the nuts, it 
provides a complete protein. Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now.) Adapted from James Beard.
Stir together the yeast and 1/2 cup of the warm water in a little bowl and set aside. In a large bowl, mix the rest of the water, molasses, salt, oil, and whole-wheat flour. Add the yeast mixture and stir again. Slowly add the white flour until it looks like bread dough. Put it on a floured surface and knead until everything is nicely mixed. Put in an oiled bowl, cover with a slightly damp towel, and let sit for 1 1/2 hour.
Take the dough out and punch it down. If you like, make a dent in the middle, throw in the nuts and raisins, and knead them in. Once it’s nice and mixed, put the dough onto an oiled baking sheet. Or you can split it in half and put it into two oiled 8 1/2 by 4/12 loaf pans. Cover with a slightly damp towel again and let sit for 1 1/2 hour.
Uncover, bake at 375 for 40 minutes. The bread’s done when you knock it and it sounds hollow.
Just a couple of new culinary experiments. Four-egg yellow cake is from Allrecipes.com with pretty much no modification. I tried sprinkling M&Ms on top 10 minutes into the baking time, but they still sank to the bottom. They still tasted good, though. The cake has an excellent texture, bland, but you want that in a cake.
Beefless stroganoff I made up.
Beefless Stroganoff
Chop the onion so the slices are going to be in long strips. Sauté that with the garlic in butter until caramelized. While it’s going, boil pasta. Stir beans into onion mixture, then cooked pasta, then salt & pepper. Add half & half until texture is the way you like it, then add white wine to taste.
This is kind of like a Hamburger Helper for a can of baked beans. And it’s dead easy.
You’ve got a lovely stew that’s fancier than just a can of baked beans. Good served with cheese on top.
Recipe from Cookie Madness. Here’s how it came out:
I played this recipe pretty much straight without adapting it. I do quite like bananas, so I used 3 bananas instead of 2 and cut the milk down to half a cup. This bread is very mild and sweet, not oppressively peanut-buttery at all, and is plenty moist since it has five wet ingredients. It tastes very wholesome, that’s what. It didn’t blow me away, but it’s something I’d like to keep in my recipe box.
Here’s another shot, to illustrate crumby texture:
And here’s the recipe:
Peanut Butter and Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 ripe large bananas, mashed (1 cup)
1 cup milk
3/4 cup chunky peanut butter
3 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray two 9×5 inch loaf pans with flour-added cooking spray.
Stir flour, sugars, baking powder, salt and cinnamon together in a large mixing bowl.
Combine mashed bananas, milk, peanut butter, oil, vanilla and egg in a second bowl. Add banana mixture to flour mixture, stirring just until combined. Stir in chocolate chips. Pour batter into the two loaf pans and bake on center rack for 50 to 55 minutes or until a toothpick or cake tester inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Cool in pans for 10 minutes. Remove from pans; cool thoroughly on a wire rack. Wrap and store overnight before serving.
First of all, I hope all of you out there in cyberspace had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family and no epic turkey disasters.
There’s a pecking order to family cooking affairs. Mom and Aunt Sue were the unquestioned empresses of the turkey this year, their respective offspring were in charge of the lesser dishes, and the menfolk were wise to keep out of it and helped out with chairs. This year, for the first time in recorded history, I got to participate in the madness as an adult (I’m 21). I got to bring a side dish.
Sadly, there are no photos available of the sweet potato cranberry casserole because some of the older folk don’t get the whole blogging thing and would have thought I’d gone round the bend if I’d whipped out the digital camera in the kitchen. Look, here’s a picture of a sweet potato:
Yeah. So. It was an adaptation of an Allrecipes.com Sweet Potato and Apple Casserole. I knew I wanted to make something like this, then went looking around on the Internet for what ingredient proportions other people tried and liked. There’s a variation on the Allrecipes site with pineapple, which is probably scrumptious.
Ingredients:
3 large sweet potatoes
1/2 c brown sugar, packed
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/3 package fresh cranberriesTopping:
1/4 c flour
1/4 c brown sugar, packed
1/4 c butter
mmmarshmallowsssss…
Preheat oven to 350. Lightly grease a casserole dish with cooking spray. Boil sweet potatoes in large soup pot until tender when poked with a fork, about 20 min. Let cool, then slip them out of the peels and cut into about 1″ chunks. Add those to a mixing bowl, then snip cranberries in half with scissors and add those, too. (Breaking the cranberries’ skin ensures that they become one with the sweet potato while baking. Otherwise you’ll find yourself biting into a tart surprise.) Add the sugar and spices and stir just until the sweet potatoes are coated.
Spread the mixture out in the casserole dish. Cream together the flour, butter, and sugar with an electric mixer, than crumble that on top like a streusel topping. Bake about 25 minutes. Then pull the dish out of the oven and apply marshmallows to taste (that is, liberally). Return to oven and bake until the marshmallows are just getting golden on top. Enjoy!
Update: The pineapple version is even more delicious than the cranberry.
Adapted from Allrecipes.com.
Tasty, but not all that exciting. I think the problem was that I overbaked it, so the pudding on the bottom all dried up and it was just a spice cake. The ingredients are so dirt cheap that I might try it again. This recipe uses less sugar than the Allrecipes version, which was definitely a good idea, and if I was to do it again I think I’d up the butter content and add vanilla.
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp nutmeg
1 cup milk1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1 1/2 cups water
1 tbsp butter1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 can pineapple rings
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease the bottom of a 9″ square baking dish. Bring brown sugar, water, and butter to a boil in a saucepan.
Meanwhile, combine flour, white sugar, baking powder, spices and salt, then stir in milk. Once it’s well-mixed, stir in walnuts. Pour into baking dish. Pour the hot sugar mixture over that. It’ll look gross, but don’t worry.
Top with pineapple rings in a pretty pattern. Bake 35-40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. You definitely want to use secondary containment here – look how that sugary mess bubbled all over the pan.
Enjoy!
I discovered that this recipe works quite well.
LENTIL CURRY
1 package (1lb) lentils
2 onions
4-5 cloves garlic
1 package (1lb) tofu
10 cups broth
handful of dark green leafies
curry powder to taste
half & half to taste
Rinse lentils, then cover in broth and simmer ~30 mins. Meanwhile, cube the tofu and sauté on high heat. You want the outside of the cubes to get nice and crispy. Caramelize the onions and garlic in the same pan. Add dark green leafies of your choice – I used the green tops of leeks because that’s what I had, but it should be very tasty with collards. Once those are wilted, add the whole caboodle to the lentils. Season with curry powder (maybe also some salt and pepper) to taste, then add half & half until it’s creamy. Serve on rice.
This makes a ton, probably enough for about 6 people.
Happy Bodies, a new blog on campus.
Jill and the people who commented on the post bring up some interesting points.
Food is a really emotional issue. It’s an extremely old issue. Try to think of anything that’s been part of the human condition for just as long, and probably the only answer is sex. It’s so important to survival, and so much of our culture revolves around it. That’s why people get so angry.
It can lead to some pretty amusing clashes, too. Now, I’m not all that vegetarian; I probably eat meat about once or twice a week because it happens to be in some soup I wanted at the dining hall. The best part is when people wonder if I’m getting enough protein. I feel fine, everybody. I’m not dead yet! I think I’ll go for a walk…
Perhaps the best way to lure others to the dark side is with delicious, delicious meatless recipes.
Fritter thingies
Mash the beans slightly with a potato masher or fork. Dice the mushrooms small and combine with the beans in big bowl. Toast the bread pretty dark, then crumble into the bowl. Blend. Add spices to taste (the more the better, the bread soaks it up a lot).
Beat the eggs separately. Add to the dry ingredients. Next comes the fun part: heat up a little oil in the bottom of a pan. Mix the goo, then form into patties with your hands. Sauté on both sides until the egg is cooked, and voilá! Crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside, with mushroomy chewy bits.
Try them, you’ll like them.