School project and banana bread

 

We are back home from our Easter holiday, which was filled with snow, skiing, friends, laughter and more eggs (in all forms and shapes) than I care to discuss. There was also a fair share of homework to be dealt with between one ski lesson and the next, but now we just have one more project to complete for Monday and then we are done.  

 

We have been asked to make and write out a recipe and background story of our child's/family's favorite recipe, one we possibly normally make together. We then must proceed to take pictures and/or the children must draw the end result or the recipe step by step. All the recipes will be published in a book that will be sold to raise funds for our school. A great idea, we can all agree on that. And I am a food blogger, so easy peasy right?

Not exactly.



This is a random picture of a banana bread past that I made using chocolate chips.

 

My daughter's first suggestion was roast chicken, which we do all love, but handing in a paper that reads we-all-love-roast-chicken-because-roast-chicken-is-delicious-and-what-we-do-is-preheat-the-oven-season-the-chicken-and-stick-it-in-said-oven-for-xyz-minutes-and-then-take-it-out-and-devour-it seemed sort of pointless, given she does not ever help me roast the chicken in the first place. Plus, pretty much everbody has their own way to roast a chicken. I know I do.

 

Eyeing the brown and spotted bananas in our fruit bowl I counter-proposed banana bread. After all, it is a simple recipe, beloved by most kids, that I make quite often and that a child can easily help with. Also, I needed to get rid of those bananas. And some of that Easter chocolate lying around.

You may, if you knew us intimately, retort that my daughter doesn't help  me bake that either (her initial objection by the way). But to be honest, she is usually too busy drawing, coloring, cutting out or gluing something at the kitchen table while I cook, to help me with any of my cooking. Granted, she is a good eater, she thinks about food during her day more than most kids do and enjoys the finer pleasures of life like crisp chicken skin and briny olives but she never helps me in the kitchen for more than a handful of minutes. She is enthusiastic for about 60 seconds and then gets sidetracked by all the more fun things her immagination is willing her to do. She can wax lyrical about the pleasant contrast of warm cocoa and cold butter and jam on bread she has for breakfast or about caramelized onions or the smell of toasting spices and gnaw nibble on bones just like her mama, but we are not really a cooking team.

This banana bread was made with 1 cup wholewheat flour and 1/2 cup oat flour
 

Her second objection was that she didn't know what to call it in Italian. Ok kid, you have a point: pane alle banane does not sound particularly enticing. But the humble loaf makes a good background story about our heritage and how "us Americans" make it to use up those overripe bananas that families with kids seem to be plagued with. And it would certainly be unique in a book filled with roast chicken, tiramisù and various lasagna recipes. We might even start a fad. And hey, we can just call it... banana bread!

So banana bread it was. And the cool part is that half the work is already done: I just have to copy the recipe and pictures off of my blog!

Except...

...I do not have a recipe for banana bread on my blog.
 

Sure, I have written about wholewheat, oat and banana muffins, chocolate chip banana bread muffins and sour cream and olive oil banana muffins (enough with all these banana muffins already!) but there is not ONE. SINGLE. RECIPE. FOR. BANANA. BREAD. An American blogger without a recipe for banana bread... shame on me. And barely a picture I can recycle for my daughter's school project because all the banana concoctions I ever used for my blog are friggin' muffin shaped!

So here, at long last, is my recipe for banana bread, adapted from the Joy of Cooking.

Chocolate chip cherry no-churn... ice cream?

I just can't seem to get enough of all those lovely pictures and recipes for ice cream out there these days. I spent hours in the heat last week looking at one photograph after the other, wishing I had the ice cream maker kit for my Kitchen Aid but, honestly, I can't justify buying one on a whim just to make ice cream a few times in the next month, until I move on to my next endeavour.

So I started ogling non-churn ice cream recipes and even though there are not half as many of them, there still are a few different methods for making it. One involves stirring the mixture every 15 minutes once it is in the freezer until it starts turning solid, but that is way too time consuming for me. I cannot imagine myself sitting around the house all afternoon waiting to stir my non-churn ice cream. Also, just thinking of opening and closing the drawers of my over frosted freezer and fitting the container in the abovementioned overflowing drawers is enough to discourage that course of action.

Another method involves blending frozen fruit with cream or custard and then freezing. You can blend again right before serving for optimal texture. I think I will try this next.

Last, a foolproof method which caught my eye, suggests using condensed milk to ensure creaminess and no ice crystals in the cream. No stirring once in the freezer, no cooking or eggs... hmmm, interesting.

I was sold.

So I pitted a big bag of very ripe cherries (I was very grateful for my cherry pitter, another on-a-whim buy from two years ago, although a much cheaper one than a Kitchen Aid accessory),  whipped up some cream, chopped some bitter sweet chocolate and made the ice cream. Next I put it into the freezer and waited the 6 suggested hours.

Not enough, back into the freezer.

Result?

I am not gonna lie to you: it ain't ice cream.

It is cold, pretty creamy, good, but it just isn't ice cream as we know it. Because the truth is the flavor is lacking in depth, the depth only custard gives you. And although it doesn't have crystals in it, it is not the same kind of creaminess you get from real ice cream.

So next time I will be trying the other method. Or, more likely, sooner or later I will give in to buying the ice cream kit for my Kitchen Aid.

Until then I may make this summer dessert again. It is good, so go ahead and give it a try. But be warned, just don't call it ice cream!

Double chocolate chip cookies

I reached cookie nirvana on Friday.

These are the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever made. This is what I expect from the perfect cookie, what I have never been able to replicate in my kitchen. This cookie is chewy, chunky and fudgy. My other chocolate chip cookies were pretty good if I can say so myself but these are perfect. In taste, texture, size. And they didn't turn flat a few minutes out of the oven. Don't ask me why or how. I've tried all the tricks. Freezing. Resting the dough for 24, 36, 48 hours. I've tried adding more or less butter. I've used different kinds of sugar. I've tried underbaking and they turned out... well, underbaked. While baking these I even added the egg later than I should have. It mattered not, still perfection.

The recipe did not seem so very different from others I had used. There were the usual promises of the best cookie ever, but I wasn't convinced. I had seen beautiful photos before and my end product never turned out looking quite the same. So I can't tell you why they turned out so good. What I can say is that just writing about the lack of inspiration I was feeling on Friday, putting it out there, got my creative juices flowing again. I literally ran home from work and baked these beauties in the two hours I had to pack, pick up the kids and leave for the week end. I barely had ten seconds to take a couple of pictures. They do not do these cookies justice. Make them yourself, you'll see.

These are brownies and chocolate chip cookies all in one. They made the perfect gift for the perfect week end. Nature leaves me speechless, by the way.

Please click to zoom...it is worth it, I promise

You forget that a few hours from a city, even in an overcrowded country like Italy, there is such beauty.

Thank you for your comments, for sharing your similar experiences and for your support on my last post. I know that for every comment left there are at least ten more of you out there that feel the same way. And last but not least, check out my blogroll. I finally updated it a few weeks ago with some of my favorite blogs.

Recipe adapted from A Full Measure of Happiness.

Chocolate chip & walnut oatmeal cookies and mini foodies

Considering I am not one for baking cookies, I am on quite a roll these days. Truth being, the not-so-satisfactory outcome of the last oatmeal cookies I made kept nagging me and is probably why I bought a can of rolled oats at the supermarket the other day.

My daughter is home with a yet unidentified fever this week. On Monday, when she started pestering me non-stop to watch cartoons (her daily TV allowance had been reached and the TV was promptly switched off) and I found my 20-month son standing on the living room table grinning at me, I realized I had to come up with an idea, and quick. I suggested baking cookies together. My daughter started jumping up and down chanting "cookies! cookies! cookies!" and I walked off to the kitchen, satisfied to have found a nice way to spend that endless hour stretching ahead of us before dinner time when the kids are especially cranky. I took out the ingredients we needed, helped my son pull the stool up to the counter and answered several questions about oats. Just when I thought we were getting to the fun part, my daughter politely asked if she could go play because she was tired and her arm was hurting from mixing. When I enthusiastically told her it was time to roll up our sleeves and start using our hands, she in so many words said she was annoiata, bored. I told her she was free to go, trying not show my disappointment. My son, as always, readily followed her out of the kitchen (this was probably a good thing since he had been reaching for the discarded egg shells and kept trying to stick his fingers in the bowl while the electric mixer was on).

So there I was, alone in the kitchen, flour everywhere, rolling the batter into balls, putting in and pulling out tray after tray of cookies. The kids were squeeling in the other room, wrestling on the floor and having the time of their lives. I still had dinner to cook, laundry to sort and endless toys to pick up between one batch and the next. Why did I get myself into this on a Monday evening? Story of my life!

 

I read all these blogs where moms write about their children helping them prepare each and every meal, about kids who actually ask their parents if they can make up a recipe and cook dinner for the family. Many children even have their own cooking blogs. 

Now, I consider my children pretty adventurous eaters. If you ask my five-year old what her favorite food is she will say sushi. When she was 18 months old she had a wasabi pea phase. When we eat fish we usually fight over the cheeks and we always share the oysters and tail of a roast chicken. My son will stuff his face with just about anything, from rabbit meat to olives. It may sound very "foodie" and cool to write this, but let's be honest, I don't for a second kid myself that my children can already tell the cheek and oyster of the animal they are eating apart from the rest of the meat. They are simply emulating and yeah, they probably have more of chance of becoming gluttons growing up with us than other kids. In our home the rule is to taste everything and to never say food is "yucky". I never cater to my children, unless it involves reducing the heat factor. But my ceviche-eating daughter will sometimes (and lately more often than not) make us sit hours at the table to eat something as unadventurous as string beans and tears easily flow when I present her with the most classic roasted carrots, which she used to gobble up in a second. My son the-vacum-cleaner will inhale a whole bowl of fancy pasta in an instant, chew happily and then discard perfectly round peas one after the other, that he stores in his cheeks just long enough to make me do a mental victory dance. Most of the time my daughter does not eat my baked goods, like I have mentioned many times before, and we have rarely gotten through a whole cooking session together.

So c'mon, how many of you out there really have children who cook gourmet food, eat every plant (after the ager of 1 or 2) that grows on the face of a planet and have blogs before they can read and write?

I made these cookies alone but everyone is eating them, even my daughter.

Adapted from the Joy of Cooking.

Chewy chocolate & peanut butter chip cookies

You may have noticed I am not a big cookie baker. Cookies are fickle, they never seem to turn out exactly the way I want them to or expect them to. Cookies are time consuming, with all those different batches to prepare and cool and I just don't have enough of it these days. I had a big bag of chocolate and peanut butter chips that I bought in NY hanging out in my cupboard, patiently waiting, but I was just not inspired and did not want to begin the quest for the perfect chocolate chip cookie, the endless search it seems every blogger starts at some point in his/her blogging history. Should  I use the NY Times Torres recipe or the Toll House recipe? What chocolate is best? How long should I chill the dough?

 And then I saw the recipe for Big, Fat, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies posted just the other day by Sing for your Supper and the photographs were so enticing I just couldn't resist, I had to try it. Oh my, those pictures...

I made a batch of larger ones and a batch of smaller ones. The result was great, I finally baked a wonderfully chewy chocolate chip cookie.

But...

There is always a 'but' when  baking cookies, something that needs to be changed or improved. Despite my cookies being good enuogh to become a staple household recipe, they looked nothing like the cookies in the pictures. Where were those fat, chunky cookies? Those pictures will haunt me until I succeed.

Oatmeal, chocolate chip & sour cherry cookies

I still have a large amount of rolled oats sitting in my cabinet left over from the fudge oatmeal bar recipe.

I like them, I really do, but whenever I buy them they end up shoved into the back of the cupboard, forgotten and abandoned after my initial enthusiasm. I didn't want that to happen this time. I didn't want to be that girl again. You know, the fickle one, the kind you meet at a party and you have a really fun time with, who makes you feel special by laughing at your jokes and hanging out with you for a while. The kind who really means it when they say "I'll call you" and then gets distracted by a newer, more interesting arrival. I betrayed my oat friends many a time. I fell for their simplicity and versatility, got all exicted about all the things we could create together: cookies, crumbles, hearty soups...why, even meatloaf! Only to forget about them when my eye caught something a little more exciting like a warmly scented, unknown spice from a far away country or a new glossy vegetable showing up at the market.

This time I am keeping my promise. I will not forsake you, my friends.