Banana Pecan Muffins

Too many of these posts begin with having something past its prime that I have to use up. Would that I had enough time to shop for and immediately use the best and freshest!

Or maybe I should consider the blog theme to be "ways to use what needs using." That certainly reflects my cooking style most of the time.

This time it was three bananas that by Tuesday were so brown that when I picked one up by the stem, the rest fell off. I peeled them right then so that the peels could go out for the Wednesday morning trash pickup, and put the fruit in a covered bowl in the refrigerator. Even on the weekend I had no energy to deal with them until today, Sunday, when it was more a matter of time running out than a sudden surge of energy.

I used this recipe. (If you read the blog post it accompanies, notice the link to a recipe for banana bread with chocolate chips and candied ginger: that's the bread I brought to the cabin in August, though I took it from the book (A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table), not the blog.

I'd seen a variation of these muffins on another blog that added 1 t salt and 1 T of vanilla. I decided to stick with the original, mostly because I'm running low on vanilla and my vanilla beans have a few more weeks of soaking in vodka before I can consider the combination vanilla extract. I did add a pinch of salt because I like a bit of salty in my sweet. I probably would have liked them better with the whole teaspoon, but I wanted them to be a reasonably healthy breakfast. In pursuit of this, I also used whole wheat pastry flour instead of white flour and maybe that's why mine aren't as handsome and fluffy as the one in the blog picture, but mine didn't seem too dense so I think it's that I didn't fill the muffin cups as much.

Unlike the muffins, the loaf clung.

Muffin tins annoy me by never being the same size as any other muffin tins. I'm not talking about the tins for mini-muffins or jumbo muffins, but for ostensibly-standard-size muffins. This recipe said it made 18, and even though I under-filled my 12-muffin tin, I didn't have enough left for six more, so I poured it into the bread pan that already needed washing because I'd toasted the pecans in it. I was afraid it would take longer to cook, but was too hungry to stay in the kitchen and watch it, so I turned off the oven and left it in after I took the muffins out. That was a mistake because, having sat and cooled in the pan, it was unwilling to let go.

My new sifter

My bananas were small, so I used all three. I also, as always, reduced the sugar, but only by a tiny bit. For once, sugar reduction was unnecessary, perhaps because the recipe source was French rather than American. The muffins were not at all too sweet and next time I would go ahead and use the full amount called for. Other than that (and the salt and whole wheat) I followed the recipe exactly: I even sifted the dry ingredients (a step I tend to skip because until a couple of weeks ago I didn't own a sifter--if the step seemed important, I'd shake it through a mesh strainer).

Good Combinations

I had a pile of lovely tomatoes I'd been given (my first really good garden tomatoes of the summer) that I left unused for a couple of days. When I realized they wouldn't last much longer I made the best of them into dinner, above, with garlic, basil, olive oil, and asiago cheese. The rest I cooked with pale purple eggplants that, while shriveled, were beautifully white inside. When I cut open even the loveliest standard eggplants, there are usually brown streaks and spots inside, so now I plan to buy these pretty pale purple ones whenever I see them. I added salt, garlic, and herbs from the garden (marjoram, oregano, and basil, I think) for flavor.

No more eggplant posts for a while, I promise. Not that there's anything wrong with eggplant; it just seems over-represented so far.

A couple of my favorite things recently aren't really cooking, just simple combining. Sparkling water over ice mixed with lemon or lime juice and lightly sweetened with ginger syrup is delicious and refreshing. And at our annual school picnic, someone brought what appeared to be just green grapes, feta cheese, and mint; everybody loved it. I wish I knew who made it, because when I list those ingredients, I feel like they wouldn't bind together properly without some moistening, but the version at the picnic didn't seem to have oil or vinegar or juice or anything else. Maybe I'd just try not letting the grapes dry after washing them.

Labor Day

I'd been planning to bake a cake for Dorothy's barbecue, but Barbara wanted to bring lemon cake with raspberry sauce, so I said I'd bring appetizers instead. I made a roasted vegetable spread I'd copied out of a Barefoot Contessa cookbook. It involved roasting eggplant, red bell peppers, red onion, and garlic that had been tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper, then pulsing the mixture a few times in a food processor. Of course, I roast eggplant all the time, and often include onions and bell peppers, so except that I usually don't bother to peel the eggplant, this was pretty much my usual roasted veggies, but with smaller bits of vegetable. It was good, though.

Yesterday after mass we ate bagels and cream cheese with red onions, cucumbers, and the smoked salmon my mom bought at the smoked salmon factory we visited in Anacortes. I took the remains of the salmon home, flaked it, and combined it with a mixture of cream cheese, sour cream, lemon juice, chives, and horseradish. I put it in the foreground of the top picture, hoping that if it were closer it wouldn't just look like a blob of white, but the pink of the fish and the green of the chives can't be seen very well in the post-mixing picture.

Having fed my sourdough starter two days ago, I finally tried making extra-tangy sourdough bread, bread that gets all its leavening from the sourdough and rises slowly over a couple of days. (In the past I'd only made the kind helped along with packaged yeast.) I was afraid it would be too sour, but the taste and texture were both very good though the loaves were a bit flat. Unfortunately, I forgot to slash the tops of the loaves before baking, and I think that kept them from expanding properly. I turned one loaf upside down for the picture so you can see where the surface tore apart on the bottom. But by halving the loaves lengthwise before cutting them in thin slices, I had pretty little pieces perfect for spreading with the toppings, so the flatness was a blessing in disguise.

Dorothy and Brian made garlic dip (Ratner dip?) with potato chips, pina coladas, and (inspired by hearing about Nick and Maggie's dinner party) a topping bar for burgers and hot dogs. Along with mustard, ketchup, lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickle, there was cheddar cheese, blue cheese, bacon, roasted red peppers, caramelized onions, and sriracha mayonnaise. My mom brought potato salad and lettuce salad, and Barbara brought beet salad and cucumber-tomato salad as well as dessert. It was a beautiful day and everything was delicious (including the perfect peach I had for breakfast).

I love Mondays off: another weekend in only four days!

Too Much Roasted Eggplant

The roasted eggplant with onions I mentioned a few posts ago with whole grain crackers made a satisfying and easy to transport lunch, so last weekend, I made another large batch. Not wanting to run out midweek, I overdid it and made too much, and I didn't refrigerate it the first night--I'd started it at a high temperature before leaving for an evening of TV and Chinese takeout with Sydney, and turned off the oven without opening it to let it keep cooking after I left, then forgot about it until morning--so I wasn't sure it would keep through the long weekend.

Saturday I ate it mixed with spaghetti, chopped tomato, torn leaves of basil, shredded asiago cheese, and a little more olive oil.

Then today I cooked what was left with the remains of a tube of tomato paste that burst so I thought I'd better use it up, half a jalapeno pepper, chopped, (it was rotting; I used the half that hadn't yet), brown rice, and water enough to cook the rice. Then I mixed in sliced toasted almonds. It isn't very exciting, but it's three days worth of lunch, packed already. I don't think I have ever yet succeeded in making myself lunches to take to school eight days in a row :-)

Heat Wave + First Week of School = Not Much Cooking

On Facebook I claimed Heat Wave + First Week of School = Total Exhaustion; perhaps that's the correct equation and it was the exhaustion that kept me from cooking, but I think the temperature and lack of time contributed directly as well. I'd have nothing to post about if it weren't that I'd decided to give my dad lots of grilled chicken for his birthday because he'd liked it so much earlier in the summer. I regretted that decision the night before his birthday when I was outside grilling at midnight in 82-degree humidity. (I know 82 degrees doesn't sound that bad, but it is when it's been in the 90s all day and night doesn't bring coolness.)

I wasn't expecting it to take so long; it was 6:30 when I headed to the grocery store. I had to go to a second store when the first didn't have whole legs, coming home in between to refrigerate other purchases because the car was so insanely hot. I'd skipped trimming the extra skin and fat last time, but as that was a possible cause of the flare-ups that had burned the first batch, I took the time to do it. Then it had to brine (I made the Mediterranean paste while it was brining). But I'd still have been finished at a somewhat reasonable hour if the coals had stopped flaming at some point. The cookbook said to leave them in the chimney until the flames subsided, so I waited, and waited, and waited. Now I'm thinking the flames were more visible because it was dark and in daylight I'd have considered them gone long before the point when I gave up. By the time I dumped the coals out, they were less than half the volume I'd started with.

Even after all that trimming, flames still leapt and chicken still burned, so I had to peel off the worst of the burnt parts just as George had. I noticed too late that I was supposed to rinse the chicken after brining. Did George do that? Maybe the sugar in the brine was part of the reason we both had such problems with burning. 

Despite the burning, the chicken was a success. It had plenty of time to re-brown and the lemon/parsley/garlic/etc. smelled and tasted wonderful. My garage still smelled good the next day (I'd grilled right outside the open garage door so that I had enough light to see what I was doing).

I haven't done much else in the way of cooking this week. I did steam an enormous artichoke to eat with lemon-butter for dinner last night (it was a gorgeous day but my exhaustion hadn't gone yet, so I wasn't up to much). My mom admired its beauty and freshness and bought it for me at Nature's Bin. 

Today is delightfully cool and I'm thinking about baking. I wanted to make vanilla bean pound cake but one of the three ways vanilla beans are involved in the cake is vanilla sugar which needs to sit for a few days. You can see my vanilla-sugar-in-process (pieces of vanilla bean in sugar) next to my vanilla-extract-in-process (vanilla beans halved lengthwise in vodka) that I started a couple of weeks ago. (The process is taking place in a dark cupboard; they're just out for the photo.)

The Kahns are coming to Dorothy's for a Labor Day barbecue on Monday, and Barbara asked if I could bring her some of my sourdough starter so she can make English muffins, so I fed my neglected starter today and am thinking of experimenting with whole grain flour in my sourdough bread. But it's almost five-o'-clock and I'm very tempted to collapse in front of my last day of Netflix Watch Instantly, so it's probable no baking will actually happen.