Food, Photography and Bons Mots
It takes a neighborhood and sometimes a bicycle! This salad recipe is adapted from Hetty McKinnon’s salad cookbook Neighborhood. McKinnon is an Australian cook who currently lives in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn but has hung her hat in the Mediterranean, Asia and France.…
Brilliant red strawberries picked at the peak of their ripeness floating on a bed of creamy mascarpone and suspended over a crisp rye flour crust… You need this tart. We are on the cusp of strawberry season here in California and this easy-peasy (and indulgent)…
Dear Meghan.
You are one lucky girl. Movie star good looks. Handsome prince. Loaded grandmother-in-law.
But why didn’t you put that elegant little foot down and insist on a real cake for your wedding? What was it with that frou-frou elderflower cake anyhow?
I know., I know. You rejected the traditional British wedding cake–the dreaded fruit cake–for a cake with organic lemons, castle-grown elderflowers and cascades of elegant flowers. Good move on that one. But, still…
I know that whole tradition “thing” must have been a powerful pressure on you and Harry in picking your cake. Someone probably started out by showing you a photo of the Queen’s cake in 1947. Whoa!
And, then, of course, there was Princess Diana’s cake for her marriage to (ugh!) Charles. Sadly, that marriage had so many things going against it from the very beginning, not the least of which was that sterile-looking wedding cake baked by the head baker for the British Naval Armed Services. If I was into conspiracy theories, I would wonder if Camilla had a hand in the cake design. Just sayin…
So, I ask you, what better way would there have been to assert your American independence than by insisting upon the quintessential American cake, the banana cake, for your wedding? Surely, the queen must have had some overripe bananas sitting around the kitchens of Windsor Castle and I’m sure that people all across America would have sent you their overripe bananas for the cake. I know I would have. It would have been a slam dunk.
But that is all, as they say, water under the (London) bridge. Your wedding was beautiful.
In any event, here is a great banana cake recipe. New brides always enjoy experimenting with recipes in their modest first homes. You’ll probably be the only one baking banana cake at Kensington Palace and it’s always nice to have something sweet on hand when the Queen stops by unexpectedly with the corgis.
Give Harry a hug.
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This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the King Arthur Flour website. Here is the link: KAF Banana Cake.
I love adore soup! All soup. Well…maybe not all soup. I was once on a school district committee where one of the elementary school reps reported on her school’s “soup day.” Seems they had an activity where each student was asked to bring a can of Campbell’s…
I gave a birthday party recently for two of my friends, one of whom had mentioned that she particularly enjoyed flan. So, there was no question that flan would be our party dessert. The history of flan is interesting. Flan has been enjoyed for…
I was reminded of Paul Simon’s iconic hit as I was making banana bread the other day. I’m quickly finding that there are at least fifty ways to make the sweet treat. (If you want to relive a bit of Paul Simon’s performance of Fifty Ways in the Central Park Concert while you make your banana bread, here is a link: Paul Simon. Watch out, though.You’ll be singing it for the rest of the day.)
I know that I recently posted a banana bread recipe.
Bear with me.
There is a new development on the banana bread front that you will definitely want to look at if you are a banana bread diva (or divo).
Believe it or not, King Arthur Flour’s site has posted a template that allows you to fill in the ingredients you want to put into your banana bread and the site then calculates the proper amount you’ll need of each ingredient. You can find the link here. Is that cool or what?
Also, I’ve found a new banana bread recipe I want to share. Actually, it is banana banana bread. (No. That’s not a typo.) It really IS banana banana bread. (This recipe is adapted from one you’ll find on the Genius Kitchen site here .)
I confess that the recipe did pique my interest because of the repetitive title. Grammarians have a term for this type of repetitive use of words. It’s contrastive focus reduplication. (You know grammarians. They have to make things sound hard!) Using this construction, the double mention of banana gives emphasis to the strength of the banana ingredient in the bread. It’s not just banana bread. It’s banana banana bread! If you want to throw this bit of grammatical trivia around at your next dinner party, be my guest. Really cool cool grammarians us the term CR, by the way.
You don’t need to be coy about making this banana bread recipe. It’s really good.
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On a long-ago idyll in India, I discovered unimagined rice delights. There were soft puffy rice cakes called idli commonly eaten in the morning. Pilaf-like biryanis. Sweet pongals. Here is a take on a rice dish you probably have never imagined, a poha.…
Your friends and neighbors who arrive home from idylls in the Caribbean usually bring back tans, lame pirate jokes, and rum cakes. Rum, of course, is ubiquitous in the Caribbean and entrepreneurs long ago learned to add rum to cakes to expand rum’s culinary…
I was lying in bed the other night when my iWatch tapped me on the wrist. (The watch has a haptic function that allows it to tap you lightly on the wrist with a vibration to deliver reminders, alert you to the end of a timer you’ve set or indicate when you should make turns while driving. Kinda cool.)
This particular message told me that I could meet my daily exercise goal if I would only take a brisk 29 minute walk. It was 11 p.m.
Hmmm. What to do?
I could venture into the dark and forbidding reaches of my cold garage and walk on the treadmill for 29 minutes or I could get up and burn some calories cooking until I felt sleepy again. Life, at least my life, is full of tough decisions.
This pastry recipe for almond puff loaf had been on the top of my ever-growing stack of must-try recipes for a couple of weeks, so I decided to give it a late night nod. The recipe had piqued my curiosity because it combines a shortcrust pastry with a pate a choux pastry all in one recipe. I’ve never done that before. Fun. Somehow, when you layer the two doughs one on top of the other, magic happens in the oven and the two doughs fuse into one delicious whole, giving you a crisp bottom (like a cookie) and an airy top (like an eclair). The end result is a beautiful pastry worthy of a fancy bakery shop–a light and flaky pastry you thought you never-ever-never would be able to bake at home.
This recipe is currently the star recipe on King Arthur Flour’s April “bakealong.” Each month the baking site selects one great recipe to feature and encourages home cooks to bake it and share their experiences. This recipe has received glowing feedback and some of the posters have pointed to a decades-old Betty Crocker Cookbook recipe for kringle as its long-ago inspiration.
Kringle is a recipe that was brought to Racine, Wisconsin, by Danish immigrants in the late 1800s and is now the state’s official pastry. (I just looked it up. California doesn’t even have a state pastry. What in the heck is wrong with us? Write your legislator!)
An authentic kringle is a labor-intensive hand-rolled pastry that has many flaky layers and can have a sweet or savory filling. This Betty Crocker/KAF recipe uses the two-dough shortcut to save you a lot of time and yields a delicious result.
Here is a short video about Racine’s kringles. The video gives you a peek at the kringle obsession that grips Wisconsinites every November and December: Racine, Wisconsin and Kringles .
Now that I’ve seen the packages of Wisconsin kringles in the videos, I realize that I’ve seen similar packages in Trader Joe’s during the winter holidays. (Trader Joe’s never ceases to amaze me. From bags of frozen Hatch chiles to sugared jalapeno slices to cans of authentic San Marzano tomatoes to kringles, the chain is unerring in its ability to identify food trends. Now, if they would just bring back those colorful boxes of roobios and honey bush tea that I’ve become addicted to!)
Since I’m a party of one, it has been a big task to eat all the pastry from this recipe but, trust me, I’ve given it my best. Now I really do need that brisk 29 minute walk!
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Here is the link to the original recipe from King Arthur’s Flour: Almond Puff Loaf.
When a wonderful baking resource like King Arthur Flour bestows the title of “Recipe of the Year” on one of its creations, I sit up and take notice. That is particularly true for me because I was so in love with their lemon…
