Join Juliet and me as we conga around the kitchen island singing Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song .

Got you in the mood for a banana recipe?

The way I figure it, everyone needs a few good banana recipes. Bananas are a health food, after all. According to the LiveStrong site: “The high levels of potassium and carbohydrates in bananas make them a good source of fuel for athletes. The fiber in bananas can help to lower your risk for intestinal problems, high cholesterol, heart disease and diabetes. The fiber can help fill you up and keep you feeling full for longer, helping you keep from eating more calories than you need and gaining weight.” What’s not to love?

I figure everyone also needs a few great banana recipes to use up those unsightly overripe bananas that inevitably end up in your fruit bowl–you know, the ones that shrivel, turn black and ooze out of their skins without the least provocation. (You can, by the way, freeze those over-ripe banana bad boys and use them –right outta the freezer– in any cake recipe that calls for bananas.)

In my home, in addition to my conga-loving rescue pup, Juliet, banana obsession extends to my  27-year-old umbrella cockatoo, Moti. Woe be it to me if I don’t promptly deliver a food dish with a few banana slices to her cage early each morning. I’ve been known to make a sleepy-eyed  early-morning banana run to the supermarket to keep Moti in bananas. Trust me, there is no sunshine in in anyone’s day if Moti doesn’t have her morning banana.

Moti is smart, too. Early each morning, perched on one foot next to her water bottle, she ever-so-carefully places pieces of her other foods onto the velcro-like sticky surface of her banana slices where they stay as she eats a little banana and then a little of her other foods, washing it all down with big gulps of fresh water. (What can I say? Everyone is a foodie in my house.)

Fortunately for us all, bananas have been around forever. Well, almost forever. Food historians trace the domestication of bananas to New Guinea around 8000 BCE, making them perhaps the first cultivated fruit. Later, Muslim traders spread the banana across Asia and into Europe and, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portuguese explorers brought the plant to the new world. In today’s America, the average American consumes 27.9 pounds of bananas each year.

By the way, the plant in the photo (above) is a yellow African begonia, a Staudtil microsperma, from Nigeria by way of Andy’s Orchids in Encinitas.  For my gardening friends who are reading this blog, here is the link to Andy’s website:  Andy’s Orchids .  Prepare to be overwhelmed by the collection Andy has put together.

This truly wonderful banana cake recipe is adapted from one that appeared in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. Here is a link to that book: Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home to Yours.

From everyone here, Day-O! to you and yours.

Yields 16 Servings

Banana Cake

20 minPrep Time

1 hr, 5 Cook Time

1 hr, 25 Total Time

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Ingredients

• 3 C. all-purpose flour
• 2 t. baking soda
• 1/2 t. salt
• 8 ounces unsalted butter (at room temperature)
• 2 C. sugar
• 2 t. vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs (room temperature)
• 5 large very ripe bananas (mashed)
• 1 C. sour cream (or plain yogurt)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Carefully grease your bundt pan.
2. Whisk flour, baking soda and salt together. Set aside.
3. Add butter to the bowl of a stand mixer and mix until the butter is creamy. Add the sugar and beat until the butter/sugar mixture is pale in color and fluffy in texture. Add vanilla to the butter mixture. Add eggs (one at a time) and mix thoroughly after adding each egg--about one minute after adding each egg. Lower the speed of your mixer from medium to low an add mashed bananas. Then, add one half of the flour mixture and mix. Add the sour cream and mix to combine. Add the remainder of the flour to the batter. Mix until ingredients are combined.
4. Using a spatula, scrape the batter into your prepared bundt pan. Rap the bundt pan on your counter once or twice once all the batter is in the pan. This will remove any air bubbles from the batter.
5. Bake on the middle rack in the center of your oven at 350 degrees F. for 65 to 75 minutes. (Cover your cake loosely with tin foil for the last 15 minutes of baking.) Your cake will be done when a toothpick or wooden skewer comes out clean when inserted into the center of the cake.
6. Let cake cool on your counter and unmold onto your serving plate. Serve plain dusted with powdered sugar or drizzle a powdered sugar glaze (powdered sugar mixed with a little milk) onto the cake. You can serve this immediately or wrap it in plastic wrap and serve the next day. According to the original recipe, the texture of the cake improves when wrapped overnight and served the next day.

Nutrition

Calories

2352 cal

Fat

101 g

Carbs

300 g

Protein

51 g

Click Here For Full Nutrition, Exchanges, and My Plate Info

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https://bluecayenne.com/day-o-banana-cake

These days many food sites exhort us to “eat the rainbow”–a colorful visual cue to remind us of the importance of incorporating a variety of nutrients into our daily diets.  Good advice. I know I need the nudge.

Here is a recipe for a rainbow in a bowl, a nutritious roasted edamame salad redolent in garlic and marinated in a delightful basil vinaigrette. It is so good that I’ve found myself raiding the refrigerator late at night for this salad rather than the usual desserts. How funny is that?

Edamame?

Edamame are (Aargh! Is edamame plural or singular? )  young soybeans and they are powerfully nutritious–high in protein, dietary fiber and micronutrients.

While records indicate they were first available in the United States in the 1920s, they didn’t take off here until the 1980s when, depending upon the food writer you read, the Shogun series hit U.S. TVs and American interest in everything  Japanese  (including Japanese food)  spiked or the U.S. organic food movement took off. Maybe it was a bit of both.

Edamame has long been a staple of Asian cuisine. In fact, the consumption of young soybeans in China and Japan predates American interest in the food by a couple thousand years. It was the Japanese who gave the young beans their modern name edamame, beans on a branch.

In Asia, edamame was consumed for both its culinary flavor and its medicinal applications for conditions as varied as diabetes and hypertension. A 17th Century Chinese writer even claimed that beans would “kill evil chi.”

Modern nutritional research has validated many of the earlier beliefs about edamame’s value in the human diet, noting that the bean is a complete protein with all the essential amino acids and a single serving provides substantial amounts of your daily dietary needs: 17% Iron, 78% folate, 26% vitamin K.  A cup has only 120 calories but 10 grams of protein. Wow!

Try this great and great-for-you recipe. Who doesn’t need to exorcize a little evil chi anyway?

Yields 4 Servings

Edamame Salad

15 minPrep Time

15 minCook Time

30 minTotal Time

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Ingredients

• 12 ounces frozen shelled edamame (about 2 cups)
• 1/2 C. fresh corn kernels
• 1/4 C. finely diced scallion
• 1 clove garlic (minced)
• 1 T. olive oil
• 3/4 t. kosher salt
• 1/4 t. freshly ground black pepper
• 1 C. chopped fresh tomato
• 1/4 C. chopped fresh basil leaves
• 1 T. red wine vinegar

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Combine edamame, corn kernels, diced scallion, minced garlic, olive oil, kosher salt and black pepper in a bowl and toss to combine all the ingredients and coat them in the olive oil.
3. Spread vegetable mixture on a rimmed metal tray and bake for 10-15 minutes. Remove roasted edamame mixture from the oven and chill in your refrigerator for 30 minutes.
4. Add tomato, chopped basil leaves and red wine vinegar to the chilled edamame mixture. Toss to combine. Adjust your seasonings to your taste and serve.

Nutrition

Calories

52 cal

Fat

4 g

Carbs

3 g

Protein

1 g

Click Here For Full Nutrition, Exchanges, and My Plate Info

7.8.1.2

55

https://bluecayenne.com/edamame-salad

This recipe is an adaptation of one that appeared on The Good Network. Here is the link: Roasted Edamame Salad

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My friend Sarah recently went to lunch at the new Farmhouse Restaurant at Roger’s Gardens in Newport Beach. She came home raving about the food. The cauliflower steaks with chimichuri sauce particularly impressed her.

I decided to see if I could recreate the dish and went on an online searching expedition. I found several recipes. Coincidentally, I also attended a Sur La Table cooking class where cauliflower steaks were one of the dishes we prepared.

It turns out that cauliflower steaks are having their moment and they are being served with a rainbow of complimentary sauces–romesco, vinaigrette, pesto and on and on. Epicurious even has a recipe for cauliflower steaks sauced with cauliflower puree. That one sounds kind of redundant to me but I haven’t made it. Maybe it is wonderful.

Once my cauliflower steak was roasted, I had some fun plating it. I decided that it should sit on the sauce rather than having the sauce as a topping. I also added roasted pine nuts as a garnish and that turned out to be a major flavor and texture treat with this dish.

Hope you enjoy this.

Roasted Cauliflower

Yields 4 Servings

Roasted Cauliflower Steaks

20 minPrep Time

40 minCook Time

1 hrTotal Time

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Ingredients

• 4 1/2-inch thick cauliflower steaks cut from a heavy and firm cauliflower
• 2 T. olive oil (or more)
• Sea salt and freshly-ground pepper
• For the sauce:
• 1/4 C. pitted green olives
• 1 T. capers (rinsed and dried)
• 3 T. roughly-chopped flat-leaf parsley
• 1 small garlic clove (minced)
• 1/2 t. Dijon mustard
• 1 t. lemon zest
• 2 T. fresh lemon juice
• 5 T. extra-virgin olive oil (or more)
• Garnish with roasted pine nuts, chopped parsley (or cilantro), a strip of tomato peel, and an extra drizzle of your best olive oil

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Prepare a baking sheet by lining it with parchment paper. Move oven rack to the top position.
2. Wash the cauliflower and discard the leaves. Do not core the cauliflower. You will need the core to keep your "steak" slices in one piece. Cut the cauliflower in half and begin slicing the steaks about 1/2 inch thick. As you move to the outside of the cauliflower, the pieces of the cauliflower will not hold together. You can either roast those pieces and serve along side the steaks or reserve them for another purpose.
3. Brush cauliflower steaks with olive oil and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Roast until a knife inserted in the steaks punctures the steaks easily. This will take about forty minutes. Turn each steak over at the mid-point in roasting. When the steaks are done, you will have pretty golden brown bits on the edges of some parts of the cauliflower.
4. Make the sauce by combining all the sauce ingredients except the oil in your food processor. Process until the ingredients are well combined and the greens are chopped into small pieces. You will want to use a rubber spatula to scrape down the sides of the processor bowl once or twice while you are processing the sauce. You don't want to over-process because you want some texture in your sauce. Next, with the food processor running, slowly drizzle the oil into the bowl until the oil combines with the other ingredients. Add salt and pepper to your taste.
5. To plate the cauliflower, smear some sauce on a white plate. Arrange the cauliflower steak on top. Sprinkle chopped parsley and roasted pine nuts over the steak. Decorate with a strip of tomato skin and drizzle with some extra olive oil.

Nutrition

Calories

903 cal

Fat

97 g

Carbs

7 g

Protein

2 g

Click Here For Full Nutrition, Exchanges, and My Plate Info

7.8.1.2

53

https://bluecayenne.com/roasted-caulifower-steaks