saucy honey mustard pork chop/crispy quinoa leftovers with caramelized onions and a fried egg

As you may have realized, I like to read other food blogs, and that's where I tend to pick up my dinner ideas. However, sometimes (as with yesterday's entry) I like to just get down to business and cook, letting the ingredients take me where they will. That can lead to some plain sauteed spinach and fairly bland quinoa, but it can also lead to a legitimately awesome honey mustard pork chop.

everyone loves a waffle iron

Maybe it's just me, but I think of waffle irons as one of those kitchen devices that everyone thinks that they will use, but inevitably ends up collecting dust in the basement with the deep fryer and other cool but non-everyday kitchen devices. I mean, I can think of probably two times in my life that my mom has used hers, so I was hesitant to buy one of my own, considering the limited storage space in my NYC apartment. Clearly, no matter how many delicious waffle recipes are out there to tantalize me, this was not something that I needed..... but alas, good sense and practicality lost out to the sheer force of desire and a tiny $10 waffle iron on sale at Target.

caramelized bananas over oatmeal

I remember the first time I learned that you could utterly transform bananas into sweet, chewy, crisp, melty banana candy simply by slicing them and pan frying them with butter. I had helped my friend Kevin move, and as a thank you he made breakfast. It was either french toast or waffles, both of which I love and would have been more than satisfied with. Then he asked if I wanted bananas, and I was blown away.




Obviously, caramelized and fried bananas are hardly a culinary innovation. This is basically the same concept of Bananas Foster, without the theatrics of flambeing.

I don't add sugar when I caramelize my bananas, and they are still plenty sweet. If yours aren't particularly ripe, I suppose sugar would help, but I'd honestly advise waiting until the fruit sweetens up naturally in order to yield the best result.

There are two basic versions of this dish: thin sliced and thick sliced. Thick slices afford for the most variation in texture and flavor in each piece, as the center of a thick slice of banana will taste purely of banana. This is very good, but usually I like to slice my banana really thinly, which means that the inner banana gets very soft and almost melts away, while the exterior becomes a delicately crispy sugar shell. If you don't have enough butter in the pan, the fruit can easily stick and all the slices can quickly become a sticky caramelly mess. If that threatens to happen to you, do not fret. It's not as pretty, but it will still taste amazing.




So what can you do with these golden little beauties? They are a welcome addition to breakfasts, brunches and desserts. You could stuff them into crepes with mascarpone or ricotta, layer them with puff pastry and whipped cream, pile them atop a stack of pancakes or french toast, serve them over ice cream... The possibilities are endless.

Today, I chose oatmeal. It was an excellent way to enliven a somewhat dull breakfast food!

sour cream corn pancakes

stack of pancake deliciousness

If you don't like pancakes then you don't have a soul. Period. I'm sorry, but that's just what I believe. Straight up Catholic doctrine right there.

But seriously folks, what could be better than piping hot pancakes, thin and crisp with a soft interior? Those babies don't even have to be fluffy, as long as they are buttery and soaking in real maple syrup. Dee-licious.


corn pancakes with extra butter and syrup

Back in early September, I made these corn pancakes with the last of my summer corn. The recipe was very simple, as any reasonable pancake recipe is. There are wet ingredients, (egg, buttermilk, sourcream and vanilla extract), mixed with dry ingredients, (flour, sugar, salt, cornmeal, baking soda and baking powder). Stir until just combined, and then cook over medium high heat in a greased frying pan. Pretty standard fare. The only thing that makes this recipe a little bit different is the addition of corn kernels, which are sauteed briefly in butter before being stirred into the batter, giving the finished product an unusual crunch. (Of course, at the time I couldn't chew, so I more or less swallowed them whole!)

These were good pancakes, and I liked them. They were a bit on the thicker side, but they were tender and soft inside with a crisp butter-browned exterior. In other words, they came out just right. They weren't too sweet, and tasted great with a generous maple syrup splash.


dissecting pancake deliciousness

As for the corn kernels, the corn that I used was sweet and delicious, so it was a pretty good addition to a very tasty batter. In retrospect, however, I don't think I'd like to have corn kernels in my pancakes more than occasionally. I mean, it was an interesting and tasty twist on a classic dish, but it just wasn't good enough to warrant their inclusion on a regular basis. Even though they were sugary sweet, those corn kernels still seemed slightly vegetabley, which is a little disconcerting in maple syrup coated pancakes. At the time, I was very pleased with how these turned out, but I'm not exactly jonesing for another batch.

Basically, I made these because I was looking to find a good use for all that food co-op corn. As it turns out, corn pancakes are a fine pancake variety. They are not God's gift to pancakes, and they do not necessarily improve them, but they are definitely pretty good. I mean, hello, they are pancakes. (As I said before, if you don't love pancakes, there is clearly something wrong with you.) So what I'm saying is that I'd encourage you to try this recipe only if you have tons of delicious corn. Otherwise, regular variety pancakes will probably serve just as well.

chocolate coffee oatmeal

chocolate coffee oatmeal

This isn't much of a post, except to say that I recently experimented with making coffee chocolate oatmeal as part of my soft food diet. I cooked the oatmeal on the stove top with hot coffee and milk, stirring in some Hershey's cocoa powder. It was surprisingly disappointing. It got gluey and sticky, and the cocoa powder clumped up a bit. I also think it could have used some added sugar to counteract the bitterness of the coffee.

I still think this could be good, but in this iteration, it simply wasn't. Bleaugh.

breakfast!

Last weekend I made breakfast for Nathan and me:


a decadent breakfast

A poached egg with creamed swiss chard, half a toasted kaiser roll, and some steak. It was pretty filling and delicious. I had put all my half and half in my sad, watery corn soup, so I actually used some of that to cream my chard. It worked just fine, although I ended up adding just a little more than I probably should have. You can see the sauce pooling out underneath the chard in the photo.

Man, I love chard. This new food co-op has only given us chard twice all summer, which is sad and shockingly infrequent. I love the brightly colored ribs. I have a great method for cooking them that I'd love to share with you all, so I hope I get more chard soon!

french toast success

oven baked amaretto pannetone french toast

Despite my doing a totally half assed job, this boozy baked french toast recipe came out pretty awesome. No measurements, just milk, beaten organic food co-op eggs, some cheap ass amaretto, brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla extract and a dash of salt mixed together and poured over buttered slices of pattetone. I was deathly afraid it would be too dry/too boozy, but instead got the slam dunk breakfast I had hoped for.

I love when a yummy french toasty is all crispy on the outside and runny on the inside. Unfortunately it was taking a longer to cook than the prescribed half hour (I kept underestimating how hot to set the oven) so I popped it under the broiler to finish off and the edges on one side started to burn a little. Minor damage, but still a shame. I normally would have been more patient, but Laura needed to leave for work so I tried a short cut. Unless your bread is at very even levels in your pan, I don't recommend the broiler for this one.

That being said, the broiler is a new-found love of mine. My mom doesn't have a broiler in her stove at home, because there is a drawer for storing pots and pans under the oven. I'd broiled things in the toaster oven, so I knew that broiling meant that the heat was coming only from above, but I only recently discovered/realized that the drawer under my oven is meant to serve as its broiler.

My stove is an ancient gas range which I have to light manually by lighting the pilot and then opening the bottom drawer and lighting the burner there, which is prone to ignite in a rather explosive manner if the gas is left running for more than a few seconds. I never would have thought to cook anything in that bottom drawer had it not been for witnessing my Aunt Cathy utilizing her similarly designed broiler to cook our beloved garlic sweet potatoes, from Mark Bittman's first Thanksgiving column in the New York Times, dating all the way back to 1997. My broiler can crisp things up pretty fast, so you've got to keep an eye on it, but it is pretty darn useful! I'm a little embarrassed it took me so long to discover it, but I'm sure glad that I have!


fruit studded french toast