Banana Bread

Banana bread is a great way to use up those "too-ripe" bananas that suddenly appear and no one will eat. If you don't have time to bake with them right away, toss them in the freezer until you do have time. You can toss them in with the skins on. You can peel them and stick them in a freeze bag or container. Or you can mush them up in portions suited to your normal recipe, about 1.5 cups (or 3 bananas) for the one below. The frozen bananas also work great for fruit smoothies.

I had just made banana bread last weekend and it was a big hit. However, I thought perhaps twice in a row would be pushing it so I altered this one a bit, adding some orange juice, just a splash, and a teaspoon of cinnamon. I debated about using cardamom, which Owen had at the book release party yesterday. I typically use it in Indian tea or pfefferneuse cookies and not much else. But I ended up just going with the cinnamon because I was in a hurry and didn't want to grind anything up. Most banana bread recipes call for 1 cup of walnuts or pecans as well, but I skipped that.

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
splash of orange juice or a spoonful of frozen concentrate
3 very ripe bananas, mashed up with a fork

Mix together the dry ingredients in a small bowl.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs, vanilla, orange juice, and mashed bananas. Blend well, about 3 minutes. Add the flour mixture and stir just until moistened.

Scrape into a greased loaf (9x5") pan and spread out so it's somewhat smooth. The batter will be somewhat stiff.

Bake at 350 for an hour. Use a toothpick or a knife to poke into the middle and make sure it comes up clean. Let cool in the pan for a few minutes, then remove from the baking pan and cool on a wire rack.

If you can't eat it all up at once, slice and freeze it. You can pull out however many slices you need and toast them to defrost.

Digital Dish Launch

I'm late chiming in... but it's not from lack of fond memories!

I brought my youngest with me and we took BART into Berkeley, adding to her adventure. We wandered up and down the farmer's market and found a place with a microphone and a bunch of chairs set up but no one around. A sign advertising Digital Dish let me know we must be in the right place however. Soon enough, Owen and Guy showed up loaded with boxes. This was my first look at the book and, boy was I impressed. How a book feels is important and this one was superb! Definitely professional looking and I was happy to have my part in it. Owen did a fantastic job putting it all together, with a neat little intro to each post and with everything indexed in almost anyway imaginable: by blog, by ingredient, by recipe name. The book itself is organized chronologically. Really a fanastically done book.

Owen did the lion's share of the talking, although we all tried to do our parts. I handed out his recipe cards he had printed up trying to lure people to sit down and listen for a bit. I also read aloud for the first time in public in I don't know how long. The speaking part was worrisome to me. Stephanie and I agreed we were much more comfortable behind the keyboard rather than in front of a microphone. She did fantastic and the thought of veal soup will remain an unpleasant image in my mind for some time I fear. However, my daughter tells me I did good but that I read better when I'm putting her to sleep at night with bedtime stories. I let her pick which entry to read and she chose the one on bacon and tomato sandwiches. Having just spent the last weekend tying up my tomato plants after a growth spurt, it seemed fitting! Some friends of mine stopped by and one of them was, in fact, the shopper for the mystery ingredient of almonds for Owen's first improvisation on strawberries. Gayle is a superb writer and quite a cook as well.

All that talk of meat and me having no secret supplier like Meathenge to meet me in alleys and hand off secret packages means I had to go to the regular grocery store though. Not nearly as exciting but they did have meat! Alas, I'd forgotten the gas grill was about out of gas (another to-do added to today's list) so I just broiled them. Good but not great. I do better judging their done-ness on a grill and overcooked them a tad. But since I'd not gotten any lunch along the way, they tasted fine.

Easy Pork Chops with Sauce

This is one of those recipes that I saw multiple variations of in various places, all the way from a few community cookbooks to the Better Homes and Garden Cookbook to postings on a cooking list. I normally saute pork chops a la Bittman in How to Cook Everything, a book I dearly love. But that requires last minute attention. I've mentioned we're in swim team season now and I wanted something that I could get ready that could then sit on the stove for a bit and stay warm.

2-4 pork loin chops
salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste
1 Tbs oil
1 can cream of mushroom soup (or make your own, of course)
1 Tbs Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup catsup

Sprinkle the chops with salt and pepper at least, and garlic powder as well if you like. Heat the oil and brown the chops on both sides. Mix together the cream of soup, Worcestershire sauce, and catsup. Pour over the chops and bring to a simmer. Cover and cook for 45-60 minutes at a slow simmer.

I bought 2 pretty large chops in the mark-down aisle for $2.89. I did actually use a can of soup, although I normally make my own so that was .50. The rest of the ingredients couldn't add up to .25 total so let's call it about .90 a serving since I got 4 servings out of it.

These were really good, moist and tender. The sauce went great on the mashed potatoes I made to with them. A side of fresh asparagus rounded out the meal.

Oh the variations I saw included some with a sliced onion on top of the chops, some with a soup can of milk added, some without catsup and/or Worcestershire sauce. Several recipes had you brown the chops and then put them and the sauce into a baking dish and bake at 350 F. for 45-60 minutes.

Beef Stew with Coffee: 60 cents a serving

I've learned that Sunday afternoons seem a good time to cruise the marked down meat aisle at my local Safeway. I do this to save money, but I have to admit there's some challenge I enjoy, having some meat added to my menu at the last minute. I typically go the grocery store with a list, based on the weekly loss leaders but if the marked down meat looks good I get that instead, causing some last minute menu changes. This week I picked up a couple of good-looking pork chops, some beef already cut up for stew, and a nice looking steak. All were marked down $2 of the normal price, leading to decent net costs. The sell-by dates gave me enough time to cook and/or freeze the meat.

I've seen many recipes that call for adding a cup of coffee to beef stew, supposedly an old cowboy trick. I finally tried it last night since I had the beef stew meat. Following is a rough guess as to what I put in the stew, which came out really good! I would have easily substitued a parsnip for the potato, whole carrots peeled and chopped for the baby ones, broth or even just water for the wine if you're not into cooking with alcohol, and so forth. Stew, of all recipes, should be crafted from what you have on hand. Cooking time is flexible. Stew doesn't suffer much from cooking more rather than less.

1 pound beef cut in cubes
1 Tbs oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup red wine
1 cup coffee
1/2 tsp thyme
1 bay leaf
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
1 cup or so baby carrots
1 stalk celery, sliced
1/2 cup peas (I used frozen)
2 cups water, optional

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium high heat. Brown the beef on all sides, sprinkling with salt and pepper. Remove the beef with a slotted spoon so the oil stays in the pot and add the onions and cook 5 minutes or so, stirring often until soft. You may need to turn down the heat for this.

Put the beef back in the pot and add the coffee, red wine or broth, thyme, and bay leaf. Note: if you're really tight on money, use water instead of wine or broth.

Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook for 1 hour or so. Peel and dice the potatoes and add them, the carrots, the celery, and the peas. If everything is not covered with liquid, add enough water (or broth or wine) to cover everything, then bring back to a simmer, cover and cook another 30 minutes or so, until the potatoes and carrots are tender.

I served this with corn bread. We got 6 servings out of this, dinner for the three of us plus breakfast (!) and a snack and there's one serving left over. The breakfast indicates a high ranking on the kid scale to me.

I'm not good at calculating the exact cost. I spent $2.20 on the beef. I know that in other parts of the country you can't see spending that much on stew beef but in the SF Bay Area this is a deal. I'll try to go back and figure out the cost of the other ingredients. Of course, the wine adds a bit but I do like to cook with it when I can. The carrots I got on sale for $1/bag and used about 1/4 of them. In hindsight, I culd have added more. The kids loved the carrots. The potatoes were .10/pound and 2 would weigh...? I don't know. It was .99 for a 10 pound bag and there were at least 20 potatoes in the bag so let's call it .20. I'm not as good at this as CheapEats. And I don't have my calculator handy. Oh, and I used cheap red wine, of course. 1 cup is about 1/6 of the bottle maybe? Gee, does anyone know a web site where they calculate this stuff? I like the idea of figuring it out but need a reference that says if onions are $x/pound, 1 onion costs $x on average. Peas were $1/bag.

Hmmm... maybe $2.20 (beef) + .25 (carrots) + .20 (potatoes) + .75 (wine) + .25 (peas) and .20 (? an onion) = $3.80/6 = somewhere between .50 and .60 cents a serving.

Digital Dish in San Francisco area

Come meet me and three other local food bloggers this weekend.

On Saturday May 21st at 11:30AM we will be launching the book and talking about food blogs and then signing the book at the Berkeley Farmer's Market in Berkeley, CA at the corner of Center Ave and M. L. King Jr. Way, two blocks from Berkeley BART.

Then on Sunday May 22nd at 4pm we'll be at the Lafayette Bookstore at 3795 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette, CA (two blocks from the Lafayette BART station).

Chicken Piccata for 2

An oldie but a goodie.

Pound a chicken breast (or slice it in half if you're lazy like me and it's partially frozen), salt and pepper, dredge in flour then fry in some olive oil until done. Take it out of the pan. Add juice from half a lemon, 1/4 cup or so white wine, and a spoonful or two of capers and swoosh around until the liquid is reduced. Add a pat of butter and thicken the sauce. Pour it over the chicken. Goes great with mashed potatoes but we just had asparagus tonight since I was lazy. If the snails haven't eaten all your parsley like they did mine, add some fresh parsley on top.

Blueberry Coffeecake

My eldest has hit that point, which seems common, when breakfast is a problem. She doesn't want eggs anymore. And the hot cereals that were a favorite for so many years don't do it--other than hot cornmeal or fried mush. (I'll write that up another day.) We've never been cold cereal eaters. Fruit smoothies sometimes go over well. Muffins and any other sweet bread are consistently a win but I could go broke buying raisin bread (which doesn't seem like it ought to be that expensive!) and I can only bake so many times a week. Yesterday, I made a blueberry coffeecake with some frozen blueberries at dinner time. The girls had a bit for dessert for dinner and then we all had some for breakfast.

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup plain yogurt
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
2 cups blueberries

topping:
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 cup butter

Note: The original recipe called for 1/2 cup of buttermilk and 1/2 cup of sour cream. I've made it that way in the past but this time used up what I had, which was a bit of sour cream with the rest plain yogurt. I tend to use the three of them interchangeably these days and so far have not been disappointed. I can taste the difference when I use buttermilk. I love it. But if I don't have it, I use the powdered version or sour cream or yogurt.

Preheat the oven to 325. Grease a 9x13 pan.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and mix well. Add the baking powder, baking soda, salt, yogurt and vanilla and mix well. Add flour and beat at low speed until blended. Spread in the pan. Put the blueberries on top.

In a small bowl, mix the topping ingredients together, then sprinkle over the berries. Bake 40-50 minutes, until done. Use a toothpick or knife to check the middle and make sure it's done.

Soup from the Freezer

Yesterday we had tuna melts and soup for dinner, a favorite weeknight quickie. For the soup, I pulled out a quart of turkey broth from the freezer and a bag of leftover roast vegetables. Heated the broth, added the vegetables, and seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper. That was it! Easy and delicious.

The tuna melts were simple. I mixed mayonnaise in with a couple of cans of tuna. I toasted the English muffins first, then spread the tuna across them, and topped that with a slice of Cheddar cheese. While I was doing this, the broiler was preheating. I popped the tray of tuna melts underneath the broiler until the cheese was melted and voila!

Now if I were making tuna melts for myself, I would have added some extra stuff. Maybe some sauteed celery. Or some capers. In the past I've used cottage cheese instead of mayonnaise as well.

Digital Dish is here!

I do have other blogs, but this was my first and holds a special place in my heart. And now you can enjoy food writing from around the world from the comfort of your easy chair. Digital Dish, The Freshest Writing and Recipes from Food Blogs Around the World is now available and I'm happy and proud to be a part of it. We've got a few signings lined up (Berkeley Farmer's Market on May 21 and Lafayette Book Store on May 22) and I'll get a chance to meet a few fellow local food bloggers finally.

Within the US, it's $19.95 plus $5 shipping and handling for 2-day shipping (sales tax added in CA) and would make a great addition to your book collection! Click here:

To order a copy to be shipped outside the US for $19.95 plus $11 shipping and handling for airmail shipping click here:

Thanks to the Daily Start Pages

The Daily Start Pages has CheapCooking as a featured site right now. If you came here from there, drop me a line and let me know how you like the CheapCooking site. If you're a regular reader of CheapCooking, go check out The Daily Overlook for some great pictures and links.

Marshmallows in the Freezer

Just a quick note... Last summer at some point I read about some unusual (to me) things that people keep in their freezers. Potato chips. Marshmallows. And a few others I don't remember...but the marshmallows stuck in my mind. I had bought an outside fire pit with some birthday money and we had really enjoyed it last summer. Sitting outside on summer nights, with the grownups drinking a glass of wine while the fire warmed us and the kids waited eagerly for coals became a tradition. The girls and their friends quickly glommed on to the fact that they should remind us to start the fire early enough to make good coals for roasting marshmallows. And if we had graham crackers and chocolate, 'smores were high on the list of featured treats!

I did remember to put the fire pit in the shed so it was sheltered from the rain this winter. I saw it there when I pulled out the rototiller to get the vegetable garden ready a few weeks ago. The girls were all ready right then and there to start a fire and roast marshmallows again. And it reminded me that I wanted to pass along this tip. Unless you can easily eat a bag of marshmallows up in a couple of weeks, you're probably going to find a bag in your pantry of melted together lumps of sugar at some point. Yes, you can pry them apart, sort of.

At some point late last summer I threw a bag into the freezer to test out the tip I'd read. I pulled the bag out periodically this past winter to add to some hot chocolate. It was so easy to pull out the bag, pull out a marshmallow or two. (Or three. We like marshmallows in hot chocolate!) So rather than tossing out gross old stuck-together marshmallows we've managed to just continue using up the one bag we bought.

So throw that bag of marshmallows in the freezer and just pull out what you need, when you need it.

I'd be curious about what others have frozen that allows them avoid throwing away food.