Banana-Almond-Chocolate Chip Pancakes

From KatieElby by Katie Elberson

August 27, 2009

Bring out those tiny violins, because Boyfriend’s marathon birthday weekend is over. I know; you’re devastated. Trust me when I tell you that he is, too. The cake has been eaten, the keg has been returned to the liquor store, and both of our pockets are quite a bit emptier, but it was a hell of a celebration. And wait, hold the phone, it’s actually not over, because my birthday present to him – a concert featuring one of his favorite bands – doesn’t even happen until this Sunday. Is this kid lucky or what?

But before we returned to some semblance of normalcy in our lives on Monday, there had to be another solid weekend brunch. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far, because in all of our cake-pizza-beer gluttony, we’d neglected to even glance at fruits and vegetables – so the once-bright cluster of bananas on Boyfriend’s countertop was now blackened and within a day of its natural life. Pancakes, they whispered to me, make us into pancakes.

Who am I to argue?

I make pancakes fairly often, and I make them with bananas and nuts quite a bit, too…but these are special. Rather than just slicing the bananas really thinly and laying them on top of the pancakes as they sizzle away in their skillet, the bananas are mashed up into the batter itself and mixed with a tiny bit of almond extract, which really makes these unique. And of course (because at this point, why the eff not?) there had to be chocolate chips. Ghiradelli chocolate chips. Because we of the Birthday Celebration are too good for store-brand chocolate chips.

Banana-Almond-Chocolate Chip Pancakes

Adapted from All Recipes

1 cup flour

1 tbsp brown sugar

2 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

1 egg

1 cup milk

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 bananas, mashed

½ tsp almond extract

½ cup chocolate chips

½ cup chopped almonds

In a large bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

In another bowl, mix together egg, milk, mashed bananas, vegetable oil, and almond extract. Add wet ingredients to dry, and mix just until combined. Batter will be lumpy. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.

Heat large heavy skillet or frying pan over medium heat, spray with cooking spray (or butter/oil), and pour about ¼ cup of batter onto the pan. When the top begins to bubble, flip, and continue to cook until both sides are evenly browned.

These pancakes are really sweet, and I put nothing on them – no butter, no syrup, no powdered sugar, nothing. And they were awesome.

Peanut Butter Bars

From KatieElby by Katie Elberson

August 17, 2009

After we made the pan of blondies to take to Boyfriend’s party, I decided we needed to bring another dessert, too. Probably we didn’t need to, as I knew there would be at least one cake there already (there wound up being two, and one was left virtually intact long after the eating had stopped), but I definitely wanted to.

The problem was, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to work with. We had plans on Wednesday and Thursday, and Friday there was an impromptu overnight beach trip to celebrate the first summer weekend in recent memory where there was not a cloud in the sky. So when was this magical, extra dessert going to get made? I had no time for baking, for preheating ovens or fussing with dough, no time for the whole toothpick-inserting procedure to check for doneness. The answer: peanut butter bars.

This is the kind of dessert you make when someone asks you to be somewhere in two hours with something to share. It takes literally 10 minutes to make, will entertain your boyfriend when you ask him to crush up a bag of graham cracker crumbs, and has zero baking time. And did I mention they’re delicious? So delicious, in fact, that I’ve made them twice in two days, and more than half of them were gone before we even got to dessert at Boyfriend’s party.

Need I say more?

Peanut Butter Bars

Adapted from allrecipes.com

1 stick butter, melted (the original recipe called for 2 sticks, which will work more than fine, but it’s unnecessary, really)

2 cups confectioners sugar (I have a hard time believing you need the entire 2 cups, but I haven’t tried it with any less)

2 cups graham cracker crumbs

1 cup + 4 tbsp creamy peanut butter, divided

1 ½ cups semisweet chocolate chips

In a medium bowl, mix butter, sugar, graham cracker crumbs and 1 cup of peanut butter. Press into the bottom of an un-greased 9 x 13 pan.

Melt chocolate chips along with the rest of the peanut butter in the microwave, and spread evenly over the top of the crust.

Refrigerate for at least one hour, then cut into squares.

Pizza, sort of.

From KatieElby by Katie Elberson

August 10, 2009

Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Still basking in the glow of last week’s delicious gnocchi success, yesterday’s foray into the art of making pizza dough fell a little short of expectations. And when you live in the tri-state area and are practically raised on New York-style pizza, a sub-par crust is cause for dinnertime mutiny. Fortunately, Boyfriend spared my life because the topping was kick-ass. It was a stuff underneath it all that was a little…questionable. Allow me to elaborate.

It’s my own damn fault, really. I was a little more cocky than I should’ve been, and chose to simply ignore the phrase “substitute up to one half of the all-purpose flour with whole wheat.” Hear that, yesterday’s self? “Up to one half.” Did I substitute up to one half, you ask? Nope. Play it safe on the first attempt at a new recipe? No way. I substituted the entire amount of flour. This wasn’t my first go-around with bread-making, but did I check to see if the yeast was dead before I used it? Nope. Did I put the dough somewhere especially warm to rise, and not just on my countertop while the A/C whirred quietly in the background? NOPE. So you see, friends, there was a really, really limited chance for success here. Really limited.

I tucked my snug little brown-flecked ball of dough neatly into its oiled bowl and waited for the yeast to work its magic. How did it look 2 1/2 hours later, you ask?

Exactly the same. Devastating.

Nevertheless, refusing to admit defeat, I rolled that sucker out, laid it on a pizza stone, and demanded it become the vehicle through which Boyfriend and I could ingest a half a pound of Habenero Jack cheese and chorizo. Despite its refusal to rise and create any semblance of a crust, it was tasty. I mean, basically it was a glorified, whole-wheat flatbread that I stridently attempted to make as unhealthy as possible by cramming it with meat and cheese, but still – I ate half the “pizza” and thought it was pretty delicious, though pizza it was not.

I guess the true test came when I asked Boyfriend if he would like me to make it again. Knowing how easy it is to anger his already frustrated and perpetually short-tempered girlfriend, he said yes…but he preferred the ready-made Boboli crust we usually use. Damn it. Guess I can’t fool him into believing this was pizza.

Kitchen Sink Guacamole

From KatieElby by Katie Elberson

August 7, 2009

The apartment I lived in during my senior year of college was pretty much just a glorified dorm room. I know fraternity brothers who made their apartments more grown-up than ours. There was a pong table in the front room and a dilapadated old futon (possibly the least comfortable piece of furniture I have ever sat – or, shudder, slept – on) that we inherited after it lived in three, count them three, different fraternity apartments (it still had one of the boy’s names written in sharpie on it’s bent, groaning metal frame), and the walls of our back room were covered (wallpaper-style) in hot pink Disney Princess Ballroom tablecloths (guess who got to climb on top of the shitty futon and the mini fridge to hang thaton the wall). It was like living in a 6-year-old’s birthday party for 9 months. And while we had 4 refrigerators (What? We needed somewhere to put all the Beast), we didn’t have a lot of other appliance-like equipment. What we did have, however, was the Magic Bullet. And the Magic Bullet brought much joy to our lives because, as anyone who has ever seen the infomercial can tell you, this tiny machine does everything.

It makes slushy drinks like daiquiris (That somehow alwayswind up getting stronger and stronger as the night goes on and will invariably stain your white counter bright-ass red – kind of makes you wonder what it does to your insides, no?) and pina coladas. And it…well, um, that’s actually pretty much all we used it for through the entire fall, winter and early spring.

But, feeling adventurous, my roommate decided one day to whip out the recipe book that came with the Bullet and make something that she loves: guacamole. Now, I am not a dip/condiment person, and that goes for guac, too. I’m not sure why I never liked it (until I had it fresh last year at a killer Mexican restauranton the Upper East Side where the gaucamole-man made it table-side with a mortar and pestle for heavenssake and my God, how could I not love it!?), but most likely I never really gave it a chance and/or never had good, fresh, awesome guac.

I digress. What my roommate made was not the guac that changed me from a hater to a lover. No, no, no. Actually, what my roommate made can barely even be called guacamole. Really, it was mushed up garlic tinted green with avocado. The amount of garlic that the Bullet’s recipe book called for was such that before you even opened my apartment door, you could smell it. It was that offensive. Suffice it to say that the “guac” had to be disposed of outside, in the dumpster, rather than in our kitchen trash, and that for weeks afterwards, we all smelled very faintly of garlic. Perhaps this is why I put zero garlic in my guacamole.

What follows is my favorite of the many guacamoles I’ve tried since discovering I actually like the stuff. I’m not a purist who believes it should really just be avocado and salt and a little lemon or lime juice - I like mine stuffed with heat and fresh produce and why did I not make more?

Guacamole

2 ripe Haas avocados

1/2 small white (or red) onion, diced

1 jalapeno, diced

1 tbsp lime juice

1 small (plum) tomato

1/2 red bell pepper or poblano, or both

1 tbsp crushed red pepper flakes

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the avocado in half, remove the pit (if you can do it using the whole stab-it-really-hard-with-a-sharp-knife technique, more power to you – I won’t lie to you and tell you that’s how I do it), and scoop all the flesh into a bowl. Mash a little with a fork, leaving it fairly chunky (this is not soup, friends). Add the rest of the ingredients (except the salt and pepper) and mix everything together. Add salt and pepper, tasting as you go. Serve with pita chips.

Gnocchi, You Will be Mine.

From KatieElby by Katie Elberson

August 4, 2009

The idea of making homemade gnocchi has been in my head for years – ever since I had it for the first time four years ago. See, once you’ve had homemade (and that’s the first way I ever had it) the frozen stuff is just not as good. Don’t get me wrong – given the choice between frozen gnocchi and any other kind of pasta, I’m going to pick the gnocchi every single time.

But I was nervous terrified. What if I screwed up something that I love? What if I told people I was making it (which I did, because why not add some more pressure to the equation?), then I tried and it just bombed…the dough didn’t come together, or the potatoes were too gluey, or…something. What if I wasted three hours of my precious, precious weekend and had nothing to show for it other than a kitchen covered in flour and congealed potato (I bet you’re hungry after that description)?

So what was the solution to eventually calming those many, many nerves?

Wine, of course.

Two delicious bottles of Spanish red, to be precise, that were both empty by the end of the process (before you pass any judgment on my drinking habits, Boyfriend was also drinking it and this was an all-day event). Because if I’m going to be making pasta all day like a tiny old Italian grandmother, I think red wine is really a necessity. But then again, there are very few occasions where I don’t think wine is a necessity.

Anyway, yesterday I bit the bullet and gnocchi was made. Lots of gnocchi. I actually should’ve made more, because I brought a bunch of it to work today (stupid) and now I just have the bag of it that I froze, because let’s face it – I don’t love my coworkers enough to bring them all of my homemade gnocchi.

I had psyched myself up for this process to be a whole lot harder than it was. Like, tears-in-the-dough-when-will-it-all-be-over-why-did-I-even-start-this-project harder. But it wasn’t. Basically, the potatoes are pricked all over with a fork, baked for an hour, peeled, grated (my kitchen obsessions are not such that I have a potato ricer or a food mill), mixed with some salt, egg and flour, formed into dough, rolled into snakes and cut into little nubbins. Sounds like a lot of steps, but really? This is homemade pasta, people. It is a labor of love.

Eggplant Parm, Polenta-style.

From KatieElby by Katie Elberson

July 27, 2009

I will be the first to tell you that my ex-boyfriend and I were…less than a perfect match (there will be hoards lining up to tell you this fact second, third, and fourth). We didn’t so much end on a great note either, and I don’t miss the drama. What I do miss is his mother’s cooking. And his grandmother’s cooking.

See, I was not always the kind of girl who would swallow an oyster. In fact, my college roommates will regale you for hours with tales of my freshman year eating habits: namely, that I ate very little except chicken Caesar salads. Then came the ex-boyfriend, and, more importantly, the ex-boyfriend’s mother. The ex-boyfriend’s mother did not much care for blondes or picky eaters…unfortunately, I was both. After meeting me, and realizing that my blonde hair did not, in fact, mean that I was a total idiot (must’ve been a good day), she made it her personal goal over the next year and a half to make me eat as many of the foods I “didn’t like” as she possibly could. This meant, in large part, that she lied to me. Like the time she told me she was feeding me the dark meat of a chicken and it wound up being goat. You’d think I would’ve stopped eating at her house, but the fact is I ate dinner there more often than not.

Maybe if I hadn’t liked the majority of the things she forced (or coerced) me to eat, I would have a different opinion about the whole process. But I credit this family for introducing me to gnocchi, Pecorino, hummus, lamb, an Italian crepe lasagna that takes hours upon hours to make (trust me, I once helped make it) and whose name escapes me at the moment, goat cheese, homemade tomato sauce, and eggplant. And really, how can you be upset about all of that? I came to them a picky eater and left them as an adventurous one. An adventurous one with a really strong affinity for Italian food.

One of those convert-Kate meals was eggplant parm. Let’s pause for a minute while I reveal yet another oddity about myself: I don’t eat chicken parm. I have a mental block about tomato sauce and chicken…I’m not sure. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the union of those flavors. So I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of eggplant parm, especially since the process began with the breading and frying of a vegetable I “didn’t like.” Hilariously, you really can’t taste the eggplant at all in the fried version of eggplant parm, and needless to say, I liked it – primarily because I really like mozzarella cheese and homemade tomato sauce.

In the years since, I’ve learned to actually like eggplant. Not fried (though really, let’s be honest – I wouldn’t turn it down), but baked, or sauteed, or broiled. But I still love cheese, and I had leftover polenta and San Marzano tomatoes, and there was eggplant and fresh mozzarella in the fridge, and hey! There’s dinner!

Eggplant Parm

This isn’t really traditional eggplant parm, because that wouldn’t be any fun. Instead, I layered thin blocks of polenta, homemade tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella cheese, baked eggplant, and baby spinach in a baking dish. And it was fabulous.

4 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp minced garlic

2 tbsp chopped onion

5 – 6 fresh basil leaves, chopped

2 – 3 San Marzano tomatoes, plus 1/3 cup of their juice

6 slices of a large eggplant

4 slices of fresh mozzarella

Handful of baby spinach

Several squares of cooked, solid polenta, sliced about 1/2 inch thick

Salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper flake to taste

Eggplant: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread eggplant slices on a baking sheet, then brush both sides of eggplant slices with about 2 tbsp olive oil (total). Sprinkle with salt and pepper and bake for 20 – 25 minutes, until soft.

Sauce: In a small pot over medium heat, heat 1 tbsp olive oil. Once oil is hot, add garlic and onion and cook until onion is translucent. Add tomatoes and juice, breaking up tomatoes with a wooden spoon (you want them to thicken the sauce a little, but not be whole). Once tomatoes are heated through, add basil, salt, pepper, and red pepper flake to taste. Simmer until everything else is finished (there is no exact recipe for this, says ex-boyfriend’s Italian mother – this sauce is the reason I can’t handle canned tomato sauces).

Polenta: You have two choices here – either you’ve bought the polenta that’s already cooked and rolled into tube-form, or you’ve cooked your own and refrigerated it until it was hard (mine sat overnight from yesterday’s dinner, in a square tupperware container). Either way, you want to keep the slices fairly thin and completely intact, so be gentle. In a saucepan, heat the last of your oil over high heat. Once it’s hot, place a few slices of polenta in (they should sizzle) and cook until lightly browned. Flip, and cook until the other side is browned. Repeat the process until you’ve browned all your slices.

Assemble: I used a little, single serve baking dish for this, because it was just dinner for one this evening, folks. I started layering by covering the bottom of the dish with about half of the polenta slices, then 2 eggplant slices, a few pieces of baby spinach (half of whatever you determined a handful to be), 2 slices of mozzarella (broken up into small pieces), and about 1/3 of the sauce. Then I added the rest of the polenta, 2 more eggplant slices, the rest of spinach, another 1/3 of the sauce. I finished with the final 2 eggplant slices, the rest of the cheese (torn up), and the rest of the sauce. Then I microwaved (No, I did not bake it, and no, I am not ashamed of this. It was 7PM and I had already been to the gym and dammit it was time to eat!) the whole deal, with a lid (because it melts the cheese better, and also because I thought it might splatter everywhere) for one minute. If your microwave is less of a beast than mine, you might need longer – everything’s already cooked and hot, you’re just melting the mozzarella, really.

Have this with a glass of red wine, and tell me you’ve ever had a more delicious weeknight dinner.

Flatbread and a Confession

From KatieElby by Katie Elberson

July 20, 2009

I have a lot of not-so-great habits. Arguably, some of them have a toe over the line into bad habits, but hey – we can’t all be perfect. One such habit is that I will consistently pick up whatever magazine/newspaper/pamphlet/letter is sitting in front of me. Not so bad, you’re thinking to yourself, what’s so wrong about that? What’s so bad about that, people, is that these are frequently not my things to be touching. That’s right, I pick these things up off of other people’s desks (yes, this includes my boss, and no, she hasn’t fired me yet), kitchen counters, end tables…you get the idea. And sometimes people don’t like their mail read by anyone other than them. Weird.

Boyfriend’s poor family, for instance, leaves their mail where I imagine about 90% of American families do – on their kitchen counter. And without fail, whenever I go over there and we’re standing in his kitchen talking/eating/preparing to eat/thinking about what we want to eat/talking about eating/recovering from eating too much, I nonchalantly pick up his family’s mail. It’s unbelievable.

I can’t tell you why I do it, and apparently I can’t stop. But occasionally I get something good out of it, instead of just the guilt. Take the night I was haphazardly flipping through the Gourmet they’d gotten delivered that day, openly salivating over the food porn on every page while I waited for Boyfriend to do God-knows-what, and his dad came in and asked if I was enjoying it. I resisted the strong urge to shout “HELL YES IT’S GOURMET MAGAZINE” at him, and instead answered (in a more polite and socially-acceptable manner) that, yes, I was very much enjoying it. His response? “You should take it! I actually have an entire cabinet full of them. We didn’t subscribe and we don’t pay for it, they just started coming one day last year and no one reads them.” And then he handed me, oh, I don’t know, 15 or so magazines, which is precisely when Boyfriend chose to reappear on the scene and stifle whatever comments breezed through his head about the look of pure elation on my face. I’ve taught him well, yes?

So thus was bestowed upon me reading material for the several weeks, but I think I got a little overwhelmed and ahead of myself and focused too much on some issues (Um, the Christmas cookie one!? The Italian food one, where they toured Venice and I read about it one week after actually being there!?) and not enough on others. And it was, I think, because of the sheer volume of reading that I missed what really is a gem of a recipe. But thanks to the Smitten Kitchen’s “Surprise Me!” button, I didn’t miss this flatbread recipe for long.

I love recipes that don’t require a special shopping trip. Ones that don’t have to be picked out a week in advance and planned into your weekly shopping trip (which we all know I don’t do myself, living at home and all…). Ones that don’t call for anything that isn’t already in your kitchen. And when you find a recipe that comes together in 10 minutes, cooks in 10 more, and is infinitely adaptable and delicious…that, my friends, is called a keeper.

Flatbread

Gourmet, July 2008, found via the Smitten Kitchen and adapted by me

Deb made this with rosemary, as Gourmet originally intended, but I’m not a huge fan of rosemary, so I used red pepper flakes instead. I also changed out a little more than half of the AP flour, but you could certainly use all white flour. Start with just a couple pinches of red pepper flakes – if you think the first flatbread could use more pep, bump up the other two by sprinkling a little more on the top or kneading some extra into the dough for the second and third flatbreads.

3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup olive oil plus more for brushing
Sea salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes – to taste

Preheat oven to 450°F with a heavy baking sheet on rack in middle.

Stir together flour, red pepper flakes, black pepper, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. Make a well in center, then add water and oil and gradually stir into flour with a wooden spoon until a dough forms. Knead dough gently on a work surface 4 or 5 times.

Divide dough into 3 pieces and roll out 1 piece (keep remaining pieces covered with plastic wrap) on a sheet of parchment paper into a 10-inch round (shape can be rustic; dough should be thin).

Lightly brush top with additional oil and season with black pepper and (if desired) more red pepper flakes. Sprinkle with sea salt. Slide round (still on parchment) onto preheated baking sheet and bake until pale golden and browned in spots, 8 to 10 minutes. Transfer flatbread (discard parchment) to a rack to cool, then make 2 more rounds (1 at a time) on fresh parchment (do not oil or salt until just before baking). Break into pieces.

Flatbread can be made 2 days ahead and cooled completely, then kept in an airtight container at room temperature.

Nawlins

The food triumph

From KatieElby by Katie Elberson

July 19, 2009

Man, oh man, do I love the South. I went to college in the Quasi-South (Richmond and I agree that since it was once the capital of the Confederacy and the grocery store is closed on Sundays, it should count as the South. I’ve met enough people from, say, Alabama – the Real South – that disagree with that assessment, though, to know that I can’t just go around calling Virginia “The South”). I also tried (unsuccessfully) to move to Nashville when I graduated (thank you, shitty job market). And let me tell you, after a long weekend in New Orleans, my love affair with the South is still going strong (sorry, Boyfriend, I know how you feel about mountains and snow).

Don’t get me wrong: NOLA is all about the tourists, at least in the French Quarter where we were staying, so it’s expected for people to kiss your ass while pouring booze down your throat. But even when you stray a little from the beaten path, and wind up in, for instance, a non-descript bar called Buffa’s at 10am because you heard a rumor of $2 mimosas and hot damn that’s cheap…the people still rock. And don’t treat you like a yankee intruder in their bar. Which is good, considering we came back every single morning of our trip, including once at 6am before we even went to bed for the night.

But we did more than drink – we ate. A lot. We had a deliciously greasy, gravy-smothered (condiment hatred be damned, it was fabulous) beef and turkey po boy encased in thick, buttered French bread, and another one stuffed with tiny, delicately breaded and fried shrimp. We had warm, melt-in-your-mouth beignets from Café du Monde at 2am, and, when the sun came up, we had a frozen café au lait that put a certain coffee chain and their smoothie-like beverages to shame. Boyfriend ate three of the four sections of the famed Central Grocery muffuletta, which was, incidentally, bigger than his head. And pralines. Buttery, creamy, rum-flavored pralines with delicious pecans barely hidden beneath the sugar. Melt.

And then there was my food triumph of the week. Of the year, maybe.

Boyfriend wanted oysters. Specific oysters, mind you, that came from a specific restaurant that a specific coworker had recommended and were prepared a specific way – raw. Raw oysters. I know, I know, I eat sushi. But sushi isn’t slimy. And it’s covered in rice and (the way I eat it, at least) dunked in soy sauce. Not so with the oysters. The oysters did not look appealing.

Boyfriend smothered them in lemon juice and hot sauce, slurped two of them down, took a swig of beer, and demanded I eat one. Hell no, I told him, but he’s persistent, and he was all, this is Acme Oyster House! And didn’t I want to eat one here of all places?! There was a line a block long outside, they must be good! So I pummeled him with questions:

What do they taste like?

Am I going to throw up?

But do they taste like fish?

Am I going to throw up?

Are you sure I’m not going to throw it up?

But what if I throw it up? Because it’s really crowded and throwing up on a crowded bar is embarrassing.

And then, I ate one (can we call it eating if it isn’t chewed?). And I did not throw up. At all. Anywhere! And it wasn’t half bad. Basically, it just tasted like salt and hot sauce, but I like salt and hot sauce, so you’ll get no complaints outta this girl.

At least, not about the oyster.