Bannannannanna Bread (i.e. Banana Bread)

To those of you who get the obscure literary reference* in the title of this blog post, well done!  But in all seriousness, I have to admit that I still need to sing out the old "Yell Leader" (yes we had yell leaders and a dance squad rather than the traditional combined cheerleading squad at my high school) chant "B-A-N-A-N-A-S Go Bananas, go, go bananas!" in order to spell the name of the fruit (and then remember to drop the letter "s", yes, I really am that pathetic with spelling—this week's triumph is finally learning how to spell restaurant instead of just randomly typing something, usually "restaraunt", and letting spell checker fix it...and yes before spell checker I would just let my handwriting go a bit to hide the misspelling).

Anyway, just like Nanny Ogg, I spent most of my honeymoon drinking variations on a theme of banana and milk (in the daytime) and banana and rum (in the evening and night time).  I didn't one tire of this from the day we arrived till the day we left, but once we were back I needed a bit of a break (as my husband would say, we had had several years worth of potassium—indeed, my husband did actually question, in all seriousness, whether we would have any negative side effects from so much potassium during our first week there).  However, this only lasted a few weeks and by the end of last week I was well ready for another banana fix.  However, we weren't in hot and sunny St Lucia, we were in cold and Dreach, as the Scots (or at least Andrew Marr) would say and I didn't really fancy a "La Belle Connection" (banana and rum),  a "Rendezvous Kiss" (banana, coconut and rum) or even a "Sea Breeze" (banana, rum, coconut and rum coffee liqueur) or (my favourite) "Kiss Kiss" (banana, rum, more rum, coconut rum and rum coffee liqueur).

So, I decided to make banana bread instead.  So I purchased my bananas and left them on the window sill to ripen (or even over ripen, although the cold grey view didn't allow this even after five days of yellow, not green, bananas).  But luckily, they were ripe enough to allow me to make banana bread last night.  Now this recipe really is very easy to make.  Monday nights in our house are about two things (1) watching a "classic serial", (2) eating pasta.  The pasta bit being the quickest and easiest thing we can think of to make (and one which can be made by either myself or my husband).  Making elaborate meals is something generally frowned upon on Monday night.  This was especially true last night as we were about to watch the final hour or so of The Thornbirds (we start on Bleak House next Monday), and it was already getting a bit late by the time my husband came home.  I had meant to make it earlier, but I had been writing the previous blog posting, so...Anyway, my husband was just saying that he was presently going to be getting out of the bath and planning to start on the pasta, when I announced I was going to make banana bread.  My husband was highly suspicious that it would really be quick, but in the end, the bread was in the oven before he was out of the bath and in his pyjamas (in our house, a keen measure of the quickness of a recipe).  Now, just a note of caution, although this recipe is ultra quick to make, it does take about an hour to bake, so don't try to make it before you leave the house (unless someone else will be at home, that is).  Anyway, here is my favourite version of banana bread (and I've tried a bunch), inspired by the recipe for it in the Avoca Cafe Cookbook 1.

Banana Bread


Ingredients


225g Plain (all purpose) flour (n.b. although in a pinch, self-raising will do)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoon all spice, nutmeg or cinnamon (depending on the type of nuts you are using, your personal choice and the time of year—in the spring and summer I use walnuts and cinnamon, in the autumn I use any type of nut and nutmeg and in the winter I use pecans and all spice)
110g caster sugar (or use light brown sugar if you prefer)
1 egg, beaten
75g butter, melted (I find that melting butter in a mug for 1 minute on 70% power works for my microwave.  Always keep an eye on butter in the microwave, otherwise it is liable to boil and end up all over the inside of your microwave—but hey, that is a powerful incentive clean your microwave)
more butter for greasing your tin
1/4 teaspoon vanilla essence
100g nuts (no need to chop them up, unless they are very large)
7-8 ripe bananas
2 tablespoons light brown sugar (optional)

1 large bowl, 1 medium bowl, 1 potato masher (or fork) and 1 loaf tin (or cake tin if you don't have a loaf tin)


Directions


Pre-heat your oven to 180 C/ 350 F.  Get out your tin and grease it and/or line it with baking paper.


Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl (except the nuts) and stir to combine.

Peel the bananas and place them in a medium bowl (if they are not "over ripe" it may help if you chop the bananas up into bite size pieces before adding them to the bowl).  Then mash the bananas up so you have a big "mush" (technical term) of banana.

Add the beaten egg to the dry mix.  Add the melted butter to the dry mix.  Stir, briefly, to combine.  There will be lumps, leave them be.

Add the banana mush to the big bowl of everything else.  Add the nuts to the big bowl as well.  Stir to combine.  Again, there will be lumps.  That's fine.  Just combine till everything is wet (no dry mix left) and then stop.

Pour into a loaf tin (buttered and/or lined with baking paper).  If you are using the optional light brown sugar, sprinkle it over the top of the mix (this will create a sweet top to the finished loaf).  Place in oven.  Bake for an hour.

Yum!

Loaf

Slice

*See Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

Nice Day for a White Wedding...and Soup! (Honeyed Parsnip Soup)

Hello,

So I haven't blogged recently.  Well, that's because I was rather busy getting married (see photo!), going on honeymoon, starting new jobs and getting over various cold weather illnesses (tonsillitis the week after honeymoon anyone?).  I had the choice to do all of that and cook or do all of that and blog about it.  I chose to do the cooking, mainly because you can't eat a blog post (no matter how delicious the photos are). Now I'm a bit more settled in my new jobs, I've got Christmas (presents) sorted and the only wedding related admin left over are the thank you cards to write (which are doubling up as Christmas cards, just as last years Christmas cards doubled up as Save-the-Date magnets) and all the paperwork that goes along with changing your name on two sides of the Atlantic.

But I have been keeping up with the cooking (although admittedly for the first couple of weeks after my honeymoon that mainly translated to boiling whole wheat pasta and mixing in frozen peas and different flavours of pesto), so what better recipe to start back up on the blog with but this luscious soup, which has a nice 'winter white' colour to it and has honey (as in honeymoon) as a main ingredient!  Last Tuesday, however, I was all in a tizzy as to what to make.  I was out of work early enough to cook and I could sense that my *husband* (still so exciting to use that word) was becoming a bit tired of whole wheat past and pesto (even with three new pesto flavours in the 'fridge).  So, what to cook, what to cook.  The task of deciding was additionally complicated by the fact that because it was cold I wanted something comforting and warm, but because it was only a few weeks after our honeymoon at an all inclusive Caribbean resort I wanted something healthy and not too heavy (by the by the aforementioned whole wheat pasta is not only quick and cheap it is also healthy and is partially responsible for the fact that after not restraining myself at all on honeymoon, I am back to my wedding day vital statistics—also partially responsible would be the dreadful case of tonsillitis which made it nearly impossible to swallow anything for a week after returning, followed by a lot of running around trying to make up on everything that hadn't been done for three weeks).  Anyway, wandering around Morrison's I decided that I quite fancied having some fruity Irish soda bread and some parsnip soup.  I was pretty sure I had a recipe, although I had never tried it before, for honeyed parsnip soup at home (and after eight years of making soup from the recipe book I thought it was from I figured I could make a pretty good guess at the rest of the ingredients).  I duly loaded up the basket with parsnips, buttermilk and cranberries for the soda bread, cherries for the scones (but that is for another blog), along with Jim Henson's The Christmas Toy—A great movie that used to show on the Disney Channel back in the late '80s and early '90s and which for a good twenty years no one else on Earth seems to have remembered except for myself (really, even back when Toy Story 1 came out—which I didn't want to see as I thought the premise had already been done better with muppet-like live action toys—no one seemed to remember it), only for me to come eye-to-eye with it on the shelf near the self check-out machines in Morrison's (n.b. DVD is not actually required for the recipe, but it is still a great Christmas programme).

Anyway, when I got home I discovered that I did not have a recipe for honeyed parsnip soup.  It was not in the Avoca cookbook I had thought it in, nor in the Cornucopia cookbook, or even in the New Covent Garden Soup for all seasons book, so I made the recipe up.  And luckily it turned out yummy.

Honeyed Parsnip Soup


Ingredients 


500g parsnips, peeled and roughly chopped
1 large potato or two small ones (waxy or floury will do, but I prefer a baking potato), chopped *not* peeled
1 onion, peeled and chopped
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
1 tablespoon of olive oil for roasting
1 tablespoon butter or olive oil for sweating the potato
1 pint milk
1/2 of a large pot of natural flavoured yoghurt
2 chicken (or veggie) stock cubes
salt and pepper to taste
cinnamon to taste
lots of honey

medium size roasting tray
large soup pot
hand-blender or heatproof stand blender

Directions

Pre heat your oven to 180 C/ 355 F, meanwhile peel and roughly chop your parsnips.

Place the peeled and chopped parsnips in a roasting tray along with the honey, salt, pepper and cinnamon.  Mix well to combine and place in your pre-heated oven.

While the parsnips are roasting, peel and roughly chop your onion and garlic.  When the parsnips have been in the oven for about 15 minutes, add the onion and garlic to the roasting pan, making sure to coat them in the honey-oily-parsnipy juices.  Return tray to oven and continue to roast for another 15 minutes.

Roughly chop your potato and place in a large soup pot along with the butter or olive oil, turning the potato pieces over to cover with the fat (note: if you are out of oil/butter/benecol, you can, at a pinch, sweat the potato in a little bit of water).  Turn on the hob on to a low heat and sweat the potato for 10 minutes (making sure that the potato does not stick to the pan too much and burn—keep the heat ultra low and stir from time to time).

By this time your parsnip onion garlic mix should be ready to come out of the oven.  Pop the kettle on and take the tray out of the oven.  Add its contents, along with all the juices in the roasting tray, to the potato in the pot.  Give everything a good stir.  Crumble the stock cubes over the veggies in the pot and add 2 pints of boiling water to the pot as well.  Now bring to a boil, then cover, reduce the heat and allow to simmer for 10-15 minutes.

Take the pot off the heat (or at least turn the heat down) and blend the soup.  If you are using a hand held blender, you can go ahead and blend pretty much straight away; however, if you are using a standard jug type blender, it might be best to let the soup cool for a few minutes before putting it into the jug and blending (unless you know your blender won't react badly—in my experience, blenders are temperamental little prima donnas, well worth providing break down cover for and given to disliking very hot liquids being blended in them, but you know your blender best).  When you have blended your soup, go ahead and add the pint of milk, stir that in, then add the yoghurt and stir that in as well.  Then add a good large dollop more of honey and gently reheat, stirring as you do so.

And there you have it, and hopefully you'll find it yummy.

I served this with a delicious version of Irish soda bread, inspired by the Avoca cafe recipe for Irish Fruit Soda.

Cranberry Irish Soda Bread

Ingredients


450g self-rising flour (actually, plain flour, also known as all purpose flour, will also work with this recipe, but might take slightly longer to bake)
1 teaspoon of bicarb of soda (baking soda)
1 teaspoon caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
170g dried cranberries
568ml buttermilk (note: buttermilk in the UK is sold in 284ml containers), you can also use 300ml natural/plain yoghurt and 300ml milk

20cm springform cake tin (or a loaf tin, although this will add to the baking time), greased, but unlined is ok.


Directions


Pre-heat your oven to 200 C/ 390 F.

Place all the dry ingredients in a big bowl, stir to combine.  Add the buttermilk (or yoghurt and milk) to the bowl, stir to combine (it will remain lumpy, thats ok).  The mix should be *very wet*, but not as liquid as, say soup or melted ice cream, more like thin-ish porridge.  Pour into in the prepared tin, amking sure to cover the bottom evenly, and place in the oven.

Cook at 200 C/ 390 F for 20 minutes, then turn oven down to 180 C/ 355 F and cook for an additional 20-25 minutes (note: your cooking times may be just slightly longer at 180 C/ 355 F if you are using plain ("all purpose") flour and rather longer if using a standard loaf tin.).  When the cooking time is up, take the loaf out and tap it, if it sounds hollow, its done, if it doesn't sound hollow, put it back in the oven and cook it until it sounds hollow (note: if you are unsure about how bread will sound if it isn't ready—in order to be able to tell if it does sound hollow—try taking it out when you turn down the heat after 20 minutes and tap the bread then—that's what it will sound like when it isn't done, i.e. "not the hollow sound").

That's it!

Serve the soup and the bread with some cheese: a strong cheddar works well, but so does brie and even Wensleydale.  we ate it in front of a lovely warm the fire while watching a dvd, but really the choice is up to you.  If serving with wine/drinks, a nice sweetish cider (especially if mulled) or a sweet German white go nicely.


In the end, last Tuesday I felt something of the domestic goddess, as I did the shopping, made the soup, the bread and some cherry scones (for our breakfast the rest of the week), did a pile of ironing (saved up since before the wedding), which was, I kid you not, as tall as I am, did a couple of loads of laundry, tidied the kitchen and all of this by the time my husband was home from work, bathed and ready for dinner.  I got to pick what we watched while eating dinner that night; I didn't have to do the dishes either (normally my job Monday–Thursday).

By the by, my husband also writes a blog, mostly on travel, which is called The Ginger Wanderer, and is very amusing!