Last weekend, I came across a recipe in the Guardian for a banana cake made with just the banana peels – an intriguing way to address food waste. I’ve made a *lot* of banana bread in my lifetime, and generally my strategy is to toss overripe bananas into the freezer whole, and then pull them out to thaw in a bowl when it’s time to bake. (If I’m in a hurry, I cover them with warm water to help them thaw more quickly.)
This was the trickiest of the lot, but perhaps the most satisfying to crack. The cheddar Mmmuffins had a slightly sweet, cakey texture, and were brilliant orange. My initial tests were tasty but missing the mark… it wasn’t until a CBC listener messaged me with a tip: back in the eighties, working at a different chain eatery, she used powdered cheddar when making the muffins. I added about half a pack of the cheese mix from a box of KD and voilà—extra cheesiness, but also that intense orange colour that acts as a visual cue, making them taste even cheesier. You could, of course, use extra-old white cheddar here—and you could omit the powdered cheese… just expect them to look a bit different.
Hanukkah begins this weekend! Which means sufganiyot – jelly doughnuts. I’m not Jewish, but grew up with so many Jewish friends and family friends, most of whom are great cooks. I’m far from an expert (Amy Rosen”s Kosher Style is my go-to reference book) but I do adore making doughnuts, and I particularly love the jelly-filled kind.
I adore flatbreads of all kinds. So many cultures around the world have relied on flatbreads in their many forms as a means of having fresh bread with every meal. I make a kind of soft, chewy naan a lot – I roll it thin and cook it in a hot cast iron skillet until it’s blistered and bulbous, and eat it warm, straight from the pan. Naan is perfect with anything saucy, or with dips and spreads or just pulled apart with your fingers and eaten for breakfast. It’s one of the easiest ways to make fresh bread for any meal, and you can have a lump of dough in the fridge and just pull off as many egg-sized pieces as you need when you need them. I adore it. I’ve been making this recipe for years, which is completely wonderful but calls for yogurt and an egg… on occasions when I haven’t had one or the other I’ve streamlined things, and often useContinue reading
Seeing as it’s the first week of July, and traditionally the air is filled with the deep-fried smells of Stampede, and half my calories are typically consumed in the form of mini doughnuts, I thought I’d post a recipe here. I did a virtual midway food class yesterday, and people were thrilled to have the ability to turn out actual cinnamon-sugar mini doughnuts in their own kitchens. This is the sort of thing you become known for – I want to be the aunt/grandma/friend who makes mini doughnuts to eat warm when you’re sitting in my kitchen or on my patio.
I feel like we need some cornbread here. It tastes like summer to me – likely because I’ve spent so many years picking up round cornbreads at SoBo in Tofino, which we would nibble from for days – with coffee and jam in the morning, seafood chowder in the afternoon… whatever. Though it’s often thought of as an accompaniment, you could stir berries or rhubarb into it for a breakfasty cornbread, or add handfuls of grated cheese and chopped or dried herbs to make it savoury. (Keep the brown sugar in if you like – sweetness tends to make cornbread taste more cornbread-y – or cut it back, or leave it out.)
I’ve been making focaccia a lot this year… OK, I’ve been making all kids of bread a lot this year, but often it’s a quick dough I make in the morning, not knowing if it will be pizza or focaccia at dinnertime, but that I’ll be prepared for both. (Or naan, even, with balls of dough pulled off and rolled thin on the countertop, then cooked in a hot skillet.) This dough is pretty universal. Here, I’ll show you how to turn it into focaccia. This dough requires no strict rising time – you can leave it on the countertop all day, until dinner, or stick it in the fridge to slow it down overnight if you don’t get around to baking it. (Breakfast focaccia is divine, by the way.) I love how oily it is… you drizzle a generous pour of olive oil into a large skillet or 9×13-inch baking pan, push the dough in and flip it to coat, then press deep intoContinue reading
Let me preface this post by saying I did not come up with the giant cinnamon bun- it is a thing, like the skillet cookie or Texas doughnut, that has existed for awhile, and I’ve been meaning to make one for eons. Mary Berg had one in her first cookbook, Kitchen Party, that came out last fall, and Anna Olson has one in her latest, Baking Day, which came out last week. That was the reminder- flipping through her book and then talking to Anna last week when we filmed a thing together, and she suggested leftover doughnut dough could be turned into a cinnamon bun. And so I did it- and then another. And then another.
I came across some doughnuts that resembled Edvard Munch’s The Scream recently on the internet-only they were made with that soft biscuit dough that comes in a tube. They looked so great though, and I’ll take any excuse to fry some dough, so I mixed up a batch of yeasted doughnut dough to do the same.
