Banana Recipe Contest: You call these gluten-free paleo things pancakes?

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we present the first entry in the banana recipe contest! This one comes from Freezair who sent it with this lovely note:

This is a recipe I heard through a friend of a friend who was on... some diet or another. Paleo? Gluten free? It sound slightly terrifying to me. It's the simplest recipe in the world, so it was easy to spread by word of mouth, but I just can't picture how these would look or taste! I know cooking straight-up banana isn't terribly uncommon. Fried bananas are a thing, right? But this seems to me like it'd be verging on a banana omelette, or even, like, fried baby food... especially with no flour or sugar or anything to cut the eggs with. I'm slightly horrified. But on the other hand, I do loves me some bananas, so maybe it's actually good? I'm too scared to try it myself. So I pass it off on a more adventurous chef!

A Book of Cookrye has featured two recipes from other people. The first one was from a recipe swap and we kind of brought that one on ourselves (however, it was the most entertaining and memorable thing we've ever made). The second one was gingerbread shoe leather. The third, viz. this one, has such a sterling recommendation that I simply had to make it.

Banana Pancakes 1 mushy banana 2 eggs Blend ingredients together until REALLY well mixed. (You may even want to use a blender.) Pour mixture over hot, buttered griddle. Cook until done.

We at A Book of Cookrye have always been leery of gluten-free versions of things that should be gluten-full. Furthermore, everything on the paleo diet seems to be punitively healthy. That said, bananas are indeed tasty so this might not be so bad. If nothing else, there's still an abandoned blender in the kitchen so this will be over with soon.
Getting down to business, the beginning of gluten-free paleo "pancakes" looks like someone is about to put a couple of scoops of protein powder in it and drink the resulting slurry. (Side note: I don't know how the protein-shake industry convinced so many that you can't do any workouts whatsoever without a massive jar of protein powder and would love to be informed how that came to be.)

If this is juicing, bring me some fried chicken.

Fortunately, there is but a small amount of banana egg stuff. I... okay, seriously people? This is what your diets drive you to? Couldn't you just scramble some eggs and eat a banana? Why do you have to put everything in a blender? Do these diets leave you so weakened you have to outsource chewing?

Okay, technically it doesn't look bad. It just feels like it'll inevitably taste terrible.

If nothing else, at least I didn't waste much time or effort on these. Also, holy crap, it actually looks like a decent pancake!

I guess using a blender also whipped enough air into it to make the pancakes fluffy and everything. However, if you can't turn an omelet, you can't turn this either. They tear ridiculously easily. Yet, oddly enough, the smelled really good. This is most confusing...

All right, if they ain't pancakes, they're as close as they're going to get.

As for how they taste? Odd, bland, and disappointing. Hot mashed bananas always taste terrible, and adding eggs did it no favors. They were a little sweet, but in a way that was oddly wrong. Also, the texture was like whipped rubber.
But! I have good news! You see, I use a communal kitchen and someone else was making her lunch. She tried a banana "pancake" and said it tasted like it would be really good to dip bread in. Furthermore, someone had abandoned a loaf of now-stale bread in the refrigerator.

This is the best French toast ever. You owe it to yourself to try this.

We at A Book of Cookrye fully expected to find this utterly dreadful and write a post about how much we nearly choked in the name of culinary masochism. Instead, we had an unexpected yet amazing surprise. Everything that's wrong about this recipe makes it perfect French toast batter. So thank you, Freezair!

------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you have any banana recipes, feel free to send them to abookofcookrye@gmail.com  for the dreadfully named Bananas About Bananas Recipe Contest! You could win this:

The contest deadline is February 28!

Happy First Birthday to A Book of Cookrye!

Holy snizzbat! If this blog was a person, it'd be approaching self-awareness by now! This calls for a celebration, but we have few funds. Fortunately, one of our cookbooks has a recipe just for times like this:

Of course someone who published a recipe for Every Day Cake would have a cake for economizing.

As grateful as we are to Mrs. George Thurn for saving our one-year-celebrating hides, we were not in the mood for triple-sifting things. For one thing, we're economizing so hard we don't have a strainer.

Economy Cake 1 c sugar ¼ c cocoa powder 1 tsp baking soda Pinch salt 4 tbsp shortening 1 c buttermilk* Heat oven to 325°. Grease a round cake pan. Stir together the flour, cocoa, sugar, soda, and salt. Put in the shortening and buttermilk, and beat them in with a mixer. Pour into the pan and bake until done. It's good with cinnamon icing on top (recipe here). *You can put 1 tsp vinegar into regular milk and leave it in a glass cup for 5 minutes. - A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George Thurn, 1934

It's been a year since I decided to write about how much I loved shoving cauliflowers in a meat grinder. I was so excited to start a cooking blog I didn't even think about what to call it and ended up naming it for the cookbook lying nearest to me at the time (printed from here) just so I could get to writing. Had I stopped to think about it, I'd have named it something easier to spell. However, I do get to use the phrase "we at A Book of Cookrye," so the orthographically challenging name does have its benefits.
 

That was quick.

It's fun to write about the things I cook and all the jury-rigging, improvising equipment, ingredient substitutions, and snatching food as soon as it goes on sale that goes into it.  Also, my friends have had fun getting dragged into this. Or at least, I'd like to think they have. If nothing else, they haven't starting avoiding me since I started asking them to try things for this little endeavor.

Something about reconstituting milk from powder for the purpose of souring it with vinegar strikes me as absurd. But that's economizing for you.

The milk got slightly curdled, but then again buttermilk isn't that great anyway.

If nothing else, writing about it has made me willing to make a lot of things I'd otherwise never have tried. Some of them have involved livers and kidneys. We've also put cucumbers into ice cream.

Maybe I should have gotten out the mixer.

One thing I like a lot about writing this is digging up the really old recipes that turn up in forgotten books (such as the first birthday cake currently in production) and posting them. It feels like I'm taking the recipes out of hiding and putting them back into the world. Sometimes I wonder- after taking things out of forgotten places like handwritten inscriptions in the back of a cookbook kept away in a library's Special Collections and putting them online, has anything I've posted made its way into someone's kitchen- and if so, what did they think?

It's the Economy Dome! (In other news, it looks like 350° baked this too fast.)

At any rate, this has been really fun to write. I've discovered a lot of things culinarily and wonder what the next year will bring. But the next year can wait, for tonight we have chocolate birthday cake with icing and everything!

The dome looks even steeper under icing.

So, happy birthday to A Book of Cookrye! Let us snarf chocolate with impunity! We can make up for it later with a Far-Out Green Smoothie and some chickpea salad. Or we can celebrate the first thing we wrote and have another pan of the baked Parmesan-Garlic cauliflower thing - it's really tasty, so it's like being healthy without the punitive aspect.  But for now, let us have Economy Cake!

Economizing aside, it's a damn good chocolate cake. You should totally try it.

-----------------------------------

If you want to win a cookbook handmade by me, enter the Banana Recipe Contest! Send recipes to abookofcookrye@gmail.com or post them in the comments.

Lavender Cookies, or The classiest recipe we've ever seen printed on a sugar box

Someone left their sugar carton downstairs, inadvertently giving us this recipe:

For those who are curious, I looked up who this 'Joan Porter' who undersigned the recipe might be. No Joan Porters, fictitious or otherwise, came up with any connection to promotional cookie recipes. However, there are many Joan Porters with Pinterest accounts, all of whom have long lists of saved recipes.

This gave us an interesting peep into the lives of people who have more grocery money than we. They can afford to buy name-brand things! These name-brand things come in fancy packages rather than paper sacks! The promotional recipes on the packaging call for things like "edible fragrant flower petals"! After had that much spare money to buy things like this, they can just leave them in the kitchen for 4 weeks and counting! I want to meet the college student who lives like this that I may solicit grocery money.

Well, we're going to see what it's like to live on high hogs for once. It turns out such a lifestyle starts with butter.

I don't know if my heart can handle this tax bracket.

This is the first time we've busted out a mortar and pestle for a cookie recipe. Usually we just use it for tea, but who wants to get a dried flower stuck in their teeth?

I wouldn't even have a mortar and pestle except it was a birthday present from my now-ex. He realized at the cash register that he had left his money at home, so I had to purchase my own present and get reimbursed when we got back. It's those little things that make you go wistful long after you should know better. But hey, if I was always wise, I wouldn't dump what looks like a handful of grass clippings into cookie dough. Since I've already poured tea into cake batter, flowery cookies seem comparatively tame.

Dumping a handful of dried pulverized plant into the dough doesn't seem as daft in person as it might in pictures. Upon mashing them, they released a delightful scent into the kitchen. Anyone who smelled it would not have found the random flecks of stuff in cookie dough off-putting to look at.

At this point, our friends at C&H Sugar think we should get 2 logs of cookie dough, each 1½ inches across and 1 foot long. Having cut the recipe in half, there should be one 1½ inch footlong of dough. However, having made sure we had the correct cookie dough diameter, we ended up with only 8 misshapen inches.

To add insult to extravagance, after cracking open a whole egg, most of the eggwash went unused down the drain and most of the eggy sugar slid off the cookies while baking. Properly expressing how we feel about this requires illustration.

However, these were very good and (egg waste notwithstanding) made a long assignment seem shorter. They were delicious dunked in tea. Or maybe I just like lavender in tea and that swayed my opinion. At any rate, they're slightly unusual tasting without being weird. Should you see lavender teabags among the herbal teas where you shop, try dumping one or two into your next dessert and see how you like it.

Liver! Liver! We made liver!

We at A Book of Cookrye have fielded accusations that we're really picky. Most of them are true. But today we are going to combat this dreadful image crisis with...

If liver proves terrible, I barely felt it when I paid for a tray of them.

This recipe comes to us from The Delectable Past, the same cookbook as the Banana Soufflé. The non-liver ingredients actually looked fairly promising. Also, does anyone else find calling this an after-theater snack amusingly specific?

Fortunately, the livers could soon go into the strainer and remain in the sink where I could ignore them.

Meanwhile, the recipe took a left turn at Louisiana and soon we were, um, making a roux. You know what? I can live with that. Half of the things River Road Recipes begin with "first you make a roux" and when you're done with those you have Cajun food.

Sometimes you read a recipe and even though the instructions are clearly written, you have no idea what you're doing. For example, I dumped the stock into the pan as directed, stirred until smooth as directed, and... wait, did I just make a pan of brown gravy?

Gravy being a somewhat religious subject, I was briefly nervous that a white vs brown debate would break out in the kitchen around me. But on the bright side, the kitchen smelled really good. People were already orbiting the door asking what was cooking. Oh, you poor saps. If only you knew.

So, what I thought was an unusual something-or-other has devolved into liver stewed in gravy.

This'll be good.

And now, garnished with ham (that dried out in the oven) from the lunch meat counter, here it is!

If you ignored the fact that this contains eight chicken livers, it looks like a decent pan of stew, doesn't it? Also, I cannot lie, it smelled amazing. Liver seems to have that property. My mom still vividly remembers one day everyone coming home to a house that smelled like fried chicken. It turned out to be fried livers.

The gravy has veins! Why does the gravy have veins?

Ladies and gentlemen, we present a delightful after-theater snack: Miss Parloa's shit on a shingle!

I'm sorry, I couldn't with this one. I gagged. It tasted all right, but the texture was just wrong. But, did you know you can mash the things?

It's like mashed potatoes, but with dead animals!

Having so done, this was actually... not that bad. Not that I'd make it again, but I didn't throw out the leftovers either.

However, it changed color overnight in the refrigerator- even with plastic wrap pressed right onto it. Yet oddly enough, it was better warmed up the next day.

N. B. If you want to win a cookbook handmade by me, be sure to enter the recipe contest by February 28! Seriously, I just cooked a whole pan of chicken livers so my too-frightening-to-cook bar just went up a few feet. Therefore, feel free to send anything!

Coffee Brownies, or We must stay upright to the end of Friday

We at A Book of Cookrye will freely admit we must drink coffee with training wheels and on ice. However, there come times when you must perforce spend time choking down dreadful assignments. You know, those times when you realize no one has accused your teacher of competency. This is when the only way to stay up is through caffeination. This is when adding instant coffee to things that don't usually have it seems more appealing than it should.

Coffee Bars ¼ c shortening ¼ c butter 2 c brown sugar (preferably dark) 2 eggs 1 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt 5 tbsp instant coffee 1½ c flour (whole-wheat is surprisingly good) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9x13 pan. Pour the coffee granules onto a little plate and press them with your thumb, the bottom of a can, or whatever you like until they are a powder. Melt shortening and butter. Stir in brown sugar, beating thoroughly. Add eggs, vanilla, salt, baking powder, and coffee. Mix well. Stir in the flour. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until a knife in the middle comes out with no liquid on it (it needn't come up clean and dry). Ideally, it will still have little clumps of brownie clinging to it- that's when they're done but still soft and gooey. Cut while hot.

If nothing else, this has more sugar in it than an iced coffee usually does.

Fortunately, we have a jar of instant coffee from the coffee cheesecake. After deciding moderation in instant coffee is for suckers, we were prepared to be cognizant through the worst of assignments. In fact, we had it in us to be awake through anything.

Just because we're awake doesn't mean we have common sense.

We at A Book of Cookrye often have received the allegation that we cannot drink coffee without training wheels. Usually, our response is "Do you have a point?" We all have our preferences, but why are you attempting to brag about the certificate you received for Best At Drinking Black Coffee? Furthermore, since most of these remarks are leveled at us when we are really tired and attempting to caffeinate ourselves back into the real world, is this really the right time to assert your superiority for petty reasons?
But enough about that. The batter for these was so thick that spreading it into the pan was like playing with Play-Doh. It's quite soothing after working over dreadfully written lines of code.

They made the kitchen smell like brown sugar and coffee. It was so enticing I seriously considered buying decaf just so I could have these when I'm not trying to stay awake.

And these are delicious! I regretted absolutely nothing. A minor caution: they go from baked to overdone and hardened really quickly, which may not be the best thing for when you're too tired to watch for that. However, they taste really good, and you'll definitely be awake enough to be fully aware of how sick you are from eating so many of them.

N. B. If you want to win a cookbook handmade by me, be sure to enter the recipe contest!

I have no idea what a soufflé is, but I put bananas in one

We at A Book of Cookrye, faced with a surplus of them in the freezer, are going bananas over bananas! In fact, in case you haven't seen it, we're having a recipe contest! Send in your banana recipes that we may use up all the frozen bananas and you can win a hand-bound cookbook which we made a lot of for this year's Christmas presents.
It's not that we dislike banana bread (we really fricken love it, actually), but we are in the mood for trying new things with this frozen bounty. Which brings us to today's creation!

This comes to us from The Delectable Past and in that book is ascribed to Maria (professionally known as Miss) Parloa. The Delectable Past is a fascinating (to me) book about the history of cookbooks and the interesting social trends and world history you can see reflected in them.

We at A Book of Cookrye have no idea what a soufflé is. We've only seen them in old movies where as soon as the housewife pulls it out of the oven, her lovably dimwitted husband (he's always lovable and stupid) slams a door and the soufflé flattens out on the plate either with a trombone lament or a comedic recording of a deflating balloon. This was apparently uproarious in the 1960s.
Well, whatever a soufflé is, it starts out looking like this.

I can't decide whether it looks better after getting subjected to a mixer.

However, as promised, it really was quite easy to make. We were folding in egg whites not 15 minutes after we started. At this point, it finally starts to look like it hasn't been digested yet.

It looks like a soufflé is basically a pan of egg foam with stuff stirred in. We were somewhat surprised at this. Is this recipe unusually simple or is the general idea of a soufflé?
At any rate, the soufflé-to-be finally looks like it will become something people would voluntarily eat.

At this point it's supposed to go in a buttered soufflé dish. I've never seen one in my life, but hopefully the broken rice cooker someone left in the kitchen will do the trick.

Five seconds drawing a swirl with a wooden spoon, triple score for presentation (minus deduction for being served in a rice cooker).

We briefly pondered what we might use for the pan of hot water as we didn't think about pans. Fortunately, we already had a suitable vessel downstairs from making supper.

And holy snizzbat did it look pretty once it baked!

It had risen so high we could not use the rice cooker lid without squishing it. A glorious triumph! In eager anticipation, we tried it and.... it tasted like hot mashed bananas. Have you ever had hot mashed bananas? They taste like sweetened vomit.
So, fully aware that the soufflé would fall (it had started sinking within minutes of leaving the oven), we put it in the refrigerator.

Tada...?

Once it got cold, it was about a fifth its height. Someone saw me lifting a slice out of the rice cooker and, upon asking what it was, decisively said it is not a soufflé because it is short. Whatever. The proof is in the tasting and...
Y'know, not bad. I actually like it. It's like banana bread, but not at all filling. And despite falling down to shorter than it was going into the oven, it was still very light and would be nice after a heavy meal. It's happy banana foam! We at A Book of Cookrye hereby declare the Banana Soufflé a success with this little note added to the recipe: "Put it in the refrigerator once it cools, and ignore how much it fell back down."

Hump-Day Quickie: Chickpea Salad, or All you need is a garlic press and scissors

We at A Book of Cookrye are attempting this whole "keep healthy things on hand for when you want a snack" idea. This is somewhat difficult because for some reason, a lot of people seem to think being healthy is a sort of penance you do to make up for whatever acts of assholery one has committed during the day. That is the only explanation we can devise to explain the punitively bland and miserable food that turns up on a search for healthy recipes. Therefore, we just got a bag of garbanzos and ignored what turned up on a recipe search.

Chickpea Salad About ¾ c cooked chickpeas (or whatever you think counts as a serving)* 2 green onions Salt, pepper 1 clove garlic Cut green onions into ½-1" pieces (save time and use scissors). Press or mince the garlic. Mix it all in your salad bowl. *I prefer them hot, others like them cold. Pick whichever you like.

Sometimes I surprise myself in how much I don't want to carry dishes downstairs and have to wash them. The pot was too bothersome.

This was already dirty from soaking them anyway.

Cooking chickpeas makes me want to start a band and call it "The Beige Baboon Brains."

So now, with some lovely cooked chickpeas in the refrigerator, all one needs to do is take a scoop of them and add the other stuff!

All this took was 30 seconds with a garlic press and a pair of scissors.

Et voila! It's like hummus for people whose blenders aren't up to it.