Banana bread-- except with plantains!

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are trying an idea we've been pondering since we first put plantains on a waffle iron: since plantains taste a lot more like artificial banana flavoring than actual bananas do, what happens if we use plantains instead of bananas in banana bread?

Plantain Bread 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla ½ c milk 2 plantains 2 c flour 2 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt ½ c shortening, margarine, or butter 1 c sugar Heat oven to 350°. Grease 2 round pans (or one very deep one). Put eggs, vanilla, milk, and plantains into a blender. Blenderize until thoroughly mixed and nicely whipped. Cream the butter, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda, beating until light and fluffy. Pour in about an egg-sized amount of the plantain mixture (about a quarter cup) and beat in thoroughly. Pour and thoroughly beat in a second egg's worth of plantain mix. Mix in one third of the flour. When mixed, add about a quarter cup of the plantain mix. Repeat this, and when all is mixed add the last third of the flour. Wait until the last addition of flour to thoroughly beat out all the persistent lumps. That way, you don't overbeat and toughen the batter from mixing it very hard multiple times. Pour into the pan and bake until a toothpick or skewer comes out with no batter or paste-like deposits on it, which will be longer than you think (40-60 minutes). Adapted from a recipe by Mrs. Tony Benkus (Whiting, Indiana), 1892-1952 Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, The First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union, 1952

This comes to us from the 1892-1952 Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book. It turned up on a friend's bookshelf. We were drawn to it because it looked so worn and old next to all the other books it lived with. The photo below is making the cover a lot more legible than it is in person; in reality the cover is so dark and the printing ink so worn off that it's a little hard to read. 
I'm surprised that the first thing we're making out of this book is so ordinary. We're not doing the poppyseed bread-braid, the prune pie, the cabbage strudel, the kolačky, the rožky, the panchuski, the pirohy, or anything else that is at all from eastern Europe. We're making banana bread.

And this book has a whole page of banana breads for us to choose from! I love this about community cookbooks. No one wants to give someone's recipe the ax. So if five different people sent in a recipe for Chicken Spaghetti, then there will be five different recipes for Chicken Spaghetti. And some of the recipes will have two names underneath.

It amuses me that the only difference between banana bread and banana cake is what pan you pour the batter into.

We're choosing the recipe at the top of the page because we don't have buttermilk, and also because someone has handwritten notes on it. At first we thought it was someone tweaking the amounts to their taste, but it's actually someone doubling the whole recipe. Sometimes you see check marks or notes like "Good!" next to a recipe, but there's no better endorsement than "This recipe's so good we wanted more!" Also, I respect the previous cook's honesty with their own bad math. Those notes mean "I'll forget how much I'm supposed to use now that I'm doubling the recipe, so I'm going to forestall my own failure and just write it out so I can't mess it up!" It's just like how we at A Book of Cookrye put our car keys on things we absolutely cannot forget to take with us when we're going somewhere. You know your own airheadedness and plan for it.
Note that the recipe calls for "spry or margarine." I note with interest that Spry was apparently so common in Indiana that Mrs. Tony Benkus didn't even capitalize it. Spry was a brand of shortening from Lever Brothers (now called Unilever) that tried and failed to knock down Crisco. They had a matronly mascot named Aunt Jenny with a perpetual oversized smile, a fanatical obsession with Spry shortening that caused her to turn every neighborly visit into a sales pitch, and a folksy accent that rivaled Josiah Allen's wife.

For those who don't read novels that turn up in people's sheds, this is Josiah Allen's wife. source

Aunt Jenny was Lever's attempt to copy Betty Crocker, who had become one of the most profitable fictitious faces in the history of flour. But at least the Betty Crocker writers had her step off of product-schilling long enough to talk about other things and seem like a real person. Advertisements showed Aunt Jenny giving "thrifty three-pound cans" of Spry and Spry recipe pamphlets to brides as wedding presents, and proclaiming that foods fried in Spry were "so digestible even children can eat'em." If you'd like to see what happens when an ad firm of men try to sound like a grandmother-aged woman with a passion for trans fats, here is a tribute to Aunt Jenny and her thrifty three-pound cans of Spry!

Back to the recipe. Today we're using plantains, but we didn't know how big a plantain is compared to a banana. We decided to do the volume-displacement test: You put exactly one cup of water in a measuring cup, shove in the plantain (in pieces if necessary), and the waterline will tell you precisely how many cups of plantain you have.
We decided not to cook the plantains before baking them. Yes, we know you are supposed to cook plantains before you eat them, but we were afraid that after pre-cooking the plantains and then baking for nearly an hour, all the taste would be cooked completely out. However, plantains are a lot more fibrous than bananas. We didn't think just mashing them with a fork like you do bananas would be enough- the plantain bread might be too stringy. So we got out the power tools. Fortunately, there's enough liquids in this recipe to make blenderizing possible.

And so, we just sort of smashed the plantains in there. This particular stage of the recipe looks like something a fitness enthusiast who's gone round the twist might do to themselves with a few scoops of protein powder added. I've previously expressed my confusion at the odd practice of gym nuts taking what could have been a perfectly lovely salad or snack and putting it in a blender. I would swear I've seen someone doing a banana-egg-milk blender-paste instead of eating the banana, drinking the milk, and either scrambling or boiling the eggs.

Anyway, the plantain blenderized almost immediately. But then everything in the blender started whipping up very nicely. We could actually see the waterline rising. So we let it get nice and aerated until it reached the top of the blender, which would hopefully add extra lightness to the bread.

And so, after that quasi-health-food interval, we return to where we at A Book of Cookrye end up so very often: making close friends with butter and sugar! I almost always use brown sugar in banana bread because I like the extra flavor it adds. But for this experiment, I used white. I wanted to see precisely what flavor we get from plantains with minimal things to hide it.

Now, at this point we would have added the eggs one at a time. For obvious reasons, this was now impossible. So we dumped in an egg-sized splot of the blender contents.

The batter looked about right, so we added the second egg-sized splatter and also a surprisingly-high dose of vanilla. Recipes like this make me glad I started using the cheaper fake vanilla. That and it turns out that you can't taste the difference after baking it anyway. Real vanilla smells so much better in the oven because the many different flavors in real vanilla beans (the ones that fake vanilla lacks) are evaporating away.

This recipe was looking promisingly normal now. You'd almost never suspect that we turned half the ingredients into a blender-goop and tried to pass it off as delightful baking.

And now, to baking! We were going to use a round cake pan, but we had a lot more batter than anticipated. We rummaged through the cabinets and found this thing.

I'm not sure what this pan is for, but it appears to have spent much of its life boiling water. My first guess is that it's the insert to one of those built-in soup wells that some high-end stoves used to have. If you've never seen one, imagine someone removed a burner from your stovetop and replaced it with a pot lid. When you take the lid off, you find what basically looks like a built-in slow cooker. Here's a photo!

There's a whole slab of cow and a basket of potatoes stewing down in there. source

Since you can't lift the soup-well assembly out (it's literally bolted into the stove), they come with various pans like this to drop in there. I think this is why soup-wells went out of style. For one thing, it's hard to show your stove off to the hopefully-envious neighbors when its snazziest feature looks like you are too lazy to take a pot lid off the stove before company arrives. For another, soup wells really weren't all that much better than just putting a big pot over a burner. And obviously, they took away a stove burner that could be used for a lot of things and replaced it with a single-purpose built-in pot.

Regardless of this pan's original purpose, it is about the width of a cake pan but extra deep. So it seemed perfect for a recipe that had just a smidge too much batter to fit in a round cake pan but not quite enough to use a bigger one. Though I wondered: if the recipe for banana bread/banana cake is so amorphous that the only difference between banana bread and banana cake is the pan you cook it in, does using this stewpot make it soup?

I'll be honest, the batter here tasted really good. I had high hopes that I could serve this as banana bread and not have people squint and say it tasted fishy. It was good enough that I deliberately did a bad job of scraping out the bowl so I could eat what remained.

The funny thing about banana bread (or plantain bread) is that it always gets a lot darker on top than you probably think it should. You may see the crust's dark golden color and think it's done. You may also give it a light press and see that it springs back. But if you stick it with a toothpick or a fork, you may find that it is still doughy in the middle anyway. Always stab your banana bread to be sure.

This bread was marvelous. It has a much more intense banana flavor than banana bread made with with actual bananas. Like, banana bread tastes like banana bread, but plantain bread tastes like bananas. Also, it sliced really easily. It seems like banana bread is always a bit crumbly, but this showed a lot of integrity even when sliced really thin. Which is nice if you wanted just a little bit.

Broccoli-Cheese Casserole: or, I voluntarily ate broccoli

We at A Book of Cookrye never liked broccoli. From its bitter taste to the inevitable backwind, broccoli is something we deeply regret every time we eat it. We are not alone in this distaste- President George Bush the Elder made a national statement declaring that now that he was president, no one could make him eat broccoli (We're not making this up: see the video here). However, you know what we hate more than broccoli? Wasting food. And so.... this turned up in the refrigerator.

However, we at A Book of Cookrye live in America. And you know what we do in America when we hate the taste of a food and are too lazy to batter and fry it? We cover it in cheese!

Broccoli-Cheese Casserole 2 tbsp butter 2 tbsp flour 1 c water 1½ tsp beef bouillon Paprika, cayenne, and chili powder to taste About 1½ c shredded cheese 2 eggs 2 or 3 large bunches broccoli 2 tbsp water Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9"x13" pan (you may want to line it with foil even if you usually don't). Chop the broccoli. Put it in a microwave-safe bowl with the water. Cover the bowl and cook in the microwave until done. Stop the microwave during cooking and stir as needed. Make the cheese sauce: Cook the butter and flour over medium heat until a medium-light brown. Add the water a spoonful at a time, stirring very hard to prevent lumps. It will seize and thicken when you first add water to it. When all the water is added, add the bouillon and the seasonings. You can add salt if you like, but the bouillon may have enough salt in it already. Cook, stirring constantly, until thickened. Then reduce heat to low and stir in the cheese, reserving a handful to sprinkle on top. Turn off the burner as soon as the cheese is all melted or else it will curdle again. Stir in the eggs. Mix the broccoli and sauce and spread into the pan. Sprinkle the extra cheese on top and bake until bubbly and set, about 20 or 30 minutes. Serve hot.

I have to admit, I've cooked broccoli a few times (for other people), but it has always been frozen. Usually it was already chopped. We had no idea how to even start cutting these things, so we cleft one in twain.

Some of the pieces that fell off looked like the ones that show up on those raw vegetable trays with ranch dressing tubs. As we were nearly done with cooking school before the plague hit, we should have been able to competently chop it. Instead we had hacked at it with the knife until they looked small enough.
With the second--- bunch? bouquet? clump?---  of broccoli, we decided to try shaving off the bushy end and see if it was a faster route to finely-chopped broccoli. The exposed botanical cross-section was interesting to look at.

This way yields tiny bits of broccoli much faster than the other way. It falls off the already decently atomized. In pleasantly short order, we had reduced the broccoli to a lot of little bits, and a stumpy-looking core.

In case the whole broccoli is edible and not just the skinny bits, we chopped up the core and added it to the bowl.

As we all know, casseroles do not bake long enough to actually cook most of your ingredients. It is customary to boil vegetables, but we decided to microwave them instead. We've discovered that most vegetables that you would have otherwise boiled taste much better if you microwave them, adding perhaps a little water to make steam as they cook. While the microwave dealt with the broccoli, we could make the cheese sauce. We did not measure the cheese, but instead grated it off of the cheese brick until the remainder was small enough to fit in a bag.

For some reason we felt like putting more effort into this than just dumping shredded cheese on the broccoli and baking until melted. If you're going to make your own gravy and are using a cheap saucepan has nothing more than a thin layer of sheet metal on the bottom, prepare to tell everyone that you thought browned butter would enhance the flavor because your butter do its damnedest to burn. It won't matter how good your pot-scraping technique is.

We decided to make brown gravy to hide the brown specks. Because groceries are getting sporadic and expensive, we used water instead of milk. To make up for the plague-induced parsimony, we dug out a canister of powdered beef bouillon (a word that defies all my attempts to spell it) that had hardened into a brick.

As groceries become sporadic and more expensive, we now understand why so many recipe books from earlier decades used massive quantities of white sauce and brown gravy in nearly everything- it's so cheap! The main ingredients are merely a handful of flour, a knob of whatever fat is on hand, and either milk (on a good week) or water from the tap (when the budget's looking tiny). It also makes it look like you have a lot more food in the pan than you do- today it's making two broccoli bunches look like a whole casserole. And when there's a bit of extra grocery money left, you can add a massive mound of cheesy goodness to the pot.

We intended that the cheese should melt on contact with hot gravy, but instead it spent a long time in looking like this.

But eventually, having spent a lot of time mercilessly beating it over a low burner, we had... this! It's the consistency of cake batter and full of cheese. I don't usually like gravy, in fact I think it basically tastes like barely-seasoned paste. But this pot of cheesy goodness was amazing. Since we'd cooked the flour and butter to a medium-to-dark brown before adding the water, it tasted like cheese on toast.

Now, the trouble with a lot of casseroles is that they never really set when you bake them. Instead, they stay exactly as goopy as when you put them in the oven. In an attempt to forestall making a pan of formless broccoli-cheese ooze, we used something we learned when making British moussaka.

In theory, the eggs would help the whole thing set like a sort of baked custard that has broccoli in it, making it the gravy-quiche of your childhood's worst nightmares.  They made the sauce a little bit gelatinous once we had them mixed in.

All right, we didn't come here for fun with cheese. We're here because of vegetables. And don't they look steamed to... uh... perfection?

Luckily, we only had to actually look at them for a brief yet wince-inducing moment before dumping the magic cheese on it.

If we look at this sideways, we can see the cheesy ooze penetrating deep into the broccoli before we even start stirring. I haven't used a transparent mixing bowl in a long time, so I've never thought about what a recipe in progress looks like in cross section.

Things looked dire in the mixing bowl once we started stirring. The broccoli shrank to near-nothing (you can see the original waterline well above its current level) and made our creamy-dreamy cheese sauce so runny it was practically water again.

I practically never make gravy and I never make cheese sauce. Furthermore, there are two eggs (that I can never get back) in this bowl of vegetable-based disappointment. We decided to dump them in the pan and just see what we would have to choke down while telling ourselves we were better people for not throwing away the broccoli.

We had set aside some of the cheese to put on top (because every good casserole has cheese on top), but it appeared that we didn't set aside enough. Those poor lonely cheese shreds looked overwhelmed by the task of making the broccoli underneath them edible.

As it baked, the combination of cheese and bitter vegetables made the kitchen smell like my aunt's house on Thanksgiving when multiple casseroles are rewarming in the overcrowded oven. The pan of baked things looked like it would have been right at home on the Thanksgiving table. Fortunately, the cheese on top spread a lot more than anticipated, giving us surprisingly-adequate coverage of the vegetable matter below.

You will be pleased to know that whatever else happened here, this was at least sliceable.  In fact, it lifted rather neatly out of the pan.

You know there may be slight problems with your food choices when the first positive thing you can think of is "You can slice it!"
As for the flavor of what we have wrought, imagine if you took a pan of baked macaroni and cheese and replaced the noodles with broccoli. The cheese didn't completely hide the taste, or even come close to it. But it did make it bearable if one ate it fast enough. If you like broccoli, you will very likely think it's a really good . If you don't, this is a decent way to make it bearable. And besides, you can slice it.

Hump-Day Quickie: Eggy Spaghetti

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are revisiting recipes we received from friends!

Eggy Spaghetti 1 serving's worth of spaghetti (whole-wheat spaghetti is particularly good) 1 or 2 eggs 1 or 2 slices of cheese (optional) Seasonings to taste Boil the spaghetti in salted water, cooking it perhaps a bit firmer than you normally would. Immediately after you drain it, return it to the pot and break the egg(s) over it, adding the seasonings of choice and also the cheese if desired. Quickly stir it all very hard. The heat in the noodles should cook the egg and melt the cheese as you stir. It doesn't always work, so if the egg doesn't cook just put it back on the stove over low heat. Stir them well, being sure to scrape the bottom of the pot until the eggs are cooked. You can add salt to the eggs before pouring them on the hot spaghetti if you like, but we find that the salt in the noodles is enough already. Source: My friend's cousin

As you can guess just from reading the recipe, this is so easy to adapt to whatever you have in the freezer. Whatever extra vegetables or meat you have would be very nice if you stir them in. Remember when we made magical garlic bread? Some of the extra garlic butter, which we froze because even before the plague hit we do not waste food) is floating in with these eggs.

As you can also see, we've added enough pepper to turn the eggs an unnerving shade of brown. We at A Book of Cookrye have never mastered restraint with a spice shaker. It's one of the ways we test potential love interests-- if they can't eat our garlic bread, it'll never work.

Anyway, remember when we made bacon-and-egg spaghetti as written from a friend's cousin in Italy? This is basically the same thing except we didn't bother finding any bacon. Why? Because in Our Kitchen of Cookrye, bacon is something we only purchase when have plans for it. Eggs, spaghetti, and garlic always have residence in our stores of food.
All right, here's where the magic happens! We dump the eggs onto the steaming-hot spaghetti...

That small amount of garlic butter got hot and stank up the entire downstairs.

And the heat within the noodles flash-cooks the eggs, giving us spaghetti that has cooled to pleasantly warmed and eggs that are perfectly cooked! See for yourself?

All right, so if you want to have a lot of egg instead of barely enough to almost coat the spaghetti, it'll probably have to go back on the stove.

Now, if you like cheese, you can just drop it in the pot when you dump in the eggs.

With a bit of hard stirring over a low burner, the cheese will melt and the eggs will be perfectly beaten. So you don't need to get out a separate little bowl and fork for egg-beating (we at A Book of Cookrye are always looking out for everyone who hates washing dishes).

Although I like to cook it a bit longer so that it actually sticks to the noodles. If you time it just right, it turns into a lovely and creamy approximation of macaroni and cheese. Since spaghetti and sandwich bread are made of nearly the same things, you could say that this is just a slight rearrangement of the ingredients for scrambled eggs with cheese on top and toast on the side.

I don't know when it's customary to eat this in Italy, but I really like it when I've just woken up or in the middle of the night. Seeing as I tend to wake up at night anyway, this is perfect. If you have a bit of extra time in the morning, this is a lovely first thing to eat.

Brownies so easy you don't even need a bowl!

Greetings from all of us at A Book of Cookrye! Things have taken a bit of a downward slump since last time, haven't they? You just never know when your life will thrown aside because of a worldwide plague. As we currently work in the event and entertainment industry, we've had a bit more downtime than we planned. Does this have anything to do with today's dish? No.

This recipe comes to us from one of our teachers' daughters. She posted that she'd made their family's favorite brownie recipe. Her mom (viz. my teacher) commented that it was the indeed the best brownie recipe ever. We asked if she might type it out and share, and she almost immediately answered with the recipe you see above.

Brownies Heat oven to 350°. Put a square pan on the stove and melt: ½ c butter Add and stir well: 3 tbsp cocoa powder Add: 1 c sugar ½ c flour 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla (optional) Spread the batter evenly(ish) in the pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes. Let cool slightly and eat. They are especially good if you're depressed or on your period.  They may stick to the pan if they cool, but will release nicely if you rewarm them. Source: One of my teachers

We at A Book of Cookrye, ever without a dishwasher are always fans of recipes that minimize dishes. This one doesn't even have us getting out a bowl!

SPLAT. SPLAT. SPLAT.

This recipe doesn't feel like baking. It feels like a first-grade craft project. We're not mixing anything, we're just smearing things around in a pan like fingerpaints. We got out the whisk to try to bust up the clumps, but all it did was push them to new and unexplored parts of the pan.

After a few minutes of making a mess in the pan, the cocoa-butter paste wasn't mixing, it was hardening. The butter was un-melting and taking the cocoa powder with it, giving us this sort of paste-like mess. I could try to get all sales-pitch-like and say it was sooooo fudgy, but it was more like hot glue while it's still a little bit warm. We decided it was time to dump everything else in here and let fate ensue.

The last time I made a recipe that looked like this, it was a group activity in preschool. In retrospect, I'm quite sure the teacher's assistant mixed a second batch of cookies behind our backs and switched them out.

Did you ever make mud pies or pretend you were a cement mixer?

After some more bashing with a whisk, we had a cohesive brownie batter! Sure there are some clumps that never quite broke down, but we held out hope that they'd be nice chocolate nuggets afterward. We once went to a bakery that stirred little pieces of unsweetened chocolate into the brownies. Maybe these cocoa clods glued together with solidified butter would have the same delightful effect.

This is how you know this recipe will make its way into our permanent rotation: these are literally all the dishes that waited for washing. Remember, we have to do all of the dishes by hand like dishwashers haven't been invented yet. So seeing this barely-existent mess was almost as good as chocolate.

I must say, when we saw that this recipe uses only three spoons of cocoa powder, we were afraid it would be one of those dreadfully bland brownies that barely have enough chocolate to color them and give you false hopes. We only gave this recipe a shot because two people we trust both said it's amazing. They were right. When we tasted the batter, it was so deliciously chocolatey that we deeply regretted mixing them in the pan. We couldn't deliberately do a bad job of scraping out the bowl and then eat batter while they baked. And look at how fantastically dark and divine these look now that we've baked them!

All right, so that looks sad, joyless, and burnt. Let's try this again:

These brownies were so delicious my camera couldn't even try to capture their divine wonderfulness. And you can just mix them right in the pan! You owe it to yourself to try these.