Best Ever Banana Nut Muffins

Have you missed me? Things have been so hectic, but it's really no excuse. I'm just shirking from the truth: I lost my cooking mojo. After Thanksgiving I just couldn't get excited about eating. It's pretty difficult to cook when I'm not hungry.

This winter thing has really thrown me for a loop. What is this snow stuff? What do you mean high of eleven degrees?! When I lived in Los Angeles, anything below 68 was sweater weather. Anything below 50 just didn't happen during the day. EVER. Which is to say nothing of growing up in Hawaii.

Needless to say, I'm doing my very best to adjust. I knew I had made the switch when I went outside one day and said, "Wow, it's so much warmer today than yesterday." Then I saw a thermometer that informed me it was 28 degrees. That is insane. By now things are starting to warm up, most days the weather has been above freezing, at least for a little while. And I'm getting back in the kitchen.

Don't think I didn't fight the lack of enthusiasm tooth and nail. I took a four week class at Kitchen Conservatory on the recipes of Julia Child (way WAY too rich. Tasty, but I can't see myself making meat stuffed meat at home.) which was a blast. I started a part-time job as a prep cook and dishwasher for Bistro Kids, a healthy school lunch company. I received a KitchenAid mixer and Thomas Keller's epic new cookbook ad hoc at home for Christmas. Most exciting of all, I got a part time job as a "backup" at Kitchen Conservatory! I get to help out and clean up during classes, and as a perk I can eat the food!

The final development was the most influential in catapulting me back into the kitchen. Working at Kitchen Conservatory gives me the opportunity to eat delicious food and spend time in a well stocked kitchen. Sometimes when I get a moment alone in the spice kitchen, I look around and pretend that it's MY kitchen. (Do you think I could have used the word kitchen more in this paragraph?)

I like my job at Bistro Kids a lot also, and last week we had excess bananas at the end of the week, which I gladly took home. They inspired me to seek out an incredible whole wheat banana nut muffin recipe. We have a winner, these are so moist and delicious I honestly couldn't tell they were whole wheat. (I harbor no illusions that they are healthy, consider all the butter and sugar!) I wasn't safe in my own home while these were singing their siren song to me from the kitchen. Fact: I ate four in one sitting. And I have no shame or regrets.

Let's get down to brass tacks. This recipe is for bread, but I opted for muffins because they are so convenient to eat and quick to bake. They also have less risk of being too dry. There were a few things I did to make the recipe the best it could be. I used an organic, less refined brown sugar that is very moist and smells wonderfully of molasses. Anne at Kitchen Conservatory turned me on to Nielsen-Massey Vanilla Bean Paste which is rich with vanilla seeds and exploding with flavor, and it can be swapped for the extract. (I'll be honest, I don't even measure vanilla. I just pour some in there. It has never negatively affected my baked goods.) I ran out of honey before my quarter cup measure was full, so I just topped it up with agave. You could easily use agave instead, or even maple syrup if you want to take your flavor profile in that direction. For the walnuts, I didn't measure, and I'm sure I threw in more than half a cup because I love walnuts. Put as many or as few as you want. Get crazy if the mood strikes you, throw in chocolate chips, or coconut, or dried fruit.

Now a discussion on flour. I used 1 cup of white whole wheat flour (which is whole wheat flour that is made with milder hard white spring wheat instead of the more commonly known hard red winter wheat) and 1 cup of whole wheat pastry flour (which has a much finer consistency than regular whole wheat and is made of soft white wheat and makes for fluffier whole wheat baked goods). My muffins were incredible. You can use any whole wheat flour or combo you want, bearing in mind that if you use only traditional whole wheat flour, your muffins may taste a little wheaty and turn out a bit heavier than mine. (They will probably still be great.) If you don't have fancy whole wheat flours on hand and you fear heavy muffins ("fear heavy muffins" is a phrase I want to use more often) you could use half whole wheat flour and half all purpose flour. Or just blow off any notion of wholesomeness and use all purpose flour exclusively. They're your muffins. Knock yourself out. Just don't overbake them and dry them out. That would be tragic.

Whatever you do, MAKE THESE MUFFINS!!! Happy baking!

Happy New Year!

Admittedly, I've cooked a great deal since my last post. Standing out in my mind are:
this delicious vegetarian Thanksgiving dish
this yummy spin on traditional Thanksgiving fare(I used about half as much sugar in the sweet potato mixture and it was still plenty sweet.)
and these delicious little morsels
And my mom came to St. Louis and we went on a cookie making (and decorating!) spree with my new KitchenAid Stand Mixer! (Merry Christmas to me!) Though many rolled sugar cookies are bland and uninteresting, ours were phenomenally delicious. I attribute this to the fact that we used high quality butter and Nielsen-Massey vanilla bean paste. The colors are subtle because I used all natural food colorings.

French Onion Soup

It's official, I'm soup crazed. When it's rainy and consistently in the 40s (which to this California/Hawaii transplant to the Midwest is too cold) like it has been for much of the past weeks, there is no end to my craving for savory warmth in a bowl. Rustic, simple soups are easy to make and incredibly comforting in this grey autumn weather.

I had leftover beef broth from Boeuf Bourguignon and a craving for soup, so I pulled out my trusty mandoline and sliced sweet onions for French Onion Soup. A lot of onions. More than the suggested three pounds. I also sliced up a little more garlic than suggested. Recipes often call for cloves of garlic and it has always struck me as a really imprecise measurement because the size of garlic cloves varies widely, not only from bulb to bulb, but also from outer to inner in the same bulb. Not that it usually matters a great deal, but my solution is to use more because I love garlic.

Because I'm a rebel, I also subbed in olive oil for half of the butter. In fact, I pretty much just used the recipe as a guideline of the procedure and threw measurement to the wind. That's part of the beauty of soup, it is adaptable. You can always adjust the seasonings later, reduce if it's too watery, add water if it's too strong or thick. So let's get to the heart of the recipe. The caramelization of the onions is key. Sure, the recipe says "about 45 minutes" but all told, it took me twice as long.

While not really labor intensive, this is the kind of recipe that you should make in advance because onion caramelization can't be rushed. Don't turn up the heat, you'll burn them.  Your home will smell incredible the whole time, and if you're patient, you will be rewarded with a reduction of sweet brown onion goo as shown above. Don't stop caramelizing on low until your onions look like that.

Traditionally French onion soup is made in individual bowls with bread and cheese broiled on top. I don't have those bowls, and really, that feels pretty fussy to me. Anyway, what if you want more soup than that? To solve the problem, I used a trick that I learned at Kitchen Conservatory and covered baguette slices with grated cheese and broiled them. Don't tell any French people, but I had a lot of cheeses on hand, none of which were swiss or gruyere, so I used an excellent grass-fed sharp white cheddar from New Zealand (by way of Trader Joe's). While non traditional, it still tasted great, and I could really taste the fresh grassy difference from other cheddars.

After I made this (early in the day so I could just heat it up at dinner time), my friend Lindsey and I went on a mani-pedi date, and I was raving about how incredible my apartment smelled because I was making French onion soup. Being a vegetarian, she can't eat it because of the beef and chicken broths involved, so I thought about a good fix.  Fear not, vegetarians! This would be delicious made with a rich vegetarian broth like a roasted vegetable broth or mushroom broth. Sure, it'll taste a little different, but it will still be tasty. Also, a note on wine, red wine works great here too. If you have a bottle of even somewhat dry wine open, just use what you have.

Chocolate Chip, Cherry, Pecan, Oatmeal Cookies

It's a long name. It sounds like maybe the cookies have too much going on, as though they are a little busy. Let me assure you that these are my all time favorite chocolate chip cookies, and they are perfect.

Two summers ago, floating around on the boat, my coworker Cary Jones (sometimes affectionately known as Skiffypoozlebergenhausentonsen or Bergen for short) received a package. Little known fact, we occasionally get mail delivered to us by other boats. I know everybody was thinking that we use a mail buoy, but that is just a myth used to confuse greenhorns. These boats also buy the fish we catch, right there on the fishing grounds, so we don't have to drive back to town every day. They're called tenders, and they provide a wealth of valuable services including mail delivery, fuel sales, and fresh water supply (for when a CERTAIN deckhand forgets to refill the freshwater tank and we come within gallons of running out. It was me! I'm sorry!). Sometimes they even provide staple food items like bread, milk, eggs, and the ever important ice cream.

Inside Bergen's care package from home were these incredible cookies, and plenty of them. Being the kind and generous soul that he is, he shared them with us. They were so good, that I went straight to the source and told Bergen's awesome other half Meg that I had to get the recipe!

I thought she had forgotten about it, and I certainly had because that autumn I was busy getting ready for my wedding. Then we got the most thoughtful wedding gift ever from her. She collected recipes from my family and my husband's family and added a few of her favorites, and made a family recipe binder for us! It's so sweet, and she included lots of cards for us to add our own favorite recipes. Right there in the desserts section, is a recipe for the cookies.

After making it a couple of times, I had to scale the recipe to half because it just made way too many cookies for our little family of two. (As though there is such a thing as too many cookies. My vanity gets the better of me, though.) You could easily double the recipe to Meg's original proportions, or change the mixins at the end to include different dried fruits, different nuts, coconut, or whatever you like in cookies. Why mess with perfection though? This combination is killer. (I won't lie, chocolate, mango, macadamia nut, coconut has crossed my mind as a possible mind blowing combo.)

I made this batch to send in a care package to my cousin Matt, who is recovering from shoulder surgery. (Though we did sample a few to make sure they were safe!) The antioxidants in the chocolate and cherries will probably speed recovery, right?

Yeah, we have a Hello Kitty toaster. It even toasts Hello Kitty's face on the bread.
Now, on to the recipe:
Meg Jones' Super Amazing Cookies
Yields about 24 cookies (or 2 dozen if you're being technical)

3/4 c. all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/8 tsp. salt
1/2 c. unsalted butter, room temperature (1 stick)
3/4 c. packed brown sugar
1/4 c. granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 and 1/2 c. regular rolled oats
mix ins:
1 c. chocolate chips
1/2 c. chopped pecans
1/2 c. sweetened tart cherries (I like Montmorency, I find them at Trader Joe's and Costco)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper. Mix flour, soda, and salt together in a medium sized bowl. In a large bowl (or the bowl of an upright mixer if you're cool like that) mix butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy and smooth. Add egg and vanilla and beat until blended. Add flour mixture and beat until well blended. Stir in oats and mix ins by hand to combine. Shape cookies by hand (each cookie is between 2 and 3 tablespoons, but you can make them any size you want) and spread them out evenly, making sure to leave space in between as they tend to spread. Bake on the middle rack for about 15 minutes (Less if you like soft, chewy cookies, more if you like crispy cookies), turning midway if you have an infuriating hot spot in your oven. Allow to sit and firm up for about 3 minutes, then transfer to cooling racks.
Tips: Baking times can vary widely from oven to oven, so experiment with how long works best for your oven and your cookie tastes. Note that they will firm up considerably upon being removed from the oven. For even baking, I only bake one sheet at a time, taking care to replace the parchment and allow the sheet to cool if I make a big batch.

Lime- and Honey-Glazed Salmon with Basmati and Broccolini

Mmm salmon. I have a special relationship with salmon, because I am a commercial salmon fisherman (fisherwoman? nobody says that. fisherperson? no.) in Alaska. That means during the salmon season I live on a boat and catch fish for pay. It's a weird job, but it's my job. One of the perks of being a salmon fisherman is enjoying incredible quality seafood. Not only do I get delicious fish fresh out of the ocean while I'm fishing, I get to bring home lots of salmon. I get to hand pick which fish I want to bring home, and so of course I bring home the best. This salmon is superior in quality and flavor to any other salmon available where I live (yeah, we're landlocked out here).

If you can find it and afford it, I recommend you make this dish with wild Alaskan king salmon, like I did. Frozen fish is a good option because if it has been handled properly it is often fresher than "fresh" fish which has probably taken days to get to your market. Most of what you find in grocery stores has been frozen and thawed anyway. Plus, the salmon season is pretty much over, and any fresh troll caught product available on the market right now is going to be astronomically expensive. If you're on a budget, frozen wild Alaskan sockeye is a good bet (it is often available at Costco). Wild Alaskan pink salmon is very inexpensive and becoming more and more available frozen in fillets, but I don't really recommend it for this application.

Whatever you do, please don't use farmed Atlantic salmon even though it's very inexpensive. (Basically all Atlantic salmon available on the market is farmed.) While I do have a personal interest in bolstering sales of wild salmon, there are a great number of reasons to avoid farmed salmon. In short they are not sustainable, and pose a threat to the environment. For more information about sustainable seafood, and why to avoid farmed salmon, visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program recommendations online. All fish labeled Alaskan is wild as Alaska has a ban on fish farming. (Bivalves and mollusks are cultivated in Alaska.) Please take the time to learn more about sustainable seafood because the future of our oceans and our fisheries depends on it!

One pot meals are popular around here, because although Randy loves eating my cooking, he gets a little burned out washing so many dishes. The real reason I made this dish was because it just looked so delicious in my October issue of Bon Appetit, and even I need some easy recipes up my sleeve. Now that I've tasted rice cooked with shallots in broth, I don't know if I can go back to regular steamed rice. We both really enjoyed the flavors at play in this dish, and it comes highly recommended! It's light and healthy (you could easily make a whole grain modification to make it even more nutritious), and the kind of thing you look forward to eating again the next day. (If there's any left!)

A word of caution if you don't cook fish very often or have been unsatisfied with the results. Don't overcook the fish. Many seafood restaurants I've been to are guilty of overcooking their seafood. This is probably the number one error that home cooks make, and I hate to see it deter them from eating fish. To check for doneness, use a fork to peek inside the thickest part of the fish, and look for a center which is not quite opaque. If your fish is uniformly opaque, you've overcooked it. Fish cooks quickly, and if you pull it out of the oven when it's still a little rare, it will be fully cooked (and still meltingly tender) by the time it's cool enough to eat. I'd rather have rare fish than dried out fish, if your salmon is chewy, you're doing it wrong. I mean, unless that's how you like it, then that's your prerogative.

This time around, I basically made the recipe to the letter (although I really didn't measure for the glaze, I just kept adjusting and tasting it until I liked it), but this recipe is really just a framework for a great many variants. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't use quinoa, or even brown rice with a little more broth and simmering time. You could use basically any glaze you like on salmon. To really keep things simple, you could definitely use frozen veggies. In fact, the broccolini I used here probably isn't a great choice as it didn't really get tender in time. I'd either add it earlier or steam it on the side next time. With so many possibilities and my two freezers full of salmon, this recipe is going to become a regular in my kitchen! Once again if you missed it, the recipe.

Afterwards, we had hot chocolate, and this pic is crazy because it looks like I'm holding my head inside the cup.

Boeuf Bourguignon

Even on a boat in Alaska, one couldn't have gotten through the summer without knowing that boeuf bourguignon is beef stew in red wine, with bacon, onions, and mushrooms. Julia Child has found a new posthumous relevance (not that she was ever irrelevant) thanks both to the re-release of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and to the summer blockbuster Julie and Julia. (Which I still haven't seen, despite even my dad recommending it to me.)

I have spent a great deal of time poring over Mastering the Art of French Cooking. (An old paperback two volume set I found gathering dust in my mother-in-law's cabinet, when she noticed I was reading it even as I was opening my Christmas presents, she decided I'd get more use out of it than she had done.) This recipe was all over the news in July, as it was the kick-off recipe for Julia Child's much beloved TV series The French Chef. July doesn't really inspire me to make a heavy braise. Even in September, as Indian Summer (probably a politically correct term, right?) dragged on, I was entirely distracted by the last of the incredible summer produce.

Now that it's getting cold and the leaves are really starting to fall off the trees, I crave the warm comfort of a meaty stew. For my August birthday, my mom bought me a four part cooking series at Kitchen Conservatory (which I wholeheartedly recommend, if I had a lot of money I would be there every night!). In our class on beef, we made an abbreviated version of boeuf bourguignon. (I keep wanting to type bourgignon which probably means ugly gigolo or something.) It was delicious, and I knew I had to make it at home. Poor Randy had to endure me coming home from class empty-handed and smelling delicious right at lunch time. (Turkey sandwiches never seemed so lackluster to him as on those Saturday afternoons.) When I made this, he told me he stepped into the apartment building and thought, "Please let that smell be coming from my apartment!" Of course, it was.

So to make up for my dear husband missing my cooking class creations, I finally got around to making boeuf bourguignon, Julia Child's hardcore 5-6 hour way. I took (almost) no shortcuts with this (okay, I used aseptic packed beef broth instead of making veal stock the way Julia would have! SUE ME!), and it was decadent and amazing, but there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't cook the onions and mushrooms in the braise, skip straining the sauce, etc. To be honest, you could do this in a slow-cooker. Stephanie would. But really, even if just once, you should do it like Julia. (I just got a really funny image of avid home cooks co-opting the WWJD slogan to mean, "What would Julia do?")

Of course, the process was not 100% smooth. I couldn't find a solid hunk of bacon, despite going to THREE STORES, so I just used 6 oz. of sliced bacon. I couldn't find boiling onions, so I substituted pearl onions. (Have you ever peeled a 10 oz. bag of pearl onions? Did you know those little things can still make you cry?) I used an anonymous piece of beef gifted to me by my mother-in-law who suffers from a Costco addiction from which I frequently benefit. Once I cut out all the huge pieces of fat, I did not have the prescribed 3 lbs. of beef, I was down to about 26 ounces, but there are only two of us, and I had extra mushrooms, so I just went with it. I broke a glass in my kitchen (which was kind of a blessing in disguise because I really needed to sweep in there anyway). I used almost every pot I own once the potatoes and peas came into the equation.

This also marked the first time I've ever simmered, drained, dried, and THEN sauteed bacon. (I heard something in Food Blogging 101 about more bacon pictures making for instant popularity!) I don't really know why I did this, but I trust Julia implicitly. (Yeah, we're on a first name basis like that.)
You should have a perfect amount of wine leftover for two glasses. I used a 2008 Cotes du Rhone, it was about $6 at Trader Joe's and okay to drink, though nothing special. Once again, the official recipe for boeuf bourguignon.

Yellow Split-Pea Soup with Sweet Potatoes and Kale

Rainy season is upon us, and every meal I eat that isn't soup or braised something just isn't cutting it for me. All I want is a big bowlful of steamy wonderful. This soup speaks to me for a number of reasons. Sweet potatoes and kale are two of my absolute favorite vegetables, and they have a natural affinity for each other. The sweet creaminess of sweet potato is the perfect foil to the earthy bitterness of kale. Sweetening the deal considerably, split-pea soup in any incarnation is always a good idea to me. Add the rich fragrant Indian-inspired spices, and you've found what might be my ideal soup. Here's the best part, I can make a huge pot of this featuring mostly organic components (keep in mind kale is part of the Environmental Working Group's "dirty dozen" for produce, and sweet potatoes are in the "clean fifteen") for around $6.00 and it will feed Randy and I for several days. It's healthy, earth-friendly, cheap, incredibly filling, and really hits the spot on a rainy night. (Not to mention lunch the next day!) It totally justifies making boeuf bourguignon the next night!


While Susan V. has a good recipe, I can't help but punch it up with more of everything flavorful. One of the wonderful things about soup is that you don't really need to measure anything too exactly or stress out about the details. I put more onions, more seeds, more ginger, more garlic, more curry powder, and most importantly more salt. Salt to taste indeed. Randy adds sriracha sauce to his bowl, which is in no way an authentic Indian spice, but he likes it. If you want to kick it up a notch, throw in some cayenne, or use Madras curry powder. For an especially authentic experience, go to an Indian or international grocery and buy Lal Mirchi powder and add a small amount at the beginning of the simmer. This is really potent stuff, so start with a very small amount and then you can season to taste.