Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

We usually eat all of our bananas before they can get to that overripe stage that's perfect for baking. However, last weekend we ended up with some lovely brown-spotted bananas in our fruit bowl, begging to be made into a tasty baked good. I had never made banana bread before, so I pulled up a recipe on the Cooking Light website. I made a few changes: using vanilla yogurt instead of the regular, and adding a handful of chocolate chips to the batter. This doesn't taste "light" at all (probably because there's half a stick of butter in it; ahem), and we've been enjoying it for breakfast all week long.

Strawberry Almond Cream Tart

I immediately flagged this recipe when I saw it in Cooking Light last month, knowing that I'd be able to get fresh strawberries soon. After picking up a bunch at our farmer's market, I decided to whip this up since we had the rest of the ingredients at home. The end result was a light, delicious dessert with all of the flavors of a strawberry cheesecake (just with more strawberry and less cheesecake).

I made a few changes: I used a mix of regular and cinnamon graham crackers for the crust, and added a splash of Amaretto instead of the almond extract. I also used more strawberry glaze than I was supposed to (a tasty mistake, mind you). For some reason the original recipe instructs you to make the glaze, and then tells you to use half of it on your tart and save the rest for another use. Since I can't read, I just dumped most of the glaze on the tart before I realized I wasn't supposed to. No one complained. So, use as much as you like. If you have any leftover, try it on pancakes or ice cream.

The only problem I had with this was that I wasn't able to cut a nice-looking (ie., triangular) slice. The middle of my crust was too soft, so I probably needed to bake it a little bit longer. It may also have helped if I used a tart pan rather than a pie plate, but we don't seem to own a tart pan.

John and I just polished off the last two slices in order to fill the void in our hearts from the end of our favorite tv series, Lost. I think I'm going to need to make more...

Rosemary Focaccia

Fresh herbs seem to be another one of those things that I'm always struggling to find uses for so that they don't go to waste. We bought rosemary for a recipe and had quite a bit leftover, so I thought I'd make this focaccia to go along with John's homemade ravioli. 

As someone who is inexperienced with bread-making, I found this really easy. My dough rose beautifully and then baked to perfection. There is rosemary in the dough and more sprinkled on top before baking, so this has lots of flavor. It's not overly oily like a lot of focaccia I've had, and was the perfect thing for mopping up extra sauce.

We had our friends over to help us eat this carb-fest, and still had lots of bread leftover. My plan for these leftovers? Croutons!

Spring Vegetable Risotto

I'm happy to say that our local farmer's market opened up recently, providing fresh inspiration to cook some new dishes. There aren't a whole lot of local vegetables available in New Jersey this time of year, but we did find some asparagus that became the basis for this dish. John's parents came over last weekend for a belated mother's day dinner, and we put together this risotto, along with a rosemary and garlic pork loin (recipe to come).

Risotto is becoming one of my favorite things to cook. While it does require a lot of attention, I'm really coming to enjoy the process of adding a little stock, stirring, waiting for it to absorb, adding some more stock, sipping some wine (I had to open a bottle anyways...), stirring, etc. And this particular recipe calls for a gremolata topping, which apparently is a posh way of saying "smooshed up herbs and lemon zest". It was a nice touch, and you use the stems from the herbs to add extra flavor to your broth. I loved how this turned out, and it was a perfect excuse to cook up some spring veggies.

Buttermilk Bread

Ever buy buttermilk for a recipe and then wonder what the heck you're going to do with the rest of it? It seems to only come in unnecessarily large containers (which makes me wonder... do people actually drink buttermilk??). I mean, I love pancakes, but there are only so many I can eat. So, I looked for some alternate uses for buttermilk and came across this recipe from Cook's Illustrated. I have no expertise whatsoever when it comes to baking bread from scratch, but this was very easy to do... you just need a mixer with a dough hook to do all of the hard work for you. The buttermilk makes this a bit richer than a regular white bread, and honey adds a hint of sweetness. It was great for peanut butter sandwiches, french toast, and just smeared with butter (but what isn't good smeared with butter?).

Indoor Pulled Pork with Sweet and Tangy BBQ Sauce

At 8:30 AM on Saturday, while most normal people were sleeping or eating breakfast, John and I headed to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for our weekend food project of pulled pork. ("indoor" pulled pork, as we live in an apartment with no outdoor space). I sent John to the meat section while I groggily staggered up to the coffee bar for my caffeine fix. A few minutes later, John comes waltzing over, clearly pleased with the giant pork butt he picked out. We wandered around for about 10 more minutes looking for Liquid Smoke, finally found it by the barbecue sauce, then we checked out. And yes, we cracked inappropriate jokes about pork butt all the way home (Hahaha... "cracked"! See what I did there?). We're mature.

I call this a project because it took all day to make. Granted, most of the day,  the pork is spent either brining or cooking, so it does not require constant attention. And at the end of the day, every last minute was worth it. We could barely muster any coherent sentences as we took our first bites: "MMM. So... mmm... wow... mmm... ohmygosh... tastymmmyummm." There are so many layers of flavor: the brine infuses the meat with the liquid smoke flavor, the spice rub adds a little kick, and the homemade barbecue sauce was just ridiculously good (you mix in some of the pork cooking liquid, which I think is the key ingredient here).

This makes a lot, but a quick Google search told us that pulled pork freezes well, so you don't necessarily need to have a big crowd to help you eat it. Serve on rolls to make sandwiches, or just eat it straight up.

Maple-Ginger Glazed Chicken Breasts

I'm not entirely sure why, but lately I've become obsessed with things that are glazed. Savory things, too, not just cakes and donuts. I went through some cookbooks as well as my favorite recipe websites and just typed in "glazed", and came across a lot of interesting recipes. I settled on these glazed chicken breasts for dinner this week because they were easy and I had all of the ingredients on hand. The glaze had a lot of flavor for not having a lot of ingredients, and was a nice way to dress up an otherwise pretty boring piece of chicken. Maple syrup adds sweetness, soy sauce adds a savory component, and ginger and cayenne add a little kick.