Banana Snack Cake with Brown-Butter Frosting

Everyone in my house has been sick with a nasty head cold that
eventually traveled down and became a chest cold.

I really had thought that my vitamins, lots of fruits and veggies,
and my fanatical hand washing had spared me of it's wrath.

It didn't.

I got sick.

I hate being sick mostly because while I'm laying on the couch
wrapped in a cozy blanket with a cup of tea, I'm thinking about all
the things that need to be done.

I don't hate the blanket and the tea part.

I just hate the "oh I'm gonna
have so much catching up to do" part.

I did manage to cook up a few meals (even if they were soup and

grilled cheese) and I did manage to make this

Banana Snack Cake and even took pictures of
it while my nose dripped like a faucet.

Don't worry, I didn't drip over the cake.



My sweet, sweet husband has been camped out

on the couch for the past week.

First he was sick, then me, so we haven't shared the

Temperpedic in over a week.

Moose and I have been alone in that bed and we don't like it one bit.
All the men in the house are healthy again and I think by

the weekend that I'll be feeling like my ole self again.

I still have lots of apples to cook with,

so prepare for more apple recipes.

I think an Upside Down Apple Pie may be in the works and

oh....I think I just may have to have another Fall Giveaway too.

I've been shopping!

Till then enjoy this Banana Snack Cake.

It was moist and scrumptious and I was told
that the frosting was excellent.

My taste buds weren't working so well,

so I'm going by what I was told, lol.



Banana Snack Cake with Brown-Butter Frosting
Printable recipe
1 ¼ cups mashed, fully riped bananas (about 4 med)
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 stick butter
¾ cup packed brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs

Brown-Butter Frosting
6 tablespoons butter (no substitutes)
3 cups confectioners’ sugar
5 tablespoons milk
2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease and flour a 9x13 metal baking pan.

In a small bowl mix the bananas, lemon juice and vanilla. Set aside.
In another bowl mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Whisk to combine.

In the large bowl with a mixer at medium speed, beat the butter with the sugars 5 minutes or until light and creamy, scraping the bowl often with a rubber spatula.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. At low speed, alternately add flour mixture and banana mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture, beat until smooth.

Spoon batter into the pan and spread evenly. Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool cake in pan on wire rack.

To make frosting:
In a 1 quart saucepan, heat the butter on medium 6 to 8 minutes or until melted and dark brown in color. Stir this every minute or so. Watch carefully so it doesn't burn!! It can go from brown to black in just a few minutes. Immediately transfer butter to a pie plate and refrigerate until firm. You want the butter to thicken up. This should take about 35 to 30 minutes.

In a large bowl, with a mixer at medium speed, beat the thickened butter, sugar, milk and vanilla until creamy and smooth. Spread over cooled cake.

Proscuttio Pinwheels

Talk about easy.

This is one super easy recipe.

I popped these into the oven last Sunday while my husband was watching his beloved Steelers. My husband is a die-hard football fan. He anticipates football season the way a little kids anticipates Christmas. So when his team is on and he can actually see the game here in RI, I like to make him some football treats.
I scored big with this recipe. Get it scored, football, oh never mind.

I found this recipe in a magazine I received called Simple & Delicious. I don’t know how I got the magazine, but it was in my mailbox so I scanned it over and saw quite a few delicious possibilities. I decided to start out with these.

When these came out of the oven, I put one on a napkin, handed it John, warned him it was hot and walked back into the kitchen. One minute later he walked into the kitchen and said:

“Whatever those are, I hope you made a whole lot of them”.

So needless to say, he liked them, he liked them a lot.



I doubled this recipe and they were all gone within a half hour or so. The kids loved them too.

I might try this with some thicker sliced ham next time. I’m going to warn you right now, one package of the puff pastry will not be enough. You really should double this recipe if you make it.
It's just so damn good.

Prosciutto Pinwheels

Printable recipe
Yield 20 appetizers (we doubled the batch and got 28, this recipe is for 1 batch)
1 sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed
¼ cup sweet hot mustard (I used Dijon)
¼ pound prosciutto or deli ham
½ cup shredded Parmesan cheese (I used grated cause I was out of shredded)

Unfold the puff pastry and spread it with the mustard. Leave a ½ border when you are spreading the mustard. Lay the proscuitto and cheese over the mustard. Roll up one side to the middle of the dough: roll up the other side to the middle so the two rolls meet in the center. Using a serrated knife cut into ½ inch slices.

Place on greased sheet (or parchment lined sheet). Bake at 400 for 11 – 13 minutes or until puffed and golden brown. Serve warm.

Grated Apple Pie with Streusel Topping

The apple recipes continue.

Grated Apple Pie. Yes you read that right. Grated. When I first saw this recipe I thought, how strange to grate the apples for pie, but as I read it and thought more about it, it made sense. Grated apples would cook quicker and probably be almost strudel-like. Strudel yummmm, that word alone makes my mouth water, so I thought, oh yeah, I must make this pie, and I did.

I made this Wednesday night. Yesterday my friend Tati and I had gone shopping all morning. We were both in need of some retail therapy. After we unloaded all the bags, we dug into this baby. I'm always hesitant when I'm trying a new recipe. I've had some failures over the years but this one didn't disappoint.

Tati thought it was better than my apple pie
or my apple pan tart (which is my personal fave). Pie for lunch.

It was great.



Thanks to my foodie friend Kathy for this recipe. She's the one who found it and passed it on to me and am I ever glad that she did. This really was like a strudel pie. When I first took it out of the oven I thought oh no, it's going to be goopy and mushy, cause it looked a bit wobbly, but once it cooled, it was perfect

Grated Apple Pie with Streusel Topping
Printable recipe
1- 10 inch unbaked pie shell
(you know me - little red box never lets me down)
6 medium apples, firm and crisp
½ cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons unsifted, all purpose flour
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Streusel Topping
½ cup unsifted, all purpose flour
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
½ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter, softened to room temperature

Peel, core and coarsely grate the apples with a box grater. Mix the apples with the granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour & lemon juice. Set aside.

To make the streusel topping: Combine the brown sugar, flour, cinnamon and salt. Press out any lumps with your hands. Cut in the butter until the mixture is crumbly.

I just used my hands to crumble it.




Spoon the apples into an unbaked pie shell and top with the streusel topping.

Bake at 400 for 10 minutes and lower the oven to 375 and bake for 25 to 30 minutes longer, or until the filling is bubbly and topping is browned.

Notes: The original recipe called for unpeeled apples. I peeled mine. If you think your apple skins are on the thinner side you could leave the peel on.

You don’t need to core or quarter the apples either. After I peeled mine I grated them whole on the box grater. I just grated each side till I reached the core, turned and repeated until the whole apple was grated. It was easy.

Just watch your knuckles!

GARLIC!

I love garlic!

I love garlic almost as much as I love chocolate or nutella,
or fresh crusty bread, or my Mom's artichoke omelettes.

I said almost.

Loving garlic more than chocolate, well that's just crazy talk.

But I do love it. In fact I love garlic so much that when John and I were first starting off in our relationship,
one of the first food related questions I asked him was "do you like garlic?".

Luckily his answer was yes, cause if it was no,

I'm not quite sure what I would have done.

A life that would hamper my love of garlic? I can't imagine it. I guess I was pretty lucky he was a garlic lover.

This year I ordered a garlic sampler from Gourmet Garlic Gardens. I found them through a fantastic gardening blog called Chiots Run.

I choose the medium flavor assortment. Here's what I got:

Persian Star - This smelled so good I wanted to chop up a clove and start cooking immediately.

Music - the biggest and baddest of them all. The cloves were huge!

Chesnok Red - this was so pretty it was kinda of a shame to cover it up with dirt.



Purple Italian Rocambole - hey it's Italian, so it's gotta be good.



The folks at Gourmet Garlic Gardens really know their stuff.

They mail you the garlic when it's time to plant it in your area.

You get 2 pages of instructions - 1 to explain how to plant the garlic, and 1 that explains how to harvest when it's time.

First the garlic gets a soak overnite in a baking soda/water mixture.

This looses up the skins.

Then you soak them for 3 - 5 minutes in rubbing alcohol

right before they go in the ground.

The alcohol kills pests and any eggs or pathogens the first soaking missed. Then you are ready to plant.

Here in RI I was instructed to plant the cloves 4 inches deep and 6 inches apart.

Mitch was my garlic planting helper for the day.

I told him that I would be sure to let all my blog readers know that

the hands you see here are Mitchells.

Please not how soft and subtle they look and how perfectly manicured they are. Mine were caked with dirt. I'm just sayin'.

Once all those little cloves of goodness were in the ground,

we mulched them with leaves and grass clipping,

which gave Mr. Softy Hands the sniffles (sorry Mitchyboy!).

The only bad part of growing your own garlic....the waiting!

These beauties will be harvested from June till early Fall.

That leaves me a lot of time to find the best garlic recipes.

Pssst...more apple recipes coming up!

Orchard Applesauce

Sunday was a busy day.

The kind of day that was just one project after another.

The kind of day that leaves you tired, but tired in a good kind of way. You know when you finish the day and your feet hurt and there's dirt under your nails and bugs in your hair and your face is flushed with a pink glow cause you've spent most of the day in the sunshine?

That's the kind of Sunday I had.

I decided to make some homemade applesauce early in the morning. The whole house smelled of cinnamon and apples. That is the smell of autumn to me.

I harvested the last of my basil and eggplant. I pulled the last of the tomatoes off the vine to ripen on the windowsill. Evan and I cleared the raised beds and weeded them one last time.

We replaced the dying impatients with mums. We pulled withered leaves and flowers from the pots. We sat by the fig and admired how big it's gotten over the summer, dreaming of the figs we'll eat next year, knowing soon it will be bundled in a blanket and placed in the shed to go dormant over the winter.

Mitch helped me plant lots garlic for next years harvest and mulched the beds to give it a nice warm place to grow. More garlic info on an upcoming post.

I cooked up some jasmine rice while John got ribs ready to go on the grill.

By the time dinner was ready, we were all hungry and tired and thankful for the simple meal before us.



This is a simple applesauce recipe. All you need is 8 apples and a few other ingredients and you have delcious homemade applesauce that puts the stuff in the jar to shame.

Just to tell you how good this applesauce is....Evan won't eat applesauce that you can buy at the megamarts, but he loves my applesauce cause honestly, it's just that good.

When the apples have cooked down just mash them up to the consistency you like. We like ours with a few lumps.



Orchard Applesauce
adapted from a recipe in Yankee Magazine
Printable recipe
8 medium size apples (I used a combination of Cortland and Macoun).
1 cup apple cider (apple juice would work too)
½ cup granulated sugar
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Peel and core the apples and cut into hunks. I put my apples through a corer/peeler/slicer machine, but if you don’t have one a knife will do the job just as well. Place the apples in a medium size saucepan and add the remaining ingredients. Cook until it comes to a boil and then turn the heat down and let it simmer for 15 – 20 minutes. Let it cool for about a half hour or so then take a potato masher and mash it to the consistency you like. Cool to room temperature then cover and refrigerate.

Apple Picking '09

Every year we head up to North Scituate to pick apples at Sunset Orchards. We've been going with John & Tati since the boys have been babies. Then Sara came along a year later and she joined the crew too.

This year John P and Jesse didn't go with us. John P was busy working and Jesse wasn't feeling so great so he chose to hang at home. We brought him home apple cider, which he loves, so he was just as happy lazing about and still getting his cider fix.

Because of all the rain we had this summer, the apple crop this year was amazing. I've never seen so many apples on one tree. The orchard also has peaches and pumpkins too.

We were there for these babies.....

Sara demonstrates the two fisted eating method.

Tati likes to eat hers hiding inside the apple tree.

Evan likes to channel Popeye while he's eating.



John likes to act like he's 12 again.

What is it with men and boobs??

Please don't answer that.



Evan must constantly make goofy faces.....

..and Sara delights in joining him every chance she gets.

After all the goofines was over, some actual apple picking took place.










We picked 25 pounds.

Tati & Sara picked 35.



I don't think I even have to tell you to prepare for some apple recipes.

Ribeye Steak with Onion Blue Cheese Sauce

Here’s a little fact a lot of you might not know about me. I didn’t eat meat for over 20 years. It’s true. I was a vegetarian for most of my young adult life. I won’t go into the many reasons that I became a vegetarian, but it did have something to do with a man named Paul McCartney and his then wife Linda.

So I was meatless for a long, long time.

Fast forward to 1995, I’m pregnant with my first child and the doctor is worried about the amount of protein I’m getting. I promise him I’ll bulk up on the protein. A few months pass, I develop gestational diabetes, I’m bed ridden for the last few months of the pregnancy, Jesse is born in respiratory distress, and he’s a little guy. Barely 6 pounds. He’s a terrible sleeper. Mama is exhausted.

Fast forward again, less than a year later, and I’m pregnant again. Doc and I have the same conversation about protein.

He jokingly writes me a prescription that says “EAT SOME FISH”. I tell him “I love fish, if you tell me I have to eat it, I will”. “Then eat it.” he says. So I do. I start to eat fish in 1996. Evan is born in October. He’s almost a 9 pounder. He sleeps through the night almost from the get go. Not taking into consideration that I have 2 boys in diapers and drinking from bottles (I changed a lot of diapers and made a lot of bottles over those years) I think I’m in heaven. I’m almost getting a full night sleep. I’m still not eating meat.

Fast forward for the last time. We are in Disney in 2006. We go to a luau. I have now decided that I’m going to try to eat a little chicken. It looked so good and smelled so delicious. I take a bite.

“Oh my God, this is the best chicken I’ve ever had”.

Was it because I hadn’t eaten it in so long?? Was it the way it was prepared???

It was so good. I ate one piece, then another, then another until John finally looked at me and said

“That’s pork you’re eating you know?

What? Pork? Me? How could have eaten pork?

I haven’t had pork in almost 25 years. I ate the pork.

I finished all the rest of it on my plate.

I crossed the line.

I was a carnivore again.

I liked pork.

I really liked pork.

So that’s the point in time that I was no longer considered a vegetarian. I still enjoy lots of meatless meals, but chicken and pork and beef have passed through my lips many, many times. Red meat took quite a lot longer for me to consume. I still can’t eat it rare or even medium rare and I don’t eat much of it, but I have to say, when it’s cooked right, I do enjoy it, carnivore that I am.

This is a Pioneer Woman recipe. PW is coming out with her own cookbook next month. If you like down home cooking that’s not fussy or fancy I urge you to buy her cookbook. She really does have some great recipes, and here’s one of them.

Let me tell you. I salivated when I saw this sauce on her site. Yeah the steak looked ok too, but that onion blue cheese sauce had me, onion freak that I am.

Be patient with the onions.

Good caramelized onions take time, but are so worth it.

Then you add the cream and the beautiful blue cheese and all is right with the world. At least until you finish this meal.

P Dub's Ribeye Steak with Onion Blue Cheese Sauce
Printable recipe
2 ribeye steaks (we grilled outside)
2 tablespoons butter
Salt
Pepper
4 tablespoons butter
1 very large yellow onion
3/4 to 1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
Salt and pepper both sides of the steaks.

Saute onions in 4 tablespoons butter over high heat. Cook for 5 to 7 minutes, or until dark and caramelized. Reduce heat to simmer and pour in cream. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes, or until reduced by half. Stir in blue cheese until melted. Serve steaks on generous portion of sauce. Faint.

Repeat as often as needed.

I could have licked that pan clean but I didn't.

I do have a tiny ounce of control left.

(but I so wanted to!)