Everybody, Go Bananas

I feel somewhat disingenuous posting my second ad-libbed, sugarless recipe before the first, but my parents only just rolled in (at one a.m., those rascals) with the leftovers of the finished cheesecake, and I couldn't possibly publish the final recipe without dolling a slice up for the cameras. Instead, I present to you a recipe for sugarless banana bread, that also happens to be vegan-friendly and not entirely bad for you.

Bananarama Bread
makes one delicious loaf

2 cups whole wheat or all-purpose flour

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp all spice (plus any other spices you feel like adding)

½ tsp salt

½ cup (one stick) margarine or butter, at room temperature
3-4 ripe bananas, the more speckled and smushy the better

¼ cup soy/almond/cow milk, mixed with 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp agave nectar, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, or rapadura

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp almond extract (optional)

½ cup chopped walnuts, or chocolate chips, or elephants

1. Preheat the oven to 350º (or if you're blessed with a convection oven, 325º). Grease a 9" x 5" bread pan with the wrapper from the margarine/butter.
2. Whisk together the dry ingredients.
3. Cream the margarine/butter until light and fluffy. Add the remainder of the wet ingredients and whisk, baby, whisk.
4. Add the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until well-incorporated. Fold in the walnuts and elephants, if using, and then pour the batter into the bread pan.
5. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about an hour and ten minutes. (Set your timer to an hour and check every five minutes after that.)

If you want to be super healthy, you can halve the margarine (to ¼ cup) and add ¼ cup of applesauce. Yum!

Invasion of the Mango Snatchers

It's not all mangoes all the time here at Château Bastek: there are other fruits in the world, after all. The tropical variety just love to loaf about in my fridge, wedged between the leftover vindaloo and the chickpeas, like vandals on a smoke break. The papaya, that layabout, must have burned through at least one pack of cigarettes in there, and let's not even get into what the bananas on my counter have been up to. I'm saving them from themselves, really.

Luckily I had a recipe lying around tailor-made for these little monsters. Enter Papaya-Coconut Cupcakes with Coconut Buttercream Frosting, stealing the lime light from Cousin Mango for the evening.

Left, just out of the oven; and right, having icing dolloped on top.

I am lucky enough to have friends that drop by on a regular basis to clean out my refrigerator, otherwise I would have to turn these cupcakes out on the street. The recipe that supposedly yielded twenty-four went behind my back with the milkman and had another six on the sly, so I ended up with a solid thirty cupcakes. Good thing Archana, Megan, and Upasana came to the rescue, or I might be in police custody right now.

Mango Week Recipe #2: Experimental Cheesecake

I have a confession: not only have I never made cheesecake before, I've also never baked anything without sugar. That's right: no sugar, no artificial sweetener, no honey, no syrup, nothing but mangoes and agave nectar. "What!" you, the loquacious readers of my imagination, exclaim, "no sweet white crystaline goodness? Wherefore cometh this insanity?" Well, let me tell you.

Sugar is the devil. This is actually a mild statement, considering it's about as good for you as certain other white crystals of a more illegal persuasion, and as far as I know, crack cocaine has yet to be linked to cancer. (Conclude from this what you will.)  Sugar has absolutely no nutritional value and creates an acidic blood profile that basically begs for cells to mutationally mutiny. There's no reason to eat it, especially since there are so many other sweeteners out there that don't wage such total war on the human body and actually have a flavor profile other than cloyingly sweet - like rapadura, unrefined honey, maple syrup, or brown rice syrup. But these are all still simple sucrose, which is why I'm only using agave nectar (fructose) in this recipe.

All right, lecture's over - back to the cooking!

Since I couldn't just crack open my magic cookbook and have the perfect recipe for sugarless mango cheesecake simply appear on the page, I had to make up my own. I started out by digging up all of the fruity cheesecake recipes I could find, and my research soon led me to conclude that all of them call for some combination of cream cheese (except for one with, er, cottage cheese), eggs, fruit puree, and sometimes cream. Maddeningly, every recipe called for a different combination - couldn't they convene and just decide for the sake of my convenience? - so I had to wing it. Figuring out the right proportions was the hardest part, because if I overdid it with either mangoes or eggs, I risked it spewing from the pan all over my oven. Yikes.

At left: winging it (pretty good so far!)

At right: oh god oh god is this too many eggs?






I ended up adding some arrowroot powder just to be on the safe side, but still ended up with something that looked dangerously liquidy - but how would I know? I have no idea what uncooked cheesecake batter is supposed to look like. (Woebegone, I looked at a picture on the internet and told myself I did believe my filling looked like that, I did, I did.)

By comparison, the crust was a breeze: instead of using flour, I ground up some walnuts, cut in some butter and agave nectar, tossed it in the oven, et voilà! C'est crust. Pat in a pan, bake it, take it out, pour on the filling, bake it again, and pray for redemption.

I am not one to sit around idly biting my fingernails, so instead I bit my fingernails while cooking vindaloo. An hour and sixty-five minutes, this came out:


Hooray! Words cannot describe the supreme glee I felt at finding all of the filling still in the pan. Three hours of chilling and some vindaloo later, I served it to Elena and my mother, all dressed up in mango slices and strawberries (the cheesecake, that is; I was wearing a dress).


The verdict? It's awesome. Even though the top is a little uneven and the crust a wee bit burnt, those are easily remedied by switching the pan to the middle rack and lowering the baking time on the crust. Best of all, the consistency was just right, and the agave nectar was subtle enough to punch up the mango flavor without drowning out the cardamom or the cream cheese. I'm try it again on Friday with a slightly different combination of eggs and arrowroot, and if I'm successful, the recipe will be yours for the taking, Internet.


See, it tasted so good that the three of us demolished a third of the cake, and all the pretty toppings. My lovely taste tester lounges in the background. (Also pictured: my battered copy of the Veganomicon, the best cookbook ever.)

Tomorrow: Indian food and (what else) another mango dessert.

Mango Week Recipe #1: Bread

A by-product of cooking almost every night is that I go to the local Asian market twice a week, which means that I am tempted by a crate of mangoes twice a week, which means that I now have a crate of mangoes at home. Well, not quite a crate anymore after several lassis and a pandowdy, but that situation will be remedied once I go shopping tomorrow. Since my indecision is at its worst when it comes to recipes, it's now Mango Week at Château Stephanie. Prepare yourselves for an orange-colored assault.

First I ground my own flour:
















Next I crushed some cardamom seeds, whipped them into the flour, pulverized six mangoes, threw all the ingredients together in a bowl, and catapulted the bread pan into the oven.







Then I lounged about in a non-violent manner for forty minutes until this came out of the oven:



(I forgot to mention that I bombarded the batter with slivered almonds.)













It is also no secret that I cannot resist cupcake liners, and obsess over presentation, so I siphoned off some batter and made these little muffins:


Next up: (sugarless) mango cheesecake. Oh, don't grimace - the mango bread above is vegan, and you couldn't even tell!

The Lost Supper, the Day After

Sunday's Lost feast was a resounding culinary success, and there's no controversy over how satisfying it was (very), unlike certain series finales that aired last night. The episode was going so well - even Kate played a useful role, and had a zinger in the first few minutes - and then the last fifteen minutes happened! It was almost on the level of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows epilogue. Almost. Also, I can't believe I stayed up until 1:30 and suffered through Jimmy Kimmel's bad jokes to watch the "alternate endings" he showed. Bah! But back to food.

Unsurprisingly, not everything on the menu found its way onto the dinner table: even though I bought three pounds of sweet potatoes, I somehow forgot to cook them, and instead of making totally new cupcakes I used the leftover salted caramel cream cheese frosting from last week's cupcake adventure. (I am kicking myself for not taking pictures of those - Vanilla Cupcakes with Lavender Cream and Citrus Cream Cheese Frosting, my infamous Tequila Margarita Cupcakes, Earl Grey Chocolate Cupcakes with the aforementioned icing and caramel drizzled on top.... Oh well, I guess this means I have to make them all again.)

I'm not too sad about the potatoes, though, since I made eleven dishes as it stands. I would have died without my coterie of helpers, though - Karissa and Upasana kept me from slipping from sanity into the frying pan by the apron strings, and it was only Laura, Annie, and Preston's angelic patience that prevented them from strangling me with the dishtowels with which I bid them dry dozens of dishes.

Anyway, pictures are worth thousands of words, so here are the money shots:

Team Tamale finished these up in record time, and Upasana single-handedly saved the day when she reminded me, forty minutes before guests were due to arrive, that raw corn flour dough needs to be steamed. Oops.

Left: Edamame-Corn-Sesame Salad
Right: Creole Stuffed Peppers

The guests, feverishly eating lest I stop them again to take more pictures:

My plate, seconds before I threw aside the camera and dug in. Starting with the purple cabbage and going clockwise: Smokey Grilled Tempeh, Chickpea Cutlet, Chile-Cornmeal Crusted Tofu, Sautéed Collards, Creole Stuffed Pepper, Southwestern Corn Pudding at center. Buried somewhere underneath that mound of food: Green Pumpkin Seed Molé.

Happy endings: Coconut Custard Pie and Mango-Pear Pandowdy. I made mini pandowdies with the leftover pie dough, but I forgot to take a picture. Rest assured that they were adorable and you are missing out.

Not-so-happy ending:

The Lost Supper

To celebrate the last episode of Lost ever, I planned an extravagant dinner party for ten of my similarly island-crazed friends. I will pretend that my Southern menu is marginally related to the theme of the show because Sawyer has a Southern accent.

THE MENU:

Appetizer

Tamales

Salad

Corn & Edamame Sesame Salad, topped with Tangerine Tofu

Main Course

Smoky Grilled Tempeh

Cornmeal-Chile Crusted Tofu

Chickpea Cutlets

Creole Stuffed Peppers

Sautéed Collards

Mashed Spiced Sweet Potatoes

Messy Rice

Southwestern Corn Pudding with Green Pumpkin Seed Molé

Dessert

Coconut Custard Pie

Mango-Pear Pandowdy

Citrus Curd-Filled Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

My evil plan for the evening was clearly to leave my guests so gorged on food that they're rendered immobile and thus forced to be my culinary guinea pigs for life. I could have been a little more subtle. I am perhaps not so great at this evil plan thing. I am, however, great at disguising that everything is vegan, and catering to those unused to non-meat protein dishes. Hence the presence of three different kinds, one of which was deep fried to tame any health benefits it may pose. What a considerate hostess I am, as I foist my sick vegetable fantasies upon their plates.

We shall see whether in the haze of four hours of straight cooking I remember to take pictures, and whether through the curtain of my tears I will be able to post them.

Inaugural Post, and a Poem

As I will be spending the majority of the summer abroad, I decided that the best way to keep in touch with all of you is to start this journal, which I hope will be a log of all the shenanigans I'll be up to, culinary or otherwise. This way, rather than imagining me sipping coffee under a wide-brimmed hat in a Viennese café - as I am sure you are wont to do - you can see pictures! Also, I refuse to furtively check Facebook at odd hours of the night (thank you, eight-hour time difference).

The phrase "What peaches and what penumbras!" comes from an Allen Ginsberg poem about - what else? - food and writing and everything else important. I just saw an exhibition of his photography at the National Gallery, which I highly recommend: it's enough to make you nostalgic for decades in which you never even lived. Half the fun was in reading the captions he wrote at the bottom of each one, but words weren't necessary to describe the living honesty of those snapshots.

A Supermarket in California

by Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo- biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?