Today, responding to a sudden craving for chocolate cake, I reached guiltily for the now not-so-secret stash. Sebastian persuaded me to maybe, why not, take the few extra minutes and use the ever present frozen bananas in the freezer, add some bran, wouldn’t we all feel better?

Looking for a recipe, I checked out Smitten Kitchen, one of my go-to recipe inspiration sites. Not failing me, I found “Elise’s Friend Heidi’s Friend Mrs. Hockmeyer’s Banana Bread, As Jacked Up by Deb, Adapted from Simply Recipes.” It looked easy. I had the basic ingredients. It didn’t even require the mixer.

My pantry necessitated some interpretation. Bourbon was replaced with whisky. I added extra salt to make up for my unsalted butter. No nutmeg.

Then I took some liberties. A little less flour and 1/4 cup bran. And finally, one generous tablespoon cocoa for a slightly chocolatey flavour. If I’d had nuts and/or chocolate chips I would have added those.

An hour later, we’re enjoying a rainy Sunday afternoon with warm, rich banana bread and a fresh pot of coffee.

The amazing floating banana bread.

I make rhubarb syrup during rhubarb season. It’s simple, and it’s amazing in cocktails. Any cocktail that calls for grenadine can be rhubarbified. The trick to making a good rhubarb syrup is to maximize the rhubarb flavour in as small a volume of liquid as possible.

1kg of rhubarb, trimmed and chopped
100ml of water
juice of 1/2 lemon
sugar
handful of fresh cherries (optional)

Dump the rhubarb into a pot with a lid, and pour the water and lemon juice over. I find that adding ten pitted cherries empinkens the brew without changing the flavour at all (and let’s face it the pinker the better). Put the lid on, and turn the heat up to medium-high. The water will begin to boil, at which point you’ll want to turn the heat down to medium. After 10-15 minutes of covered simmering, the pot should be full of rhubarb fibres and bubbling rhubarb liquid. You want to wait until the rhubarb chunks are completely shapeless.

Strain and discard the solids. Measure how much liquid remains, and put it back into the pot. If you start with 1kg of rhubarb, you should end up with about 500ml of liquid. However much you end up with, add sugar to the liquid in the ratio of 400g sugar for each 1L of liquid. Bring it back up to a slow boil, and skim any scummy bits that can be skimmed off.

Let it cool and bottle it. A tablespoon of vodka at the time of bottling will help it last longer in the fridge.

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for; a cocktail…

The Panty Remover.

I can't possibly be the first person to notice how suggestive the classic sword-through-a-cherry garnish is.

The Panty Remover
2 oz rhubarb syrup
2 oz gin
juice of half a lemon
angostura bitters

Shake with ice, strain into a glass filled with crushed ice.
Float a couple dashes of angostura on top. (optional)
Garnish suggestively.

Clementines and other kinds of mandarins now seem to have taken off, with “Cuties” everywhere this past winter. In case you weren’t aware, “Cuties” are a brand of clementines marketed as being perfect for kids. The idea of branding a fruit really gets under my skin, and I make a point of not buying “Cuties” or any other citrus advertised by a brand name. I once even swore at my mom for saying she had bought a box of “Cuties.”

And now I’ve finally run across a report about the subject of branding fruit. Smithsonian magazine has started a series on this and related topics:

We’ll look at decades of experimentation in plant genetics geared toward improving the user interface of the mandarin; the novelty of marketing fresh fruits and vegetables; the rise, fall, and comeback of graphic design in the produce aisle; and growers’ ongoing battle to keep bees from trespassing and pollinating their seedless crops.

Here’s the introduction and the first article in the series. Via the New York Times Diner’s Journal blog.

I should have known better.

I normally despise syrupy-sweet desserts but for some reason I decided earlier this week that I absolutely had to buy some “pumpkin jam” that was sitting at the checkout at my usual falafel spot/Middle Eastern grocery. I love every other pumpkin dessert I’ve tried, so why not? I asked the owner what it was and how you eat it. She said you just eat it as is and that it comes from her hometown. They’re having trouble getting it because of what’s going on in Syria right now, so she asked me to be sure to report back and tell her whether I liked it.

I guess it’s telling that it took me five days to work up the nerve to try it. I started worrying because I realized I wouldn’t be able to go back to the store until I tried it. Well, last night I finally did. I took a small bite out of one piece, chewed for a bit and spit it out. My co-taster managed a whole piece, but mostly because he was brave enough (or stupid enough) to put a whole piece in his mouth all at once.

It looks pretty, right?

The jam is made with pickling lime (calcium hydroxide), which causes the pumpkin to retain much of its original crunch and stringiness. Thankfully I had read about the crunch in advance. I had also assumed that the syrup was a sugar syrup, but it tasted more like honey. At least, it had that funk that honey sometimes has, sour but not in a pleasant, citrusy way. In fact, pretty much all I tasted was sour funk.

Now I have to go back and tell the owner that I didn’t care for it. Maybe I won’t be having falafel for a while after all. My co-taster suggested putting it this way: “Isn’t it interesting how sweets are the most culturally specific tastes?”

The good news is that I think I’ve found I have a birthday present for my brother-in-law.

Halbes Hänchen und Salat

Step two: Reach for your jar of imported St Lawrence Market Churrasco Chicken Sauce. This might be hard to source. Your best options is to hire a sauce mule.

Beribboned jar of churrasco chicken sauce

Step three: Cover half of the half chicken with sauce (because a whole half a chicken is too much for one person)

That looks like a lot of sauce, but there's tons left in the jar

Step four: Enjoy your chicken by candlelight.

Romantic chicken dinner, direct from the styrofoam clam

You must try these. Just fry up the wings as you would for Buffalo wings and toss them in the sauce. A little goes a long way since the sauce is basically a sticky sweet and salty caramel. Next time I think I’ll add a bit of orange juice or rice wine vinegar. Or I’ll use the sauce from David Chang’s wing recipe. Here’s a simplified version. The original calls for brining, cold-smoking and confiting the wings, then browing and pressing them in a cast-iron pan, and then glazing them.

Here are two recipes for soup from the 1975 edition.

Soup
Mrs. Wallace Kusler

Peel potatoes and fry, when done add milk, some cream and salt and pepper in amount needed for family and serve. This is like soup.

Wine soup

The Christ Wolf family have a recipe that came from Russia with their grandparents and sometimes they still use it if someone gets sick. It really is good when you come down with a cold. The recipe is as follows:

Take 3 c. water, 1 1/2 c. port wine or white wine. Cook and add 1/4 c. sugar. Add 1 handful of oyster crackers. Set aside and beat 2 eggs into 1/2 c. cream. Beat this into the broth. If it is too hot it will curdle.

The German-Russian Pioneer Cook Book from Eureka, South Dakota

Who doesn't love fried cheese?

Stuck with a bunch of mustard greens (which are far from my favorite) from my latest CSA share and looking for recipes other than greens with garlic and olive oil, I asked for ideas from Facebook friends. Colin came to the rescue, suggesting saag paneer.

This batch of paneer was the best I’ve managed yet, and the result was delicious. I used this recipe. I didn’t have fenugreek leaves but otherwise I followed the recipe pretty much as written. Next time I’ll at least double the chiles. I used serranos from the garden, which were pretty hot but small.

Saag paneer – pretty damn tasty

Buying a fish from the grocery store is always a gamble, not because of the quality but because the people behind the counter rarely have a clue and can’t perform such tasks as descaling nor can they answer the question “Is that fish descaled?” If I had the tools and skills for descaling a fish, I could confidently eat whole fish all the time. Instead, I eat it only on Saturdays when I can go to a fish monger.

Excuses and excuses. Roasting a fish is as easy as roasting vegetables. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, roast in a pre-heated oven until it looks done. Easy.

The recipe says 350°F for 30 minutes, but those numbers are for a larger fish than I would buy. It also says to broil for a few minutes at the end, but my gas stove has no broiler, so I just crank up the gas, and cook in the bottom of the oven. Using a pan with a rack is key to keep the skin crispy and thus easy to peel away, making the fish as easy to eat as to prepare.

I have a mouthwatering recipe for roasted fish in my Les Halles Cookbook that calls for braising vegetables and reducing wine, which all sounds amazing, but is 300% more work than my version which, as you can guess, is the one described in The Joy of Cooking.

I served the fish with a minimalistic fennel salad.