As a budding chef who is learning how to cook through blogging, I now understand the importance of selecting ingredients and actually following a recipe. Previously, if I felt creative enough to try cooking something new, my creative energy would not let my attention focus on those words in the cookbook. I would wander willy-nilly through my kitchen and put into the pot whatever ingredient suited my whim. As you can imagine, the culinary result was often inedible. Sure I'd had fun, but I didn't have dinner. As a result, I didn't engage in this creative sport very often, and our family meals were in the boring rut of routine. But by steadily blogging about Wisconsin recipes over this past year, I've learned how to follow a recipe and have been heartily rewarded by many delicious meals. Wisconsin chefs have taught me what ingredients taste good together and in what order to mix them.
Now, a year later, I am venturing back into creative cooking. But I am treading carefully. This weekend when that cooking muse called me to create, I out-foxed her. Before she could carry me down to the land of swill, I grabbed hold of the proverbial branch in the cliff wall. I pulled out Donna Weihofen's cookbook, Mom's Updated Recipe Box: 250 Family Favorites Made Quick And Healthy. I've had cooking success with a number of Donna's recipes. And the book title is correct, the recipes are quick, and I've also found them easy. I've learned numerous tips on baking, cooking, and selecting ingredients from Donna. But I knew that Donna's book was the right one to pick this weekend because most of the recipes are flexible. The cooking methods described are not complicated. No exact timing or cooking technique makes or breaks the dish. Use more or less of any ingredient and you've got a good chance that the meal will likely still be edible. Donna's book is like cooking training wheels; even if you mess up, you won't go hungry.
So this weekend, Donna, my muse, and I created Banana Nut Bread. It was a joint effort that yielded delicious and mostly nutritious breakfast food. Click on "Continue reading..." for the recipe and more of the story.
Here is Donna Weihofen's recipe for Banana Nut Bread as it appears in her cookbook Mom's Updated Recipe Box: 250 Family Favorites Made Quick And Healthy.
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/3 cup vegetable oil
- 2 eggs
- 2 Tablespoons fat-free milk
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
- 3 medium bananas, mashed
- 1 3/4 cups flour
- 1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease a 5 x 9 inch loaf pan. In a large bowl, combine sugar, oil, eggs and milk. Beat well. Add salt, baking soda, baking powder, and nutmeg. Blend well. Stir in bananas. Add flour and nuts. Stir just until blended. Spoon into pan. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes or until set in the middle and light brown. Do not over-bake. Remove from pan and cool on a rack. Note: To make small loaves for gifts, use four 2 x 4 inch pans.
All of Donna's recipes include nutritional information: Here's what she says about the banana nut bread:
Calories: 135; Fat, gm: 5; Protein, gm: 2; Carbohydrate, gm: 21; Cholesterol, mg: 20; Fiber: Low
So that's Donna's recipe. Now I'll tell you what I did to it.
First off, my muse is not as healthy as Donna's. I substituted 1/3 cup butter for Donna's vegetable oil and 2% milk for her fat-free milk. My arteries will complain when I'm older, but right now my tongue is very happy. You might consider me health-conscious when it comes to sugar-use. I typically add less than a recipe calls for. But again, I can't claim points on the health-conscious scale. I just don't have as big a sweet tooth as most folks. My tongue rejects overly-sweetened foods. So I used a scant 3/4 a cup of sugar instead of a full cup. I did however, at the last moment, add 2 Tablespoons of pure maple syrup. That's because after I mixed up the batter the aroma reminded me of banana pecan pancakes which I remember enjoying at Madison's Original House of Pancakes restaurant. I thought the maple syrup would add some flavorful complexity to this sweet bread, and I turned out to be right. I'll definitely add the maple syrup again. If you follow suit, be sure to use PURE maple syrup, NOT maple-flavored corn syrup. It makes a BIG difference. I also added one teaspoon of cinnamon. My family likes cinnamon a lot so I add it to whatever I can. I chose pecans over walnuts, simply because I had them. I ground them in the food processor because of my children. As I wrote in a previous post, they won't eat nuts they can recognize, (unless of course, the nuts are peanuts and those aren't nuts at all.) Lastly, in typical Cristie style, I didn't have enough time to wait around for a loaf of bread to cook in the oven for an hour. So I poured the bread mix into greased muffin tins and baked it for 25 minutes. The recipe yielded 12 very large muffins which tasted wonderful. When I took them out of the oven, they looked pale. They weren't sick; they were just banana muffins made with white flour. So to color them up I sprinkled some cinnamon on top of them. It was a purely aesthetic gesture. I was pleased and no one complained.
My kids loved the muffins as much as they loved clowning around them. All in all it was a grand success.
Yes, a little sense and experience is reigning in my culinary muse. Thanks to help from Donna and all the other Wisconsin chefs whose recipes I've been reporting on, my family is eating a large variety of good-tasting food. And, when I follow those recipes, we're also eating healthier. I'm learning that bran is a good thing and that there are ways to soften vegetables beyond boiling them. So I hope this post encourages you to break out of your cooking routine and to create new dishes. Remember, if you need guidance, there's plenty of great help in Wisconsin.
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