sick – AT-AT Everywhere

Chocolate Banana Bread Pudding

It’s the 4th of July and I’ve been holed up at home for the last three days with a respiratory infection. I hardly ever get sick but when I do, that’s usually what it is. Up until today, eating has felt like I’m dining on sand sprinkled with glass shards sauteed in acid every time I swallow. And it all just takes like hurting…there is no flavor thanks to the congestion. Then, there is the phlegm. It is absolutely amazing the varying shades of color that post nasal drip can trigger. On the bright side, I do think I’m slowly on the mend, though my voice still sounds like it belongs to someone who has been chain smoking for 30 years.

So who’s hungry?!

I’m so bummed I’m missing out on all of the 4th of July party shenanigans (e.g., eating like it’s my last day on earth), and while I’m not contagious, I just didn’t want to be “that” phlegmmy coughy person at the BBQ or Kevin’s family’s lunch. So here I am, drinking hot tea to soothe my throat in my eighty-five degree apartment…trying to get caught up on the backlog.

Kevin and I hosted a belated birthday dinner at our place for Alex’s birthday back in February (dinner recipe deets forthcoming) and had to make sure we had something kick-ass for dessert. With Lingie as chief dessert decision officer, we came up with a great idea for a chocolate banana bread pudding. My favorite bread pudding is from Nook Bistro, as are a few other recipes I’ve tried to recreate through the years. The recipe I found on Denica’s Cafe sounded like it would yield something similar at the time, though now that I’ve made and eaten it, I’m convinced Nook’s uses way more fat and maybe even a brioche bread.

I did make a few tweaks to Denica’s recipe though. Chocolate chips usually have less cocoa butter than bars do, so they hold their shape in moderate oven heat. That way, they retain their texture and shape in cookies, muffins, and other baked goodies without looking melted melt (even though the cocoa butter has melted). I wanted a big gooey swirly chocolatey mess with my bread pudding, so I chopped up a chocolate bar (dark instead of semi-sweet, simply out of preference) into chip-sized pieces. If I were to make this again, I’d utilize bananas that are a day or two more ripe than what Denica recommended too, again for that gooey bread pudding texture.

Here is my rendition:

INGREDIENTS:

1 loaf (16 oz) firm white bread or French loaf, cut into 1 1/2″ chunks and left out uncovered overnight
3 ripe but still somewhat firm large bananas. Use bananas that are a little ripe than what’s pictured below. Brown spots are fine!
Key Ingredients
4 large eggs
2 cups half-and-half
1/4 C packed light brown sugar
1/2 C granulated sugar
2/3 C chopped dark chocolate chunks (I used bars of Cote D’Or)

DIRECTIONS:

Peel and slice bananas into 1/2 inch slices.
In a large bowl, whisk eggs, half-and-half, and sugars until blended. Gently stir in bread, bananas, and chocolate chunks to combine. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour or overnight, pressing down bread occasionally to absorb cream mixture.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9″ round springform or cake pan that is at least 2 inches deep. The pan will be very full.
Bake bread pudding, covered loosely with foil, 35 minutes. Uncover and bake 45 minutes or so longer, or until knife inserted in center of pudding comes out clean. Cool pudding slightly on wire rack before serving.
Chocolate Banana Bread Pudding

Check out that gooey swirl! We served it a la mode, and I think it went over well with the birthday boy and fellow dinner guests!

Raspberry Mini Cheesecakes

I somehow managed to get sick AGAIN last week, thus the surge in posts (2 posts within a week is a lot!). It all started on Valentine’s Day – the day I was planning to surprise Kevin with a new cheesecake recipe I came across back in January. However, we miraculously must have channeled the germ gods at the same time because we both ended up feeling fatigued and sniffly by the end of the day. After almost a week straight of feeling congested, unquenchably dehydrated, and tired, I finally regained my energy over President’s Day weekend – enough energy to cook-up a storm.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, or so the cliché goes. However, the object of my affection has a bottomless pit for a stomach and peculiar taste preferences, so I’ve really had to change up my game in the last few months. While my food staples are quinoa, fresh produce, and lean proteins, Kevin’s are Party Pizza, Carl’s Jr. western bacon cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, and hot sauce. While I like to think I’ve always been a decent cook (considering my parents don’t cook so I pretty much figured it out on my own), it’s been a challenge to meet halfway between an “obsessively healthy” cooking style to cuisine that has a lot of flavor additives. The man even said STEAK doesn’t have enough flavor…to which I replied, “That’s because you haven’t had mine yet”. Challenge accepted. I said I was going to make steaks for dinner.

After an hour’s worth of time at Ralphs and Trader Joe’s followed by a 3-hour (yes, THREE HOUR) stint in the kitchen, I’m glad to share with you my well-rounded (albeit not calorie-friendly) dinner featuring a dinner salad, my favorite homemade steak, mac and cheese (Kevin’s pick), and raspberry mini cheesecakes. The raspberry cheesecakes really are the main event to this post, but I was taking tons of photos for the cheesecakes anyway so I figured why not do the same for the meal as a whole.

Who can resist a medium-rare filet mignon rubbed with a little fresh ground pepper and kosher salt? I topped it with some fried garlic and grilled onions on the side. Nom.

Next up, we have baked mac and cheese, utilizing a recipe I borrowed from Alton Brown.

Last but not least, sweets for my sweet. I made a raspberry puree sauce with my “hand-y” food processor. That is, I don’t own a food processor so I mashed a container of raspberries with a fork and separated the seeds from the fruit. I didn’t need the raspberry seeds/guts for this recipe, but it made a nice pseudo-jam for my almond butter sandwich the next morning.

Raspberry Sauce (right) and Seeds (left)

The hardest part about making these guys was dealing with the water bath situation. I drowned one or two mini cheesecakes in water every time I took a batch out of the oven. The other difficult step was drawing the hearts, while taking a photo in one hand and keeping my other hand steady while doing the heart. I didn’t have any toothpicks handy, so I improvised by using an uncooked soba noodle to draw the hearts.

I thoroughly enjoyed this particular recipe… dare I say even better than the Peanut Butter Chocolate Mini Cheesecakes I made for his birthday in August. As fluffy as I thought those were, these were much more delicate and light, but still had a velvety rich taste to them. Voilà!

Check out the gallery for more photos!

Separating the Seeds from the Raspberries

Robot Desk Organizer

I’ve been sick for almost a week and I almost can’t remember what it was like to not sound like a man or be able to hold a conversation without coughing. Being sick puts quite the damper on one’s social life, as my usual routine is to head to the gym after work a few days a week. However, I think working out or playing basketball under such conditions would be the most inconsiderate thing I could possibly do. Also, who wants to guard that gross wheezy girl, or gasp for the same stale gym air as sneezy over there? No one. The first few days of January inevitably create a surplus of people at the gym trying to keep up their New Year’s resolutions in vain. At least I have an excuse to do something else productive with my free time… assuming that writing here is productive in some way.

ANYWAY, I saw the how-to for this on Paper Source’s blog, and thought I’d give it a try. I made this for Kevin’s birthday back in August to go with his relatively new apartment, keeping with the theme of the Robot Appliqué Pillowcases (Part 1 and Part 2 ). I still need to take a decent photo of the completed set to complete the pseudo-tutorial. Kevin (who makes up about half of my readers), don’t worry I will get around to finishing that last post up.

I found some great paper at a hole-in-the-wall scrapbook supply store, and used leftover cardstock from some mini-scrapbook kits I made a year ago to give the organizer some sturdiness to it.

This project wasn’t too complicated, so I’ll just get sraight to the photos. The green divider is removable, so you’re not confined to any given space.

The instructions for the how-to are here.