Homemade Doughnuts

Frying Doughnuts

We used a recipe in Baking Illustrated for these homemade buttermilk doughnuts. It was pretty simple, and we were able to control the shape pretty well by using a drinking glass and a small water bottle to make the holes. Baking Illustrated recommended frying these in Crisco, but I think that if we had them to do again, I'd use peanut oil. They weren't greasy, but the Crisco weirded me out.

Banana Bread

I absolutely love banana bread, so when I spied a few soft bananas in our kitchen, I decided to take full advantage. I've been using a modified version of a Better Homes and Gardens recipe for ages, but I recently found a recipe from Baking Illustrated that intrigued me. It called for a generous 1.5 cups of bananas, like my modified BH&G recipe. But Baking Illustrated also wanted me to use a combination of melted butter and plain yogurt in my wet ingredients. There were other small but significant differences as well. The result was a more bread-like bread (vs. the cake-like bread I usually make), slightly less sweet but still tender and moist. I'm converted.

Now, the Baking Illustrated recipe did suggest adding toasted walnuts to the bread. I will confess here that I am not a fan of nuts in banana bread at all. I'm especially put off by the texture of the nuts after they have been steaming inside the bread for an hour. However, I did have a few leftover chopped pecans in the pantry and, in an effort to use everything in the house before our move, sprinkled them atop the bread.


The pecans remained crunchy and nutty, and the baking brought out their natural sweetness very nicely. I also appreciated the contrast between the crunchy texture of the crust and bread's chewy, soft insides. In short, I may never make banana bread without pecans again.

Moroccan-Style Potato and Egg Sandwiches

I spotted these sandwiches in Gourment magazine and couldn't resist making them. The original recipe called for Portugese rolls, but, for some reason, I had a hard time tracking those down around here. At one nearby bakery, the guy behind the counter responded with "what are those?" At Whole Foods, though, I found some really nice ciabata rolls.

The recipe itself is a cinch. Basically, hard boil enough eggs for everybody to have one. Sauté some sliced onion, potato, and cubanelle pepper. Then, when everything's done (vegetables are soft, eggs are cooked and quartered), stuff the sandwiches. First, hollow out the rolls. Then, make a bottom layer of two egg quarters. Pile some of the vegetables on top of the eggs. Top the sandwich off with two more egg quarters. We sprinkled a mix of cumin, cayenne and paprika on ours. Next time, we'll either mix that in as we layer the filling, or else we'll put them out on the table so we can add more when we get down to the bottom of the sandwich.

They made a great, quick breakfast, and they'd probably make a great brunch food, too.

Scones

I forgot how easy it is to make fresh breakfast breads, even during the work week. But yesterday I hopped out of bed and went straight to work on a batch of traditional currant scones. The recipe that I used included eggs, and you can see that the scones ended up with a slightly cakier texture. This seems to have worked out well for freezing them, though we plan to make a future batch without eggs to get a more biscuity scone.

Cheese Omelet with Salsa Fresca

Tonight, we both wanted something simple. I proposed hot dogs (we like the uncured beef franks from Wellshire Farms), but Jennifer thought we'd be better off with cheese omelets. Yes, she was right.

Right now we're eating Organic Valley's organic extra-large eggs, from cage-free hens that have been fed a 100% organic vegetarian diet. We usually look for at least cage-free, but these were a real find. They've got full egg flavor, and seemed to hold together pretty well.

I grated some Whole Foods cheddar, and Jennifer took charge of the omelet cooking. Then, I spooned some leftover salsa fresca, also from Whole Foods, over on the small side of our Vessel Fusionware dishes. A couple sprigs of cilantro and a sprinkle of fresh-ground salt and pepper finished off the presentation.