Coconut Banana Bread with Lime Glaze

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I was first introduced to the recipe for Coconut Banana Bread with Lime Glaze from Cooking Light Magazine by the lovely AwtemNymf, The Faerie Whisperer. A long time ago in another blog she asked me to try making it and I finally did but halfway through the recipe I realized I only had 1 cup's worth of mashed bananas, not 1 and a half! Crap!

There were a lot of not-so-nice words flying around my kitchen when I realized that my three tiny bananas were nowhere near 1 1/2 cup of mashed bananas. What did I do? I had some very ripe strawberries so I mashed them to make up for some of the volume and I added an additional 1/4 cup of yogurt. I also only wanted the coconut inside the banana bread so I omitted it from the glaze. I had no idea how it was going to turn out. Thankfully, according to friends and family, it passed the test! It was lovely!

See, you can play with baking recipes and make something wonderful that is completely your own. Baking can be flexible, fun and delicious. Here is my version of the recipe for you to try:

Suzie's version of Coconut Banana Bread with Lime Glaze

2 cups all-purpose flour (about 9 ounces)
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup butter, softened
2 large eggs
1 cup mashed ripe banana (about 2 big bananas, 3 small)
1/4 cup of mashed very-ripe strawberries
1/2 cup plain low-fat yogurt
3 tablespoons rum
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup flaked sweetened coconut
Cooking spray

Lime Glaze
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lime or lemon juice
zest of 1 lime

Preheat oven to 350°.

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour, baking soda, and salt, stirring with a whisk.

Place granulated sugar and butter in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Add banana, strawberries, yogurt, rum, and vanilla; beat until blended. Add flour mixture; beat at low speed just until moist. Stir in 1/2 cup coconut. Spoon batter into a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan coated with cooking spray; sprinkle with 1 tablespoon coconut. Bake at 350° for 1 hour or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove from pan.

Poke holes all over the top of the banana bread with a long skewer so the glaze can work its way inside. Combine powdered sugar, juice and zest stirring with a whisk; drizzle over warm bread. Cool completely on wire rack.

Stepping into the unknown: Kidneys

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Mom and I had never tried porcini mushrooms before so I bought some for this recipe and also used to broth they created for making the sauce

Mom told me that when she was sad, Grandma used to make her one of her favourite foods in the world: kidneys. My mom and I are very different when it comes to this part of the palette. I lean more towards vegetarian than she does but she is staying with me, has had a lot of challenges since getting here and I wanted to make her feel better. In order to do so, I decided to take on kidneys as my food phobia challenge this week by making steak & kidney pie. I used this recipe as an outline but it was so poorly written I went here for ideas on technique and then came up with my own. This recipe requires patience, an open mind and lots of time. I hope you enjoy the visual tutorial on how to make homemade steak and kidney pie.



Finding the kidneys was the hardest part. Not exactly typical food fare around here but I managed to get some and also bought stewing beef. I chopped them up and dredged them in flour that has been seasoned with salt and pepper and did the dredging quickly in a Zip-Loc bag.



You dredge the meat in flour to help the meat brown and the flour will also help create a sauce once all of the meat is browned. You really need to do this in batched or else the meat won't brown, it will steam. The bottom of the pan is going to get very brown and almost look burned but don't panic, we want that!



I removed the meat then added the mushrooms, 3 previously-sauteed shallots, 1/2 cup of the porcini broth, 1/2 cup of dark beer, 1 cup of beef consomme, 4 chopped thyme sprig leaves, just a bit of finely chopped rosemary and 1 bay leaf. I gently and gradually scraped up the brown bits and once the sauce has thickened, added back the meat. I covered and simmered the filling on low heat for two hours then I cooled the filling to room temperature.



Then it was time to make the pastry! Make sure to use ice water, it makes a difference, I promise. A traditional steak and kidney pie uses suet but after how hard it was to find kidneys, I decided to use butter instead:



My personal favourite technique for combining butter and flour for pastry is to grate the cold butter into the flour. It is best to put the butter in the freezer for a bit to make sure it hardens but is not necessary. I did this with butter right out of the fridge. I used 8 oz of self-rising flour and 1 stick of butter which is half a cup or 4 oz. Combine so it looks like dry peas. Do not over work it though! Better to underwork than over work a pastry dough. This will keep it tender.



For some tenderness I added one egg yolk but I think I should have done a whole egg. The crust was almost too tender! I also added way more than 2 tbsp of water and still my dough was crazy dry and sooooooooo flakey and wonderful. Once the dough came together I shaped it into a disk and wrapped it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to chill.



I put the meat and sauce into large rammekins and because the dough was so flakey and dry, I just rolled out smaller pieces and then topped off the rammekin with a disk and gave it a bit of an egg wash. I put it in the oven for 25 minutes at 350F until the pastry browned a bit. According to England's Heritage Cookbook the traditional way to make this pie is to steam it but there were no instructions on how to do so! Steam a pie? I have no idea so I just baked it instead.

My first bite was of a kidney. I tried to like it, I couldn't. I just couldn't. I had another bite and I was done. I felt bad, that maybe I had let my Mom down but she thought the pie was absolutely divine. Her words! Yay! That made me much happier. I took out the kidneys and she ate them all and I enjoyed the steak and mushrooms. I managed to make us both happy with food.

Definitely not a meal I would make every day, it is a lot of effort but wow, the depth of flavour is crazy deep! Plus, it really brought a lot of joy to my Mom and helped her feel loved and taken care of and reminded her of Grandma. Totally worth it.

Wreck This Journal Begins!

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This is the first blog post for Jamie's The Next Chapter: Wreck This Journal book blogging experience. I have been really looking forward to letting out my destructive tendencies! My Mom and I have been sitting out on my deck a lot and I did some of the exercises with pen but this morning I brought out my markers:



So I could do this! Then I wanted to do something even more destructive so I did this:



Up on my deck, I let the journal drop!



That's actually an action shot, LOL. Not super great photography but it was cool to try and take a picture as my journal fell.



And it landed in the morning dew in our too-tall grass. I know this sort of thing may seem crazy to do to a book. As a woman with a Creative Writing and English Degree who spent many years working in many bookstores, this should feel totally wrong. And it doesn't! In fact I can't wait to attack the book even more. We are too conditioned to live safely, treat everything gently. Oh the joy of allowing ourselves to do something "bad" which it really isn't. It's just a book. This book has given us permission to attack it. It is not alive. It does not hurt. It's OK ladies, go crazy. Get out those knives and start tearing it apart. It's good for us!

For those of you who are new to my blog, please note that because of health reasons I am restricted to spending time at my own blog and will not be able to visit and comment back so please do not feel pressured to do so here unless you really want to. I wish I could do more but for now my energy stops at the destruction of our book club journal.

Celebrating my Mom's Latvian Name Day

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June 3 is my Mom's Latvian Name Day. In Latvia you have a special day to celebrate your particular name. My Mom and I were going to go to The Five Fisherman for a lobster dinner but her back has been hurting too much to do go anywhere (thank you all so much for your wishes, she woke up feeling better today and I am convinced it is because of all your beautiful healing wishes for her, I am so grateful). The other day she talked about how Grandma would make a roast pork shoulder dinner for Christmas and how she had happy memories of the house filling up with its scent and Grandma cooking in the kitchen. I asked her if she would like me to make her this dinner. She could not believe I would do that for her considering I normally do not eat pork, let alone sauerkraut! I told her I would be happy to make it for her and would also eat it. And I did.



Here is the pork roast covered in salt and garlic powder and my Mom so happy that I am making this meal for her.



I was always afraid of sauerkraut as a kid. My Mom loves it but for some reason it always frightened me, perhaps because the scent of it is so strong. My Mom makes her own version which mellows it out and it actually is quite yummy. If you rinse the sauerkraut and then fry it up in bacon and add fresh cabbage with some brown sugar and caraway seeds, you get this:



Truly not as overpowering, mellow and quite lovely.



First we slow cooked the pork at low heat (325F) for hours and hours and then we put everything together so the juices would meld and roasted until the pork was done and was 185F inside and the potatoes did eventually brown.



Here is a dish of amazing rustic Latvian cuisine that me and my Mom inhaled. I could not believe how much I enjoyed it and the only person more shocked was my Mom who would not have been able to force feed this to me as a young girl. I feel pretty stupid that all this time I was missing out on my food heritage and am just so grateful I could do this for my Mom and me. What a perfect Latvian Name Day dinner! We looked up an equivalent name day for me here and now I will be celebrate my Zuze day on February 19th.

Wishcasting: What do you wish for June?

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This week's wish on Wishcasting is What do you with for June? My Mom has had a hard time with physical stuff since she got here and even though we had those great road tours we are staying close to home because of some health issues. I wish with all my heart that she feels better soon, for June and for all days.

Banana Pancakes

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While my Mom has been here the weather has been warming up and all of the bananas I bought for her visit are rapidly ripening. When my Mom saw them she said, "Banana pancakes are my favourite." As an adult, I have never had banana pancakes and apparently she did make them when I was a child but I could not remember so I thought, let's make homemade pancakes!

I used Tyler's Florence's Banana Pancakes recipe, kind of. I didn't grind up pecans or make maple butter and his recipe would have fed a large family so I tweaked it, a lot. I also mashed up the banana and put it entirely in the batter instead of pouring the batter and then adding it. See the bubbles? This is how you know when to flip your pancakes.

So moist, so delicious and beautiful. It did take me back to a distant childhood memory, one in which I probably did not have a lot of teeth and just chomped on that pancake as a wee-one. I forgot to ask my Mom how she went about making her banana pancakes until mine were done and she said, "Oh, you just used the boxed mix and then added mashed banana." Yes, much, much easier to do I suppose and a way of making pancakes I had also forgotten about. Homemade or from the box, banana pancakes are divine.

Hitting the Road one more time

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My mom, husband and I did one last drive this weekend. The sun finally came out and it got all nice and warm so we drove down the South Shore. This was our first stop, Chester Basin. Talk about beautiful and serene. I made sure to get a picture of us too and guess what?



The dream van of Bohemian Single Mom's showed up in the picture! She has been wanting an orange Volkswagon van forever and I keep seeing them here and this one snuck itself into our photograph which rocks.



My Mom waiting for our seafood platters at the Mug and Anchor Pub in Mahone Bay. I was a good foodie by diving right into mine when it came but totally forgot to photograph it!



We figured we went as far as Mahone Bay, why not go a little farther and go to Lunenburg as well? Lunenburg is my favourite area of Nova Scotia. Way too far for this non-driver to live but man, what character!



The houses there are right out of my dreams and the town has a gourmet cooking supplies shop. It is so beautiful and my Mom loved it too.



We ended up at the family cottage (on my husband's side) for a short visit but then these clouds rolled in and we knew it was time to go back home.

What a long trip! Mom did very well and was happy to have something to take pictures of other than my food, LOL. I will be getting back to my kitchen now and this week the food phobia I am going to tackle is kidneys for our steak and kidney pie if I can find them!