Over the weekend, I ate the best pancakes of my life. I headed to CT with friends, and we had pancakes BOTH mornings. Sunday morning, I tasted the most delicious blueberry pancakes that you can imagine -- the taste and fluffiness were beyond what I thought a pancake could achieve. So I was already on a pancake high when I returned to the internet Sunday night to find TWO WHOLE blog posts on fruit pancakes. It made me even more excited to start experimenting with these types of recipes at home. Here are some from around the web that look particularly tasty:
Dole has increased its banana imports to Japan by more than 25%, yet there's still a shortage of the fruit in this island nation. So what's the reason behind this sudden spike in demand? A fad known as the Morning Banana Diet. It's so popular that one young woman has been waiting to start the diet for a month because her local OK Store is always out of bananas.
The run on bananas began last month when former opera singer Kumiko Mori who weighs more than 200 pounds announced on the television show Dream Press-sha that she lost 15 pounds on the Morning Banana Diet. After the show aired there was a 70 to 80 percent increase in banana sales versus last year at supermarkets run by Life Corp.
The regimen itself is pretty simple: Allow yourself as many bananas and room temperature water for breakfast; eat anything you like for lunch, 3 p.m. snack and dinner; stop eating by 8 p.m. and get to bed before midnight. It's the brainchild of Osaka pharmacist Sumiko Watanabe who designed it to increase the metabolism of her husband, Hitoshi, who lost 37 pounds. There's even a web site for the diet. It appears to be down right now, but this amusing video describing how the diet works complete with a techno version of The Banana Boat Song is still working.
This isn't the first time a fad diet has caused shortages in Japan. Last year the natto diet stripped supermarket shelves of the funky, slimy fermented soybeans. Who knows whether either of these diets works, but a morning banana beats natto any day.
Food manufacturers are always looking for ways to improve the nutritional content of their products, as well as ways to lower the calories. Scientists may have found a new way to do just that with an innovative new ingredient: banana flour.
They've developed a flour from unripe bananas, and adding it to pasta has been one of the first applications. Pasta makers have experimented with adding other ingredients, but everything they've tried so far makes the pasta shrink too much when it's cooked. Banana flour, on the other hand, doesn't seem to cause any additional shrinkage.
The banana flour looks promising for manufacturers. Not only does the new flour add antioxidants and tannins for a nutritional boost, it also boosts the amount of resistant starch by 12%. That allows the potential pasta to claim to be a lower glycemic index food because the resistant starch is not digestible and works in your system like insoluble fiber.
The pasta makers say that the results they've gotten with the banana flour yield a good quality product but that more testing is required regarding the taste of the product. So you may see banana flour as an ingredient in the future, but it may take a while for it to get there.
Sometimes some of the best and most worthwhile meals or treats are the ones that take no time at all. While there's nothing quite like a carefully prepared dish, it's also great to wow the tastebuds with simplicity. The above video, Green's Cuisine, has rejigged the Chinese treat toffee apples with deep-fried bananas into a super-quick and sugary treat. Sesame bananas are basically chopped bananas sprinkled with sesame seeds and then doused with a good drizzle of freshly made toffee syrup -- just a melted mixture of water and sugar.
This looks like the perfect dish for entertaining -- whether you're gathering together for a chat and want some munchies, or curling up with a good movie. Personally, I'd treat it like fondue -- prepare a nice, large pile and then give everyone skewers to pick up banana chunks as they wish. In fact, I'm thinking that the bananas on my counter won't be going into a smoothie after all...
I have a foodie confession: While I do like fruit, I almost never eat it in its full form. I try -- really I do. I buy fruit and eat some nibbles, but before I get to the rest, it inevitably goes bad and I have to either have to throw it into a smoothie pronto, or freeze it for a smoothie later. But that's not the case with my beloved banana.
Banana is the wonderful fruit that's good even when it's bad. The blacker and more shriveled that the skin is, the better it is for baking up a batch of banana bread. I picked some up a few weeks ago, with the best of intentions, but they went black before I could eat them. But they're bananas! So, no matter how hot my apartment was, I knew what I had to do.
As if that wasn't good enough -- recipes that allow you to make the most of fruit going bad -- banana bread is one of the easiest and most forgiving foods to bake. The above was whipped up half-assed. I doubled my recipe. I didn't level off my measurements. I smushed and mixed it all together in the end with a potato masher. But still, the end result was a nice warm cakey bread with a little bit of melting butter.
I've never considered myself a pudding person, as I'm not generally a fan of very soft or mushy foods. Bread pudding is wonderful, but pudding puddings always remind me of baby food or having my wisdom teeth. Recently, though, I've seen some very classy puddings pop up in the food blogosphere. Nothing gooey about them, they look sophisticated and absolutely delightful. Check some out: Creamy and Cold Banana Pudding from Bakerella Effortless Banana Pudding from Su Good Sweets
There has been an overwhelming response to AOL's round up of America's Most Hated Foods. I mean, people are vomiting through their computers and damning foods to illegality (poor cooked carrots). I've gotta admit, I don't have any aversions that strong. Sure, I have foods I dislike (I'm lookin at you, Mr. Sun-Dried Tomato), but nothing that is going to make me weep into my dinner plate.
That said, I do have a pretty serious issue with seasonal food hatred. Certain foods that I enthusiastically eat all winter long just cannot cross my plate during the summer.
Mint-Chocolate. As stated in this M&M review, mint-chocolate means wintry warmth. Although there has been accusation that I got this association from Starbucks (damn you, Grande Soy Mint Mocha!), I maintain that this comes from Christmas' candy cane cataclysm.
Potato Soup. Obviously, it's hot. But what's worse, it's dense, and starchy, and thick, and kinda fuzzy. These are not acceptable adjectives for summer outerwear, let alone my internal organs.
Breakfast sausage. Now, I'm all about a sausage on a bun; toss on some spicy mustard and it's a par-tay. But a girthy link of meat just sitting on my plate first thing in the morning, waiting for a greasy, snappy bite to set it free? Hell no.
Some foods taste great but they don't exactly have names that instill confidence that they'll taste great. Other foods have a name that just makes you want to bite into the letters, and Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins is such a food.
This recipe is from the always fun Cooking For 2 blog. But you can make these muffins even if you find yourself alone on a Friday night (especially if you find yourself alone on a Friday night). Full recipe after the jump!
So it was a lazy Sunday afternoon and I had one rotten banana in the cupboard. I'd been staring at the banana for a few days, watching it grow from spotted to brown to nearly black. I could have thrown it away, but for some reason I felt that that 15 cents worth of fruit had a nobler destiny. But one mushy banana isn't enough for banana bread or cake or muffins. What to do?
Googling "what to do with one rotten banana," I discovered a message board on the topic of leftover bananas, where, scrolling down, I discovered this recipe for banana biscotti. I didn't have any nuts so I smashed a dark chocolate bar with a hammer and tossed the fragments into the dough. These unusual biscotti came out very nicely indeed - they remind me of Banana Nut Crunch cereal. Next time I'll give them an egg wash and sprinkle them with coarse sugar, then serve them with coffee and vanilla ice cream.
Are you nostalgic for the days when women shelled peas into enameled colanders or their gathered apron? Well, the verdict is that when it comes to freshness and nutrition, frozen may be the way to go.
When it comes to getting the most nutritional bang for your buck out of your fresh veggies, it is best to shop often or use frozen, as those leafy greens lose their vitamins during extended fridge storage.
For those lucky enough to live in the Portland area, rejoice, as your farmers markets are beginning to reopen (here in my area, we have to wait until the first weekend in May).
In anticipation of all the fresh, local, organic produce, they've included a slew of recipes to utilize all this delicious freshness.
The Pickle Sickle hits the desks of the Oregonian FoodDay editors and they give their perspective on the puckery treat.
The FoodDay intern rethinks the classic quiche, making one that comes together quickly and is just as tasty and filling as the original.
Banana bread is one of my Desert Island Foods, that list of foods that I would want to have with me if I was stranded on a desert island (apparently in my world, desert islands have supermarkets and manufacturing facilities). I'm not a big baker so I rarely have it, but I truly love it.
If you ever happen to find yourself with 7,200 -- that's 600 dozen -- bananas, you could bake a year's worth of banana bread for you, your family, friends, neighbors, and probably people you don't know, or you can create a work of art like Stefan Sagmeister's.
The artist's work, which includes this banana wall thing (I have no idea what to call it -- a sculpture?) are on display at Deith in NYC. All 7,200 of the bananas are real, and according to Make, "it smelled like 7,200 bananas too, slightly rotting." There are more pictures on flickr.
Another food that relies on shape and texture, the phallic banana has long been considered an aphrodisiac. It definitely helps that bananas also have a luxurious, smooth texture.
However, there might be some romantic chemistry involved with bananas. Bananas are rich in potassium and vitamin B, which are two components for sex-hormone production. Studies have also shown that the naturally occurring enzyme bromelain enhances male performance.
While bananas might not make it onto the Valentine's Day dinner table for two, they're a good thing to include for Breakfast in Bed the -- ahem -- next morning. Banana-stuffed French Toast or Banana Pancakes are a natural choice.
The saying is that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but it never specified which kind. According to research from Chang Y. Lee of Cornell University, apples, as well as bananas and oranges, might keep brain doctors away. Antioxidant compounds found in those fruits seem to prevent neurotoxicity in cells. In other words, eating apples, bananas and oranges "may be beneficial to improve effects in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's."
Over the weekend, I ate the best pancakes of my life. I headed to CT with friends, and we had pancakes BOTH mornings. Sunday morning, I tasted the most delicious blueberry pancakes that you can imagine -- the taste and fluffiness were beyond what I thought a pancake could achieve. So I was already on a pancake high when I returned to the internet Sunday night to find TWO WHOLE blog posts on fruit pancakes. It made me even more excited to start experimenting with these types of recipes at home. Here are some from around the web that look particularly tasty:
Dole has increased its banana imports to Japan by more than 25%, yet there's still a shortage of the fruit in this island nation. So what's the reason behind this sudden spike in demand? A fad known as the Morning Banana Diet. It's so popular that one young woman has been waiting to start the diet for a month because her local OK Store is always out of bananas.
Some foods taste great but they don't exactly have names that instill confidence that they'll taste great. Other foods have a name that just makes you want to bite into the letters, and Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins is such a food.
Banana bread is one of my Desert Island Foods, that list of foods that I would want to have with me if I was stranded on a desert island (apparently in my world, desert islands have supermarkets and manufacturing facilities). I'm not a big baker so I rarely have it, but I truly love it.
10 More Dirty Restaurant Tricks
5 Things You Didn't Know About Turducken
10 Catchiest Food Jingles We Love to Hate
