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I bought marked down bananas at the grocery yesterday. The store sells them for 69 cents a pound, but when they begin to turn, they are marked down to 29 cents. Given how many of their bananas end up marked for reduction, I’m not sure why they don’t just lower the price to a reasonable amount before they go brown.
Usually the ones I get are fine for eating, but these were a little too ripe, so I used two on Monday morning to try a new recipe for Oat Bran Banana Bread, from North Dakota State University Extension Services. It's one that Italian Baker might like because it uses baking soda for the leavening, not baking powder.
As usual, I modified it. I ground the oat bran in the food processor, and I substituted in ½ cup of whole wheat flour for the 1 cup of AP specified. I added 4 Tbs. powdered milk. I used buttermilk instead of skim milk. I left out the optional salt. The recipe didn’t specify a pan size, so I used a 9x5 inch loaf pan. It’s not an overly high quick bread, so possibly 8x4 inch would work as well. I sprinkled the top with demerara sugar. It baked in 50 minutes in my oven in a USA loaf pan coated with THE grease, and it released beautifully. We had some for dessert this evening, and we like it. I might add some walnuts next time.
The loaf has about 8.75 g saturated fat and 222.5 mg calcium.
Although we still have leftover soup and some slices of turkey, for Sunday dinner I made acorn squash halves stuffed with a combination of bulgur, cooked ground turkey, mozzarella, sliced mushrooms, onion, parsley, and sage. We had steamed broccoli on the side.
For Friday night’s dinner, I tried a new recipe, “Oprah’s Kale and Farro Soup,” which I got from an email sent by Tasting Table. I tweaked it slightly, in that I cannot find leeks in the grocery store here. I also did not have a 3-inch Parmesan rind to add. I used close to 3 rather than 2 lbs. of butternut squash. I deleted the can of tomatoes because tonight I felt like a non-tomato soup. I didn’t add any salt. It seemed to be missing something, so, taking a hint from a barley-butternut recipe I like, I added 2 tsp. cider vinegar. It made a very chunky soup, but we like chunky soups. It’s the first time we’ve tried farro. It is chewy and mild. We had the soup with a turkey sandwich (our hosts and hostess last night kindly sent some turkey home with us) on a yeasted pumpkin roll.
Here's a link to the recipe:
https://www.tastingtable.com/cook/recipes/oprah-kale-farro-soup-recipe
And in case you are wondering what the heck farro is, I did some googling. I'm not sure that this story explains it, but it is a start:
https://www.npr.org/2013/10/02/227838385/farro-an-ancient-if-complicated-grain-worth-figuring-out
Enjoy your pie, Aaron. Remember--taste makes people not think about shrinkage.
You may need to order the drip catcher at their online site and have it delivered to the store.
The bread flour is probably not helping the crust. In bread, I know that when using bread flour, the dough has to rest about 10 minutes after the first rise and being punched down, or it resists.
Have you looked at Ken Haedrich's Pie Academy online?
Well, the joke (?!) is on me. What the pumpkin producer at the farmers' market sold me back in October are NOT pie pumpkins. They seem to be a small variety of the jack-o-lantern type pumpkin. The first clue was the extremely hard-to-cut through skin. The second was when that skin was still hard after an hour, an hour and a half, and two hours of roasting. The third clue, when I took them out after the two-hour mark, is that the hard shells separated almost completely intact from the puree, which I was able to cut into chunks. There was no caramelization, so these two are definitely not sugar pumpkins.
They won't have much taste. I don't want to use them in baking. I'm not ready to make pumpkin/black bean/tomato soup again, where the pumpkin is just an element without much taste, and what taste it has is not tasty. I have thrown it away.
I have another three small pumpkins. I'm pretty sure one is a sugar pumpkin, so I may go ahead and bake it for my rolls. I'm not sure that I want to deal with the other two today.
I think that these vendors grow the pumpkin as a side project. From talking with them, I gather that the wife does not cook or bake with them. I may have to stick with peanut pumpkins and the blue-green ones and look elsewhere for my pie pumpkins.
Note: I also could not read the article because of the paywall.
The two sugar pumpkins that I now have roasting were very difficult to cut open for some reason, even with my Kuhn-Rikon sawtooth pumpkin knife if was quite a struggle. I resorted to sticking a butter knife in where I'd started cutting to create a wedge, but it was hard going. At that moment, a can opener and a can of pumpkin looked appealing....
Jack-o-lantern pumpkins make very thin puree, and as Skeptic notes, do not have much taste. My mom used to cook them--even roast them--when she got a good deal at the end of Halloween (free). It's a wonder any of us still like pumpkin.
