Hi there all,
I've been reading this community for well over a year now, but I don't think I've ever posted. Well, now that I've got a new camera and more time to cook, I decided it's about time I contribute.

( ..pictures behind the cut.. )

And finally, a question. the boyfriend really likes stuffed peppers. Usually I bake the peppers for a bit to soften em up while I prepare the filling, stuff them, then bake them again. The other day, the boyfriend asked if it would be possible to bread the outside of the peppers. Well, I don't see why not, but I'm not quite sure about how to do it. I'm thinking that after I pre-bake the peppers, but before I stuff them, I should just dip them in some egg, and then some bread crumbs. Would this work? Any other tips or ideas?

I've been freeloading off of everyone else's porn for so long, I thought it was time to give a little back. ( I present to you the PBan. )

Was bored or I made banana bread, and to make it interesting I added chocolate chips.

( more pix )

Click here for recipe and much more.

Lots of it, too. I have a completely full trifle dish of banana pudding, plus a small container I set aside for a friend.

MMmmmmm! I'd been craving it since last week, but I didn't make it while we had a visitor since she's not a fan of it. But yay for dessert tonight! And breakfast tomorrow! And snack tomorrow afternoon! And more dessert!


(Taken before the last dollop of pudding was added, as well as the decorative wafers on top)

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(x-posted to my journal as well)

Okay. So two questions:

First one being, besides the normal Banana bread, I have a whole bunch of very ripe bananas. What should I do with them?

Secondly, I made the best cake ever! And I want to fill it with this awesome chocolate stuff before frosting it. The chocolate stuff, well, Its the begining half to a torte I made before, but the chocolate is so dreamy. The recipe: In heavy saucepan combine 1 lb semi-sweet choc, 1 lb butter, 1c whipping cream, and 1 c sugar. Cook andd stir over medium heat until chocolate and butter are melted, remove from heat.
If I use that recipe and put it inbetween my layers (not as frosting) do you think it will semi-harden or at least get sticky enough to hold it together, or do you think it will be runny??? Are there any changes I could/should make so that it won't be runny?

I love bananas.  But, I am obsessive-bordering-on-mental when it comes to eating them.  My conditions are as follows:  The banana must be just barely ripe.  It must be perfectly light yellow, with hints of green at the ends.  A banana bearing brown spots will be cast out of my kitchen forever!!!

OK, actually, a banana that fails the inspection just gets turned into banana bread.

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Also, I still have a ton of frozen bananas. Any ideas of what to make besides muffins, bread or cake?

I apologise - there are no photos - but some of you expressed an interest in how the African Feast turned out.

We had a record turnout for our church - including 3 African guests who had randomly turned up, not knowing that this was happening. All three pronounced the food authentic, and one wanted a recipe, as it was better than her mother's...

Menu:

Moroccan Chick pea Soup

Cous-cous with sweet peppers and spring onions (scallions)
Red-Red
Bobotie
Fried Plantains

Passionfruit Bavarian Cream (made with Agar rather than gelatine)
Gabon baked bananas (with cream/sour cream/brown sugar)

Rooibos tea/fruit juice

( recipes etc )

So I'm tackling a few things that I've never done before tomorrow for brunch for my Mother-in-Law. Eggs Benedict and roasted breakfast potatoes.

I'm not so concerned with making the Hollandaise, actually. I can make buerre blanc and lemon curd, so I figure the sauce won't be hard. I'll be using Alton's tip to store it in a pre-warmed thermos until service time. Edit to add: Is it OK for me to put a tad of lemon zest into the sauce? I really like my Hollandaise to be lemony.

I'm nervous about making good poached eggs though. I've read about it - fresh, room temp eggs and vinegar in the water are the main tips I've heard so far. The water at a high simmer, right? Anything else I should know? How long should it take to poach large eggs to the perfectly-runny-yolks stage? I'm gonna practice some tonight - I bought extra eggs.

My other vexation is the potatoes. I want to make deep, dark brown roasted red potatoes - like the "breakfast potatoes" served in restaurants. Whenever I've tried in the past, it's been very hit or miss.... I'm looking for sure-fire tips to make knockout roasted potatoes.

The rest of tomorrow's menu will be pineapple-swirl muffins and a strawberry & banana fruit salad with mimosas, of course. I'm still working on building the muffin recipe, but I'll finish it my just barely mixing in a whole fresh pineapple's worth of pineapple sautéed in some butter and dark brown sugar.

this might be a little expected...

but does sweetened condensed milk have anything to do with how a pie sets?

i made a key lime pie and substituted heavy cream that had sugar added to it for the can of sweetened condensed milk and it DID NOT SET AT ALL...not even a little bit. so weird.

all of the recipes i saw had pretty much lime juice, egg yolks, and s.c.m. with maybe a little lime zest thrown in and thats all...im jsut wondering if it has some kind of setting properties...

anyways, we used the lime pie soup on top of bananas and strawberries with a little bit of the crust and the meringue (which turned out fabulously) for a very ghetto but very delicious version of fruit cobbler...haha.

how annoying though.

becky*

So today it was kind of gloomy out, and AMST285 really made me annoyed with college kids (again... that class has a way of doing that to me).  I was sitting in my room graphic designing and watching A&E when I decided that what would really cheer me up would be to cook.  I decided to bake some cookies, and then that turned into making a big(gish) dinner for Keegan and myself.

I don't know about you, but I love love love hot chocolate chip cookies.  In fact, last year, I caused a fire alarm -- on accident, I swear! -- when I tried to microwave a Gizmo cookie, but I didn't realize there was a bit of nut in it... the nut oil caught fire, I had set the cookie on a paper napkin to microwave it, you get the idea.  The most upsetting thing to me?  The loss of a good chocolate chip cookie.

So when I set out to bake cookies tonight, they had to be chocolate chip.  I decided to make 12 normal chocolate chip cookies and 8 experimental cookies -- .  Both were excellent.  We ate the cookies after dinner in Keegan's room and drank some heavy cream, because we had no milk... and by "drank," I mean "took a tiny sip each and decided it was like drinking milk-flavored pudding and really, we should save it for milkshakes."

Before the cookies, we had Three-Cheese Baked Spaghetti with Crispy Crumbled Bacon-Pretending-to-be-Pancetta [recipe at my journal to save space and cross-posting!]

I saw this recipe for Banana oatmeal cookies a couple days ago and thought it looked amazing. I'm in charge of bringing something to sunday school tomorrow so i thought these would be great. The only problem is that i absolutely HATE making cookies. I'm not really much of a baker. I was wondering if there was anyway I could turn this recipe into a bar instead of cookies. I didn't know if I needed to adjust the ingredients or if they would even turn out? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
( Banana Oatmeal Cookies )

Adapted from many different recipes!




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First post! I've been lurking for a while now. My name is Carly, I'm 17 years old, and I love the culinary field. I'm in my third year of Culinary Arts at my high school, graduating this year. Recently I won a competition for garde manger and dining room services; silver medal and a $2,000 scholarship to Connecticut Culinary Institute. While I don't plan on making culinary arts my career, I do love to cook and bake in my free time.

I was going through the tags this morning, and I did find a wonderful recipe in which I wanted to try. glendaplatypus did recommend it to another member, but I would like to post some pictures from the baking process.

A few little things:
- The baking sheets I used are very old, more than 20 years as a matter of fact. They look dirty, but I assure you I cleaned them before use.
- I was very happy with the taste of these cookies, the texture was nice, but the bottoms did not brown enough, making it difficult to remove them from the cookie sheet. In fact, one cookie sheet browned them a little better than the other. (I used two separate ones.)
- I doubled the recipe shown; there isn't this much in the original yield.
- I omitted the chocolate chips.


( Recipe and more pictures under here. )