Almost Healthy Gingerbread

This week I pulled the book Healthy Homestyle Cooking by Evelyn Tribole off my cookbook shelf. I wasn't in the mood for cookies and I'm low on supplies for savory items, so it was the Gingerbread recipe that caught my eye.

I think I bought this book at a yard sale or a thrift store or something. It's one of my older ones and it is chock full of lots of good recipes that are on the healthier side of things. I'm still working on my holiday weight, so it was nice to pick out a few things that wouldn't break the calorie bank.

I love gingerbread. I find it hearty and comforting. I like how after it sits for a little bit, the top always gets sticky and you have to lick it off your fingers. I like how it almost develops a little more flavor with age.

I did play around with the original recipe a bit. I upped the spices, added salt, switched buttermilk for yoghurt and added a little milk. I used apple butter instead of apple sauce because that's what I had on hand.

It came out very well and I'd definitely recommend you try it! Next time, I'll probably try and figure out a way to get some booze in there somewhere.

Almost Healthy Gingerbread
Adapated from Healthy Homestyle Cooking

1 Cup All Purpose Flour
1/2 Cup Whole Wheat Flour
1/4 Cup Brown Sugar
1 Teaspoon Ground Ginger
3/4 Teaspoon Ground Cinnamon
1/2 Teaspoon Baking Powder
1/2 Teaspoon Baking Soda
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
2 Egg Whites
1/2 Cup Yogurt
2 Tablespoons Fat Free Milk
1/2 Cup Apple Butter or Apple Sauce
1/2 Cup Molasses

Preheat the oven to 350F. Spray or grease an 8x8 Baking dish.

In a large bowl, mix the dry ingredients together until well combined. Add the egg whites, yogurt, milk,  apple butter and molasses and stir well until combined. You should have a nice thick batter.
Spread into your pan and bake for 30 minutes until the cake has set. Let cool in the pan, then store in an airtight container.

This is great right out of the oven, but if you let it mellow out for a few hours it's even better.

Eat at work at your desk, lick the sticky top off your fingers and try not to get anything on your keyboard.

Makes 9-12 pieces.

Banana Rum Cake for Larry

New Year's here in the Valley was a really nice experience this year. I had a lot of fun on the 51st floor of the Cosmopolitan drinking wine and champagne, playing Cards Against Humanity (which, incidentally, is the best game every) and hanging out with friends.

My friends Larry and Justin were staying with me over New Years. They were in from California and were using my guest room while I'm between roommates. They both love food, which makes them the perfect guests.

I'm going to try something new this year. It isn't exactly a resolution, just a way of keeping me busy. I have a lot of cookbooks. I consider myself a collector and I love getting books for my birthday or Christmas. I'm going to go ahead and try and aim to make and adapt one recipe from a different book every week. This could be interesting for sure, as I've got several books that I've never made anything at all from.

So since it's the first week of the year, I asked Larry to give me a hand picking out a book. The happy result was the Joy the Baker Cookbook. After skimming through the recipes, we settled on one for Banana Rum Cake. When I went to Antigua I can back with a bottle of Antiguan rum and have been looking for a good excuse to open it.

I adapted this cake a fair bit from it's an original version. Instead of making it a layer cake with frosting, I went for a simple bundt cake.... a good excuse to break out new pans.

Banana Rum Cake
Adapted from Joy the Baker Cookbook

3 Cups Flour
2 1/4 Teaspoon Baking Powder
3/4 Teaspoon Baking Soda
3/4 Teaspoon Salt
1 1/2 Teaspoon Cinnamon
1/2 Teaspoon Nutmeg
3/4 Cup Butter, softened
1 3/4 Cup Dark Brown Sugar
3 Bananas, mashed
4 Tablespoon Rum
3 Eggs
1/2 Cup + 2 Tablespoons Buttermilk
1/2 Cup Walnuts, chopped
1/2 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract

Preheat the oven to 350F and grease a Bundt pan.

Cream together the butter and sugar, add in the eggs and vanilla. Add in the bananas, rum, cinnamon, nutmeg, buttermilk, salt, baking powder and baking soda until well combined. Fold in the flour and the walnuts. Pour into the pan and bake for fifty minutes. Turn the oven off and leave the cake in the oven for another 10 minutes. Check that the cake is cooked through. Let cool in the pan.

Cut into nice big chunks and eat at your desk at work after a busy couple of hours. Resolve to drink more tea.

Cinnamon Chocolate Coffee Cake and Being Owey

I'm hanging out in bed today, medicated and resting while my body calms down after the second of my three surgeries on my left leg. This one wasn't as bad as the first. The first one was a bit heavier and they had more trouble finding my veins.

So I have just one more to go on Tuesday, and then hopefully I'm done. I'm confident I'll be back to normal soon.

Speaking of normal, I finally managed to get into the kitchen. It was lovely. I've really missed cooking these last few weeks. I frequently forget how happy it makes me. I finally finished reading Stephanie Izard's book Girl in the Kitchen. I have to say, I really didn't much care for it. I have a huge amount of respect for Stephanie. I think she's brilliant and talented, and I'm fascinated by her food, but I felt like her book wasn't really very accessible. She uses a lot of top shelf ingredients that are easy to find when you have a good restaurant supplier, but are a bit harder to find if you are just a normal person. Her recipes are extremely complex. She also spends a good potion of time talking about all the restaurants she has worked in. I didn't get a sense of her as an individual. I marked a few recipes to try, but all in all I was a bit disappointed.

Since I've finished that, though, the next book in my stack is the Joy the Baker Cookbook by Joy Wilson. I love the tagline of her book "A Celebration of Butter and Sugar". I thumbed through it a little the other day, looking for a recipe for coffee cake. Now I'll read it cover to cover, like I do with so many cookbooks, using post it tabs to mark the most inspiring recipes. I've been looking forward to this one.

I made the coffee cake as I limped around on Wednesday, still testing what my leg can and can't make. Her initial recipe called for a topping as well as a filling, but I decided to skip it, choosing to add in a bunch of chocolate instead. I took the cake to work where it was devoured my many hungry and brilliant technicians and circus performers. I loved it and I'm absolutely making it again. Please excuse the less than stellar picture. My photography is not at its best when I'm on painkillers.

Cinnamon Chocolate Coffee Cake
Adapted from Joy Wilson's Joy the Baker Cookbook

This cake is moist, decadent and delicious. You can use full-fat milk and sour cream, but I tend to only keep non-fat in the house.

For the Cake

3/4 Cup (1 1/2 Sticks) Butter, softened
1 1/2 Cups Granulated Sugar
1/3 Cup Light Brown Sugar, packed
2 Teaspoons Vanilla
3 Eggs
3 1/4 Cups Flour, sifted
2 1/2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
1 1/4 Teaspoons Salt
3/4 Cup Non-Fat Sour Cream
1 1/4 Cups Non-Fat Whole Milk

Preheat the oven to 350F. Butter and flour a 9x13 baking pan.

Cream together the butter and sugar and pale and fluffy. Add the vanilla and the eggs and mix well. Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt, then add in the sour cream and milk. Make the filling.

For the Filling

1 Cup Light Brown Sugar, packed
2 Tablespoons Cinnamon
1 Teaspoon Nutmeg
3 Tablespoons Cocoa Powder
1 Cup Semi-Sweet chocolate chips
1/2 Teaspoon Salt

Mix all the filling ingredients together. You may want to use your hands because brown sugar tends to be a bit clumpy.

Spread half the cake mix into the pan. Scatter over about three quarters of the filling. Spoon over the rest of the cake mix, then sprinkled over the rest of the filling. With a spoon or spatula, marble the cake by dragging the spoon through the whole thing in swirls or figure eights. Don't mix it too much. You just want to kind of swirl it up so that it isn't a uniform layer.

Bake in the oven for about 55 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Let it sit for thirty minutes before cutting in.

Enjoy with a glass of milk propped up against your kitchen counter, or hand out pieces at 11:30pm to awesome technicians as they are clocking out for the night.

Makes about 20-30 servings depending on how big you cut them.

 

Whilst I Am Not Cooking

Still not much time for me in the kitchen, though I did have the fabulous Myles over for brunch. I made a Goat Cheese, Tomato and Spinach Quiche similar to the recipe found here. He made biscuits and Man Hash Browns, which are made just like normal hash browns except that you use Bacon Grease instead of oil or butter and you have to make them in a cast iron skillet. Delicious.

When I have a few minutes in the evening I generally pull out the cookbook that I am currently reading. I read cookbooks like novels, and I keep little post it tabs next to my bed so I can mark recipes that I like. Right now, I'm reading Girl in the Kitchen by Stephanie Izard. I've always been a huge fan of Stephanie's since she became the first woman to win Top Chef, but I have to say I don't love her book yet. I was a good 100 pages in before I marked a single recipe to try. It seems like every blurb about a dish references one of her restaurants... it doesn't tell me about where the food came from. I'm just not feeling the soul. But I'm sticking with it and hopefully I'll see what I'm looking for soon.

If I were in my kitchen, these are the things that I would want to make right now:

Chocolate Orange Pots de Creme from Pioneer Woman

*Update! I did make these, though I left out the Grand Marnier and topped them with white chocolate mousse and then a peppermint whipped cream. This recipe came together remarkably easily, and I hope to tweak it and share my layered version soon.

Greek Lemon Chicken from Everybody Likes Sandwiches

Butter Pecan Shortbread from Bake or Break

Wild Rice Salad with Roasted Vegetable and Lemon-Tahini Dressing from David Lebovitz

*Update. I made this! I really loved it, though I found it a little heavy on the tahini. I'd back that off next time and use a touch more lemon.

Cheezy Jalapeno Pull Bread from Simply Recipes


What are some other recipes that you've seen lately but haven't had time to make?

Sesame Green Beans and Cookbook Collections

I have to say, I adore cookbooks. I have a good collection going and I anticipate it getting even bigger. It's confined to one bookshelf for now, with a few books scattered around the apartment, but I feel as though pretty soon it will be spilling over. I read cookbooks cover to cover as though they are novels. I usually have at least a couple by my bed.

This Christmas I received three fantastic new books. One of them, from my Brother and Sister-in-Law (who on top of choosing great gifts are also being nice enough to make a new baby for me to fawn over), is called Sunday in the South. It's all about Southern food and Southern hospitality. It's one of those great books where you open it up and find you want to make at least every other recipe. Those tend to be my favorite kinds. It's also a very neat book in that the recipes in it are all parts of menu plans. You can pick and choose individual things or you can use the plans for dishes that go perfectly together.

There is so much in this book I long to tackle. There are chicken recipes and cornbread and cakes and pies and all sorts of wonderful things that remind me of Georgia. I think that's one of the reason I like the book so much.... it makes me think of Georgia and how much I miss Southern food and living in the South. It's also filled with stunning pictures of beautiful homes and ideas for setting gorgeous tables. It's inspiring really, it makes me long for the day when I've got my own house and my own garden, and I can have pretty table settings and people over for tea. Maybe I've just been watching too much Downton Abbey.

When John came home with some yummy fresh Green Beans to have as a side dish for dinner, it was to this book I turned to for recipes. Green Beans are so delightfully Southern. They also go wonderfully with Lamb and Potatoes, which were the other planned dinner components.

These green beans come together in ten minutes, and they have a great texture and a perfectly delicious nutty flavor from the sesame seeds.

Sesame Green Beans
Adapted from Sunday in the South by Ginny McCormack

8 Ounces Green Beans
1 Tablespoon Olive Oil
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
1 Tablespoon Sesame Seeds

Top and tail the green beans, then boil them in water for five minutes. Drain them and put them in a skillet or shallow pan with the olive oil, salt and sesame seeds. Sautee on a medium to high heat for five minutes until the sesame seeds are golden and the beans are delicious.