WWOBPs...yum!

Today’s Experiment: Whole Wheat Oatmeal Banana Pancakes



Purpose:

To make healthy and delicious pancakes using ingredients on hand. (Honestly, who has time to run to the store on Saturday or Sunday morning before pancake cooking time? Not me.)

Materials*:

¼ c. whole wheat flour
¼ c. oats, presoaked to soften them
½ tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt
Dash of sugar
Dash of cinnamon
Dash of nutmeg
1 egg
½ c. orange juice cut with water or water cut with orange juice, depending on your taste**: this amount can be increased or decreased depending on your particular batter
Banana (or some portion of a banana), sliced
Butter or oil for pan

Procedure:

1. Mix whole wheat flour with baking soda and salt and stir to mix.
2. Lightly beat egg. Add orange juice/water mixture.
3. Preheat and grease pan/skillet/griddle over medium-low heat (on my gas stove … yours will probably be different).
4. Add soaked oats and egg mixture to flour mixture, stir until incorporated: about 10 stirs. You don’t want to overdevelop the gluten in the flour because you will have tough pancakes.
5. Spoon your desired pancake size of batter into your skillet and put some banana slices on top.
6. Cook for a few minutes, until lots of bubbles develop, and flip. Cook for another minute or two.
7. Garnish with sliced banana and brown sugar. Enjoy!



Results:

Definitely one of the most successful pancake experiment recipes I’ve created. Soaking the oats before adding them to the rest of the ingredients is a clutch step – otherwise they will be tough. I might have added too much nutmeg, but they were still very good. The spices add depth to the sweetness of the banana, which is sometimes bland on its own, although obviously those should be altered according to your personal taste.

Conclusion:

Delicious! Highly recommended, and definitely to be made again.


*Recipe from which I adopt other pancake recipes is a buttermilk pancake recipe.
**You need an acid in the recipe to chemically react with the baking soda. Think baking soda and vinegar volcano circa third grade.

My Favorite Place in the World

Raw and Guilty

My Guilty Pleasure:

Raw Cookie Dough

I make cookies basically for the sole purpose of eating the raw dough. Regular cookies are great and everything, but there is nothing as finger-lickin’ good as a fresh batch of raw cookie dough. Why bother turning the oven on, scooping, scraping, and cooling when you can get an even better treat 15 minutes sooner?

Sometimes people get a little put off by the whole raw egg thing but to tell you the truth it doesn’t bother me. Maybe it’s a bit of a sumo wrestler complex: raw eggs make you strong. But also if you think about it, there are only two eggs in an entire batch of dough, and it is doubtful one will eat the entire thing in one sitting, which is a pretty small amount of raw egg. However, if you can eat an entire batch of cookie dough in one sitting, well, I might marry you.

I am partial to chocolate chip, but really any cookie dough will do. Although oatmeal tends to be a little iffy because of the toughness of the oats, a delicious blend of cinnamon and brown sugar often redeems raw oatmeal cookie dough. I am currently slicing off a frozen log of snickerdoodle dough. It’s addicting. Slice after slice, chunk after chunk. I can’t stop. It might be a clinical disorder, I’ll have to check on that one. Don’t let me go back for more.



Before I make myself sick…

How to make (edible) raw cookie dough if raw eggs freak you out:

Make it like normal (“as directed”), omit the eggs and any ingredients like baking soda or baking powder, whose chemical leaveners are unnecessary if you aren’t baking the dough. It should be about the right consistency – you might have to use a little less flour because the lack of eggs means less wet ingredients. Also, sometimes when I bake I use oil instead of butter: this is a NO NO when making raw cookie dough. Because you can’t cream oil and sugar, the dough ends up oily and separated and generally disgusting.

Raw cookie dough, with or without eggs, is the most guilty of my guilty pleasures and the only one I could never give up. Eat it. I will convert you.

On Caffeine

I hate coffee, I like tea.

Why coffee is gross and tea is delicious:

1. Coffee is bitter, while tea can be sweet or tangy or fruity or spicy.
2. Coffee has much more caffeine than tea.
3. Coffee drinks are very unhealthy. Tea is delicious even without milk or sugar.
4. Coffee is only good hot. Even room temperature tea is still delectable.
5. Coffee is only worthwhile because it has caffeine. Decaf teas are yummy too.
6. Coffee is for everyone. Even Dunkin Donuts. Tea is so much more refined.

I made a spectacularly energizing (a.k.a. probably very high caffeine) tea blend the other day. It was a Tazo Maté Tropic teabag and a Stash Green and White Fusion teabag. The complexity of flavors from the three different tea leaves as well as the flavor additives in the Maté Tropic created a tea which was both delicious, invigorating, and mood-enhancing (or I could have just been having a good day).

Try it.

Pearlicious

I just invented the best dessert. Ever.

I often have that problem where I want something sweet yet satisfying, but ordinary desserts don’t cut it. I’ll wander through my kitchen (mentally – it’s not that big) and have a nibble here, a nibble there, and before I know it I’ve had several cookies, a handful of chocolate chips, a few spoonfuls of sorbet or ice cream, and probably a handful or two of cereal. But this impromptu tapas-style desserting fails to satisfy.

Read a food or health magazine and they’ll tell you there’s nothing as satisfying or as delicious for dessert as a piece of fresh fruit. Fruit? The dessert connoisseur in me scoffs. But on some level they are right. The nights when I grab an apple for dessert I find myself feeling fuller, more satisfied, and healthier than the graze-and-eat-whatever-sugar-I-can-find nights. Then again, there are the days – most days, that is – when an apple or an orange just won’t cut it, when you need something just a little sweeter and a little heavier. Pure decadence.

Tonight was one of those nights. I began the graze. A handful of chocolate chips. A scoop of goat’s milk ice cream (to satisfy the ice cream-loving lactard that I am). And then I stopped and reevaluated my methods. Neither healthy nor satisfying, and much too processed for my crunchy, back-to-nature lifestyle. (Ha.) And then I remembered the crazed fruit addict who spent $40 on oranges bananas and pears at Whole Foods the other day. Those barely underripe pears hanging out in the fridge – maybe I could do something with them.

First let’s realize that I am not much of one for delayed gratification, despite my love of baking. I am the one who fills up on raw dough or batter and then doesn’t care much either way for the finished product. I didn’t want to have to wait to roast or poach or bake or whatever it is you do to pears to make them deliciously dessertified. But what is it about a baked pear or apple that really makes it so good? Not the warm gooey smooshiness. So not my style. It’s the brown sugar caramel goodness and spicy cinnamon that really gets me going.

Hence my spectacular dessert invention:

No-Bake Baked Pear:

1 D’Anjou pear, cut into thickish slices (1/2”)
Small spoonful of brown sugar sprinkled over slices
Generous shaking of cinnamon sugar over slices

Let sit for a couple minutes to allow the sugars to juice and sweeten the pear, which should still be firm.

Then gobble up, making sure to clean every last crumbly crumb of brown sugar from the plate with pear slices, finger, and/or tongue. (Manners? What?)

I ate in. In about two minutes. It was amazing. I am full. And I am going to eat this every day for the rest of my life. Or until I run out of pears, which will bring me to … two days from now.

Oatmeal Schmoatmeal

What is it about oatmeal, that ubiquitous breakfast food? What is so attractive about a smiling old Quaker caricature? Why is it so appealing to everyone? Well, almost everyone. Until yesterday, I had never had oatmeal. In my entire life. Don’t believe me? You should. I don’t lie, not about my food.

And you know what? It’s not that bad, but it’s not that great either. To me, it tastes a little bit like Passover food, which makes me think I’m eating it about two months early.

Here’s how it happened. I decided last night, during a brief period of insanity, that I wanted a late night (10 p.m., I’m such a rebel) snack. I had already had approximately 3 Thin Mints (I love Girl Scout season), 2 Brussels cookies, a couple handfuls of cereal, and some raw cookie dough, all of this after dinner. For some reason I was convinced I still needed that little something else before I would be really satisfied for the night. So I said to myself “tonight is the night I like oatmeal.” To be honest, oatmeal actually disgusts me. It’s all gloopy and smooshy and wet and lumpy and warm. I think it’s the warm that pushes me over the edge, because very few other textures actually bother me. But I decided to put all that behind me and convince myself that I liked oatmeal.

So I grab Mr. Quaker Oats in his funny columnar canister off the shelf (well obviously I own oatmeal, I have to make cookies after all) and read the directions on the back. I decide to go with the heart healthy (denoted by a <3) serving size and measure out my cup and a half of water (wouldn’t want to waste precious milk on a science experiment), which along with a sprinkling of salt – it calls for a dash – I set to boil on the stove. I measure out three-quarters of a cup of old-fashioned rolled oats and watch impatiently as my pot of water finally boils (ha! take that, old wives). As directed, I put the oats in the salted water and stir occasionally for closer to ten minutes than the five that are called for. I decide it’s probably done because it looks abhorrently mushy and I taste it gingerly before adding any of my pre-selected mix-ins (banana, cinnamon, brown sugar, and A LOT more salt). It tastes like – well – warm splooshy Passover food. In a word, disgusting. Despite this initial letdown I decide to proceed with my experiment (bananas are cheap, not such a waste) and add an entire banana in slices, a generous dosing of cinnamon, and about half a handful of brown sugar. Mix, mix, mix, mix, taste …. blechhh! Needs salt. Salt, salt, salt, salt, mix, mix, mix, mix, cinnamon, cinnamon, mix, mix, taste, alright! Tastes okay, not great, but I don’t really like this kind of thing anyway. I have three bites, and I’m full. No wonder they say eat oatmeal to lose weight. It is the densest, heaviest, most filling breakfast I could possibly imagine. I had three bites and I was so full I was nauseous.

After picking out all the bananas and eating them (I guess it would have been a waste after all), I decide it’s a waste to throw out all that perfectly good, fresh, hot oatmeal, so I consult my resident oatmeal guru and housemate Hillary, who eats oatmeal practically everyday (although she makes her in that funny thing called a microwave) if she thinks it would still be good tomorrow (today) if I keep it in the fridge. She thought it would be fine, so I covered it up in Saran Wrap and stick it on the top shelf, next to my precious milk, and promptly forgot about it and went to watch the Daily Show.

This morning, I thought I would try some cold oatmeal. Hey, it couldn’t have gotten any worse, right? Again, I had two bites, was a little nauseated, and decided to have some peanut butter toast for breakfast instead. Always a good idea, peanut butter toast. But still I stuck it back in the fridge. I would not throw it out until it was all gone or gone rancid.

But tonight again I was in the mood for a late night snack and the first thing I think of is my cold oatmeal. It couldn’t have been as bad as I thought, right? At this point it is cold, cinnamony, full of banana flavor but with no banana pieces, and infused with delicious brown sugar. Sounds delicious – what could possibly be bad about that? Oh, the whole OATMEAL part. The mushy gooey slimy Passover food just wouldn’t taste GOOD. No, it wasn’t bad, just not as good as I wanted it to be. But I ate it. All of it.

I am sitting here with an empty oatmeal bowl next to me, and you know what? Maybe I’ll make it again, but save it in the fridge for a day because cold oatmeal really is the only way to go in my book. Or maybe that’s a waste of oatmeal, and I’ll use the rest of my oatmeal (can’t call it a box…) silo to make cookies or something more rewarding than HEALTHY breakfast gloop.

Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Dessert

If you ask, I might tell you I have no career goals, and that’s a semi-truth. Everyone is so absorbed by their obsessions with finance and Wall Street and you just can’t get away from it. That’s so not my style. I don’t want a job. Ever. I just want to run away and hide. Now, all I need is a hiding place …

Luckily I have one, sort of. My haven, my sanctuary, is my kitchen. And as much as I’d like it to be, it’s not my (convenient) kitchen here at school but my (seven and a half hour inconvenient) kitchen at home. I love my granite counter tops and propane stove and the wonderful cookware my parents have amassed over their last twenty-six (twenty-seven?) years together. It far surpasses the Ikea (at best) and left over from two occupants ago (at worst) mismatched pots and pans that occupy our cupboards here.

But it’s fine, it’ll do, I’ll make it work. I might make it work a little too well, as there are definitely times when my hours in the kitchen are maybe a little distracting from the homework I should be doing. Like those times at 10 or 11 p.m. when, instead of wasting my perfectly good ten dollars on ordering Insomnia Cookies I decide instead to bake cookies. Even though I am an exceptionally experienced and speedy cookie-baker, it still takes a good hour to an hour and a half to mix, scoop, bake, clean, bake, eat, clean, and eat the cookies. And then of course you have to travel ALLL around the house offering them to everyone else, which inevitably leads to another good half hour of chatting and commiserating over tests and homework and classes and lack of sleep. Basically, I just lost two hours of homework time. And I’m not even a chronic procrastinator. Usually. Except for now.

No worries though, it’s all in the name of the career goals that I apparently don’t have. In reality I just don’t like to admit to them because maybe someone will copy me or try to sabotage me or something. Or I don’t like to recognize them because of a fear of disappointment…

Basically, I like to think I am that girl from Stranger than Fiction. I wish I had such cool tattoos. That’s me, at my Ivy League university, doing what I can to stay focused on my academic life, when really what I like to do is make those experimental whole wheat oatmeal-craisin-chocolate chip cookies (think what you might, they are DELICIOUS) that provide much-needed sustenance for my hockey team, or the impromptu (and actually quite disgusting but addicting at the same time) raw eggless chocolate chip cookie dough for late night study break snacking. (Be extremely careful when making those with oil instead of butter, because it separated on me and we were eating spoonfuls of Canola Oil-drenched chocolate chips. Mmmm…)

Someday, hopefully, it will be my job and my life to do this for other people. Bake, not post on blogs, obviously. Unfortunately I am a product of my society and I know (or I think I know) I have to learn some stuff, work for a while, and make some money before I can pursue my dream of having my own bakery. That’s where the whole job depressive thing comes in. While everyone I know is applying for their summer internships at the Goldman Sachs and the McKinseys and the Bear Stearns of the world, I am pondering whether I should beg for work at the bread bakery or the pastry bakery or maybe go for something a little more adventurous and challenging to my burgeoning culinary talents (so I like to think).

At the risk of doing myself a disservice, I’m trying to be realistic and recognize that I probably won’t own my own bakery, at least anytime soon, and I’ll have to settle down as the soccer mom I know deep down I’ll end up being. I have in fact been planning my privileged suburbanite’s kitchen for several years. At least I’ll force my experiments down the throats of my children. And I always know my dad is good for a few slices of mangled chocolate cake.