Banana Molasses Crackle Bread

I have a new favorite banana bread recipe.  I'm not a huge banana bread fan, but I made it because otherwise I would have to actually eat all my bananas before they go brown, a thing I am apparently pathologically incapable of doing.  So the brown bananas go in the freezer until I have 3 or 4, and then I make banana bread.  That bread has seemed a necessary evil, a demonstration of frugal domesticity, a thing I did because otherwise I would have had banana guilt.

But now... now I have changed my tune.  I am remade.  I see banana bread as its own worthy pursuit, a fall breakfast of extraordinary lusciousness, a reason to go buy bananas if there are none in the freezer.

It all started, as so many of my kitchen adventures do, over at Smitten Kitchen, where I saw a recipe for banana bread with millet in it.  And I thought... Millet!  Of Course!  I love millet.  I put it in seed bread and it creates a robust wonderful texture.  I happened to have some in the cupboard for that reason.  If you don't have millet (because, duh, why would you have millet?) then fear not!  It is pretty easy to find in the bulk section of any grocery store with a hippie-ish bent or a comprehensive bulk selection.  Here in the Portland Metro area, that's Whole Foods, New Seasons, Winco, and Freddie's.

Once you've acquired some millet, you can set about making this textured, crackly, rich banana bread.

Bananananana Bread 

Nouns-
3 large overripe bananas
1 egg
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup molasses (or, for a lighter, less intense flavor, half molasses/half corn syrup or half molasses/half honey)
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
pinch of ground cloves (I might have added more than a pinch)
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/3 cup uncooked millet

Verbs-
Preheat Oven to 350 and spray a loaf pan with oil or coat it in butter.  Mash bananas, then stir in the egg, oil, brown sugar and molasses.  Then, stir in baking soda, salt and spices.  Fold in flour until just combined, then fold in the millet.  Pour batter into the loaf pan and bake for 45-50 minutes.  Keeps week at room temp in a ziplock bag for about a week, or wrapped tightly in plastic wrap in the freezer it'll keep for months.  I recommend slicing it, toasting it and eating with a smear of butter.

Caramel Apple Spice Cake

This cake is ridiculous.  Really really ridiculous.  I cobbled it together from several recipes and from some determination to bring together elements that I thought should be a cake, but didn't seem to be a recipe anywhere.  Some parts work better than others; the frosting, though delicious, is terrible to work with because it is sticky and has a silly-putty kind of consistency that won't stick to the cake well.  Still, it's totally worth the fussiness.

First you make THIS SPICE CAKE RECIPE, through step three.  Then stop.  To be honest, I added about 50% more of each spice than the recipe calls for, but other than that, I didn't fiddle with it.  I know... I couldn't believe it either.

Here's where it gets interesting:

Nouns:
Filling-
2 apples, peeled, cored and sliced thinly
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp butter
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Icing:
2 sticks butter, room temp
4-5 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1 tbsp corn syrup
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp vanilla extract

Verbs:
Filling and Icing--
In a small saucepan, cook the apples, brown sugar, butter and cinnamon over medium-low heat until apples are soft.  Reserve the apples until you are ready to assemble the cake.  Then, in a clean saucepan, boil the water, sugar and corn syrup without stirring for 5-10 minutes until it is a deep amber color, taking care not to scorch it.  Using a HEAT PROOF spatula, carefully avoiding the hissing splattering, stir in the heavy cream and sea salt.  Now you have caramel sauce.  Set it aside to cool.  If you feel like it, you can add a tablespoon or two to the apples.  Why not?

In a stand mixer, beat the butter until creamy.  Gradually add the powdered sugar and beat to combine.  Gradually add the caramel while beating the icing until it reaches the desired level of caramelly flavor.  If the consistency is too soft, add more powdered sugar.  If it is too stiff, add more caramel sauce or some heavy cream.  Feel free to reserve some caramel sauce to drizzle over the top of the finished cake, or into your mouth, or whatever.

Assembly:
I like to freeze my cake layers for an hour or two up to a day or two before I assemble the cake.  I find it's easier to work with and I get fewer crumbs in my icing.  In any case, the layers should be cooled before assembly.  Set the bottom cake layer on a small dollop of icing on your cake platter, so it stays put.  Then, pipe a ring of icing around the top edge of that layer.  Spread the apple filling inside that ring of icing until even.  Set the top layer over the filling on the ring of icing so that the filling is sealed in and won't goo everywhere while you are frosting this thing.  Spread the icing in a thin layer over the whole cake.  Freeze for 30 minutes.  Then frost with the desired frosting effect.  feel free to just glob it on there, or to get fancy.  I got fancy, but I'm a fancy kind of girl.  I also put some caramelized sugar frou-frou on top of mine, because I love frou-frou.

Hippie Mama's Tofu Punkin Pie

I grew up eating this pie, and I love it.  No one would ever guess it has tofu, and frankly, the tofu base is easier than doing the custard base of most pumpkin pies, and it's much better and fresher than the canned pumpkin pie mix stuff.  I have modified my mom's recipe a little, but this is more or less how she does it.

Nouns-
Filling:
12 ounces (about one package) of silken tofu
2 cups canned pumpkin, or two cups sugar pumpkin, seeded, roasted, peeled and pureed.
2/3 cup honey
2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (I make my own-- it's 1 part fresh ground cloves, 1 part fresh ground allspice, 1 part ground ginger, 1 part fresh ground nutmeg and 5 parts cinnamon)
2 eggs

Crust-- this makes a double crust, so halve the recipe if you aren't going to use the other pie crust
2 1/2 cups flour
1 cup butter, chilled and cubed
1/2 cup ice water

Verbs-
Pulse the flour and butter together in a food processor until it looks like coarse crumbs.  Drizzle the water in in one continuous stream with the processor on, until the dough just comes together when pinched.  Pour the dough out onto a cutting board and form it into two disks.  Wrap and refrigerate the dough for an hour.  Once dough has been chilled, preheat oven to 425.  Then, put all the filling ingredients in the food processor and process until smooth and creamy.  Roll out the pie crust and transfer it to a 9inch pie pan.  Pour in the filling.  Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, then turn down to 350 and bake for another 30-45 minutes, until fully set.  Cool and top with whipped cream.  Good for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Hmmm, pie.

Stregnth

I just read this wonderful piece by Dvora Meyers for Jezebel, and I was really struck by a few of the things that she says about doing gymnastics as a child and struggling with how to make the sport compatible with her other, especially her religious, values.  


She says this about athletics and feminism:
"My mother, who had been the first in her family to go to college, intellectually conveyed her ideas about feminism to me, insisting that if I got an education, I could do whatever I set my mind to. But what about whatever I set my body to?

Through gymnastics, feminism was communicated physically, which turned out to be much more powerful than its intellectual demonstration. If ideas about inferiority or separateness of women are rooted in our different bodies, then the best way I found to overcome these ideas was by using this same body to accomplish feats of strength."

And this, THIS, is what I have been feeling about running but have been unable to articulate.  I have always felt, thanks to my wonderful parents and grandparents and teachers and my own innate stubborn streak, that I could do anything I put my mind to.  That I could be a doctor or a paleontologist or a professor or an astronaut, or, if I want to settle, a lawyer.  But I felt limited, limited by the perceptions and pressures of the world, limited by my body and by circumstance... just limited.  And when I run, that goes away.

I have been religiously watching the olympics, marveling at the greatest achievements in human strength, speed, grace and precision, and so I appreciate that I will never, never be a world-class athlete, or even a good athlete!  But the physical communication of feminism, the well of strength that comes from working my muscles, putting my feet on the road, going far, that does create a sense of limitlessness.  It is so easy to shrug off the silly ideas of what I should look like, the sense that my body is not what society deems it should be, when I can USE this body to run 42 miles of trail in three days, or finish a marathon, or just to put some miles between me and whatever is bothering me.  It is also easier to put my mind to things and live out my intellectual feminist principles when I am rooted in the physical strength and I feel like my body is an ally, rather than an enemy.  I feel whole.

I think the most pernicious thing about our society's beauty standards, diet culture, and the unrealistic and objectifying views of women it perpetuates is that it makes a woman's own body her enemy.  It breaks her down into component parts and renders each one a separate foe: her thighs are her tormentors, her stomach her opponent, and her ass an obstacle.  And that is tragic.  Because a woman cannot be anything but limited if she must battle herself, divided.  How can she have any energy left to triumph over the other myriad obstacles of life? 

Anyway, thanks to Dvora Meyers for her writing and reflection.  Its timely, as I'm watching the Olympic women's gymnastics final right now, and I can feel the strength of those women, see the hours and hours of dedication reflected in every movement, and see that even under pressure and in pain, they trust themselves and their own power.  Sometimes they fall, that isn't the point.  The point is that they trust themselves to fly.

Rogue River Trail Run

I started this sentence over and over again, erasing version after version, because I can't figure out how best to describe this adventure.  I didn't post about it much when I was training for it, because I wasn't following my original training plan, and I was really struggling with the sense that I hadn't put all the checks in the right boxes.  I felt weird, almost ashamed, of not following my training plan on its beautiful spreadsheet.  But, as I now know, the training I did was much better than the spreadsheet, because instead of following the plan, I just listened to my body and had fun.  So, my training process was organic and un-regimented, and nothing to write home about, but the run itself, the run itself was... sublime.

It was tech-free, ego-free, and entirely beautiful.  The map above was the route we took, running from right to left along the trail as pictured.  

DAY ONE:

We met in Merlin, OR, on Monday.  I showed up alone at the rafting company and met Tara, Nina, Layla and Karin, four friends who decided to go on the trip as a girls' adventure vacation.  I was so excited to meet the other runners and to learn that they were all about my age.  I was more excited when they turned out to be hilarious, welcoming, irreverent, strong, encouraging and generally fantastic.  We met our running guide, Vic, and our rafting guide, Matt, later to be nicknamed Padre and Diesel.  We packed our stuff into dry bags and loaded up in a van to drive to Grave Creek.  At Grave Creek, Matt put the raft, loaded with all our stuff, into the river, and we took to the trail.  

It was HOT, and rocky, and steep.  We wound our way up the hill along the river until we were running along the edge of a cliff looking down down down to the river on our left.  

We ran about three miles and then stopped at Whiskey Creek to see a historic cabin and refill our water.  We saw this sign, letting us know we had many many miles to go until the end of the adventure:

The trail was gorgeous and we had lovely, though slightly hot, weather.  

At the end of a long, lovely morning of running, we stopped for a late lunch and spent a few hours eating, relaxing and sticking our feet in the river, before we were paddled across the river to Black Bar Lodge.  After winding up the trail to the lodge, we saw the welcoming committee:

 

I stayed in this lovely little cabin, complete with a hot shower!  Very civilized.  

I had a great time hanging out on the lawn with my new friends before dinner.

By the end of the day, I felt totally at ease and confident that I hadn't dramatically overestimated my capabilities or gotten in over my head.  Luckily, I had a pace-buddy in the group of girls, Layla, who was willing to walk the steep uphill sections with me, rather than run them.  As a result of our less all-out approach to hills, she and I would end up a few minutes behind the other three at the end of each section.  But since we stopped for breaks fairly often and had a nice long lunch and relaxation break before we hit the lodge, we were never that far behind. 

It was nice to have a buddy for the run, though we didn't always talk.  I ran silent for the first time in a long time, running just to run, without music or chatter, and heard my breath in my ears and my feet on the trail, the wind and the river... and the quiet in my own head.  I found a pace that felt natural and sustainable, and then didn't have to think much at all, except about avoiding rocks, jumping streams, and ducking the occasional low branch.  I felt both wonderfully included and wonderfully alone, and though the running was hard, it was always good-hard.  Not overwhelming, just empowering.  

I slept well in the total silence of the woods after the lodge turned off the generator.  

DAY TWO:

I woke up in my snug little cabin, showered and went down to the lodge for breakfast, which was yummy.  Then, we repacked our stuff and got all our gear on and stretched, ready for 14.8 miles!

The girls gave me the extra pink running shirt they'd had made for their trip, a generous gesture of inclusiveness, and so I was made an honorary member of this ridiculous and awesome tribe of ladies:

We decided to run about nine miles on the second day, then take a running break and ride the raft for a few miles, before finishing out our day with a short mile or two into the lodge.  The first 9 miles flew by.  More beautiful scenery, more silliness and hijinks on the trail, more laughs.

Taking a break to ride in the boat was awesome.  I think saving my legs a bit for the long miles of the last day was a good idea, and while we were on the river, we got to see a bald eagle fishing.  Wow!  Layla took a turn on the oars and did a great job not running into rocks, but Matt, our river guide, took over for the rough parts.  We went through a few small rapids, but nothing too exciting.  It was relaxing and beautiful and I managed to stay relatively dry through the rapids.

We stopped for lunch after our raft ride, and spent an enjoyable hour eating and soaking our feet and sunbathing again, before we jogged the last mile or two to Marial Lodge.

Marial Lodge was amazing.  The innkeepers were welcoming, the food was fantastic, and the views were lovely.  We spent the evening on the deck, enjoying some wine, some games, the view, the bird-feeder, and a chance to rest.  

DAY THREE:

I was a little nervous when I woke up on Day Three, because I was a little sore and we had sixteen (16!!) miles to run.  We had talked about it the night before and decided to try to do the whole day running and not resort to the raft.  This was the end of our adventure, our biggest test, and I was especially determined to challenge myself and do it.  After a delicious breakfast, we geared up.  In addition to the usual water, sunscreen, bug spray and other accouterments, Karin started making daisy chains.  We ran the whole day with flowers in our hair, and amazingly, they stayed put!  

After many hours of running and two totally brutal hills that were NOT in the brochure (ow!), we made it to the end.  We celebrated on the boat launch at Foster Bar with lunch, cookies, and a quick dip in the river to wash any poison oak off.  

In sum: This was awesome.  I feel incredibly blessed that the weather cooperated, that I managed to avoid injury and poison oak and blisters, that I stumbled into the company of such wonderful people, and that I trusted my body and trained up to where I could run 38 miles in three days and feel... amazing.  To go places only reachable on foot or by boat, to see such a breadth of Oregon's natural landscape, to challenge myself and find my strength with no technology, no ego and no pace clock, to have had these three days of wonder was a joy and a triumph.  

Thanks to everyone who supported and encouraged me to do this, special thanks to Nina, Layla, Tara, Karin, Matt and Vic, who were there for every mile.  I totally want to do it again!

Vignettes

One
I was exhausted and re-wearing the same clothes for the 4th or 5th time.  A Christmas-break road trip from Colorado to California and then back to college in Washington had been prolonged by a blizzard that trapped us in Elko, Nevada for two days, and then again by an ice storm that kept us in Portland.  I was missing a suitcase that had somehow gotten lost on the first leg of the trip, and so I had no clean underwear, no cell phone charger and was uncertain of the fate of most of my Christmas gifts.  I was giddy with the prospect of a shower and my own bed, reading the signs aloud as each familiar landmark welcomed us back.  The Tacoma Dome.  The Glass Museum.

And finally, getting off I-5, taking the exit for Highway 16, only a few miles from campus and home.  Spencer's phone rang, and I answered, because he was driving.  It was for me.

"Alice, I'm afraid I have some very bad news," he began.  "It's your grandfather..."

"Daddy, no."  I couldn't breathe.  "No."

Two
It was snowing quite a bit, and the road was very dark.  My father looked older than I remembered, hands on the steering wheel, peering at highway signs.  A lot has changed, even in these backroads towns of corn country, and we numb and tired pilgrims had gotten lost.  Somewhere, there, in that suddenly-unfamiliar chunk of rural Indiana, there is an oak tree growing on the roof of an old, dignified courthouse in a lovely little town.  Its roots have grabbed ahold of the building with stubborn firmness and Midwestern insistence, and the townspeople apparently felt that, like themselves, it should stay where it grew.  As we drove by, I could see the branches uplit by the lights in the little square as we went past, on our way to another little town where my father had grown up, on our way to the sacred ground where my grandfather would always rest.

Three
 "Why, Alice, what are you doing?"  My Aunt Esther could somehow tell by my posture on the lovely reception chair that something was amiss.

"I'm in 'jail,'" I started to explain.

Before I could elaborate, my aunt laughed and my very indignant cousin Maya, age 8, skidded toward me in her patent-leather maryjanes and suitably ruffly dress, scolding me.  Prisoners, of course, cannot talk.  Aunt Esther, seeing a ready opportunity for a break, managed to get herself arrested and me released, and relaxed into the chair in my place.  Before Maya could arrest any additional funeral guests, I took her hand and asked if she would come outside with me.

The snow was thick and fluffy, falling in large, puffy flakes.  Our dress shoes were treacherous on the icy bricks of the church's courtyard.  I held her hand and led her to the plain brass door, behind which our grandfather's ashes resided in an incongruous plastic bin.  Later, a plaque with his name would adorn the spot, but for now, it was flat cold and gave no hint that the man I loved so dearly had chosen it as his resting place.

"Maya, do you want to say goodbye to grandpa?"  I knew she wouldn't remember, and probably didn't understand, but I thought someone should give her the chance to participate, to have her moment, in case in later years she did remember.

"Bye-Bye, grandpa!" She trilled, and I lifted her up to place her hand on the brass, which she did with an enthusiastic and somewhat confused smack.

"Bye-Bye, grandpa, " I repeated.  We went back inside, to the warm, and let Aunt Esther out of jail.

Meal Plan

Here's the plan:

Vietnamese Noodle Salad
Cherry Chipotle Turkey Cutlets with Sweet Corn Casserole
Roast Chicken with Kale and Sweet Potatoes
Ratatouille and Garlic Parmesan Toasts
Green Chili Mac and Cheese 


Yum!