Various Culinary Adventures

One could say that I have dealt with my culture shock by absorbing myself in obtaining ingredients for and successfully making things from home. I have made banana bread, brownies, snickerdoodles, puddings, Thai Green Curry, and Indian curries. I accumulated quite a wide array of teas and coffees. Though the curries turned out quite well because of many past experiences and the help of curry pastes, the other baking recipes were not so successful. Mostly because of the constant pain and difficulty of trying to convert the stubborn, foolish, arrogant and out of date system that the USA uses for measurements – the American system. While the rest of the world uses the metric system, based on mass, we still continue to use a relative system based on volume. Thus everything is usually out of proportion and the desired consistency, texture, and feel of the baked goods is very difficult to obtain. Furthermore until recently I thought my oven/microwave was broken (but in fact i just did not know how to use it properly) so I have to use a toaster oven – prone to overcooking or inconsistent cooking – and the rice cooker – prone to steaming instead of baking. While the later made for a nice consistency for banana bread, it made a completely different kind of brownie (though still extremely tasty).

So here is the Brownie recipe i used – its the famous Cook’s Illustrated recipe via a cooking blog. Here.

Then this is my Banana Bread Recipe adapted from two recipes one on youtube.com and another on the website that gave me the idea to try baking in a rice cooker. Anyway here it is in the metric system.

BANANA BREAD RECIPE

256g cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

150g cup white sugar

165g brown sugar

113g butter

1/2 tsp salt

2 eggs

20g plain yogurt(full fat)

6 small blackened, over-ripened bananas

100g crushed walnuts

5-10g Cinnamon

This recipe comes from a mix of the below website and a cook on youtube. This recipe yields a soft, moist, and full-flavored banana bread, with a pleasing contrast with the crunchy walnuts and moist bread. Also the aromatic cinnamon gives the entire room a pleasing atmosphere to enjoy on top of the its delicious flavor.

Then  according to this website. You grease the rice cooker and pour the batter for one cycle.  Make sure the banana bread is done by sticking a chopstick or toothpick in the middle – if it comes out clean its done. It took two cycles and a little “retain” heat for about 5-10 minutes before mine was done. This is a funny japanese voice announcer version of just normal bread.

Try it out and let me know how it goes in the comment section!