Bread

Banana Nut Bread

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I’m horrified to report that as a child, I didn’t care for banana bread. I don’t know what about it displeased me, but frankly, I was a fairly picky eater for many years and shunned off a number of foods that I now find delicious. Lately, we’ve been on a bit of a banana kick in our house, but we inevitably end up with a couple of bananas that reach their prime too quickly and end up getting blacker and more shriveled on the counter as the days go by. Fortunately, the cooking gods have a perfect solution for this problem. As bananas ripen and their sweetness becomes far too over-powering to eat them on their own, they become the perfect mix in for a loaf of sweet, tangy, breakfast bread.

There are a few things I really like about making banana bread. One, I hate wasting food, so I find it extremely satisfying to re-purpose over-ripe fruit to make something new and magical out of them. Two, this old recipe (given to me from my mother, who got it from HER great-grandmother) is extremely straight forward. The ingredients are quite basic, and the instructions are fast and easy. No complicated folding, alternating, sifting, or resting required.

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Egg & Avocado on Toast

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Avocado and Egg Toasts
There are so many magical things you can do with an egg. Having grown up with them almost exclusively scrambled, hard-boiled, or whipped into cake batter, I’ve recently worked on expanding my egg repertoire at breakfast. Sometimes I’ll roll them up in breakfast burritos, other mornings I’ll toss them on an English muffin, and some mornings I’ll make one of these beauties.

But on super-special mornings, I’ll buy a precious avocado and smear it across toast to a beautiful, green canvas for a gently fried egg.

Breakfast is coming
Mash the avocado
I’ve loved avocados for a long time, but I was previously skeptical of their ability to translate to breakfast. Lord, I was so wrong. The flavor and texture of the avocado and the egg together are fantastic. The avocado needs no additions, though admittedly, I did try mixing in salsa one day, and while it was delightful, I still preferred it all by itself.

Avocado on toast
The eggs, while you’re smashing avocado, fry gently with their yolks unbroken. If you’re not a fan of runny eggs, don’t worry, just break the yolks with a fork and cook them a bit longer on the second side for a firm yellow center.

Pretty pretty eggs!
Finishing the egg frying
Breakfast is almost ready!
This simple breakfast is super-quick for rushed weekday mornings when you want to pretend, just for a minute, that it’s already the weekend. And it’s fancy enough even for the weekend. Why go out for breakfast when you can stay in your pajamas and have this?

Avocado Egg Toasts


Egg & Avocado on Toast

Makes 2 servings

1/2 an avocado
1/2 T butter
2 eggs
seasoned salt
black pepper
2 slices of bread

Scoop the avocado out of the skin into a bowl. Crush the avocado with the back of a fork until it is mostly crushed. Heat a frying pan  over medium heat. Once warm, add the butter to the pan and coat the bottom of the pan as it melts. Crack the eggs into the pan without breaking the yolks, keeping the eggs separate. Sprinkle lightly with seasoned salt and black pepper.

While the eggs cook, toast the bread and smear avocado evenly over both pieces. After eggs have cooked for about two minutes, flip carefully with a spatula and sprinkle the opposite side lightly with black pepper. After about 30 seconds, gently lift the eggs onto the toasts, placing them on the avocado.

Serve and enjoy immediately.

Egg in a Hole

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Egg in a Hole for Breakfast

It’s entirely possible that I’m the last person to arrive at this party, but these days I find I really, really like soft-cooked eggs. Growing up I thought I only liked scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and deviled eggs (who doesn’t?) but recently, I’ve discovered the pleasure of the slightly runny yolk.

And THIS, it turns out, is the best way I’ve found to enjoy it. I feel a little generous even calling this a recipe because it’s SO quick, SO easy, and amazingly, deliciously good.

Simple ingredients
I’ve seen this recipe with a number of different names. Egg in a Hole, Frog in a Hole, Egg in the Middle… but the principle remains the same. You take a piece of bread. And you punch a hole in it. And then you put an egg in the middle and cook. Simple!

Making the hole
I like using a round cookie cutter for this, but you could get cutesy and use a heart, a square, or whatever shape you want. The important thing is to not make it too small. Trust me, if there isn’t enough hole, the egg will just overflow and not cook and you won’t be able to flip it and all will be ugly for your breakfast.

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Whole Wheat English Muffins

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Whole Wheat English Muffins

I don’t eat a lot of sandwich bread. Brad can finish off a loaf of bread in three or four days, even faster if he’s trying to eat at home. I, on the other hand, have a tough time getting through even half a loaf before it takes a turn for the moldy.

I’ve always tended to prefer my breads in other forms. Tortillas, bagels, biscuits, cornbreads, and baguettes are much more likely to appeal to me than a loaf of sandwich bread. And more recently, English muffins.

Homemade English Muffins

Considering that I love finding ways to replace my store-bought staples with homemade versions, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I really haven’t spent a lot of time focusing on breads. I do have some go-to recipes for quite a few quick breads, but not many that I cook on a regular basis (the dramatic exception being my favorite, favorite cornbread, which ends up on my menu quite frequently).  So when I ran across a recipe for this, my current bread-of-choice, I decided it was time.

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Mini Cheddar Swirl Buns

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Cheddar Swirl Buns

The internet is full of food blogs, and though I’ve been a bit busy for leisurely reading lately, I read quite a few of them. I love to see what other bloggers are cooking, writing, and photographing; each one is hugely inspiring. One of my favorites — I adapt quite a few recipes from her posts — is Smitten Kitchen, crafted by the clever, snarky, and talented Deb Perelman. Her site is gorgeous, her archives well-organized, and if you’ve never taken a look, I highly recommend it. In fact, Smitten Kitchen was the first food blog I ever read, and was a major source of inspiration for me to start a food blog of my own.

Today is a special day here at 30 Pounds of Apples… it’s my two-year blogoversary! And to celebrate, I have a copy of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook — signed by Deb Perelman herself — to give away to one of you!

Lots of tabs

Last fall, Deb’s work jumped out of the internet and onto my bookshelf when she released a cookbook. After receiving a copy as a Christmas gift from my fabulous sister, I spent quite a bit of time and many post-its paging through her book marking up recipes I wanted to try. And this one, for these luscious, savory breakfast buns, was at the top of the list.

Cooking from the book!

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Quick & Easy Cornbread

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As a junior in college, I moved out of the dorms and into my first apartment. I was thrilled to flex my baby culinary muscles beyond what they could make in a microwave or a contraband toaster, so my friend and I marched to the grocery store to see what there was to see. And what there was to see was Jiffy corn muffin mix, for twenty cents a box. We bought about a dozen boxes and a 2-pack of cheap muffin tins so that each of us could make cornbread at any hour of any day with our new-found kitchens.

Several years have passed, and my kitchen has come a long way since those first cornbread-baking days (though I still have that very same muffin tin). I still make this tasty treat quite a lot, though I haven’t bought a box of the Jiffy for years. Why? Because I discovered it’s just as simple to make it from scratch as it is from a mix. Seriously.

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Pesto Pinwheel Pizza Bread

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I frequently lament that I need another freezer. We have your standard apartment fridge-and-freezer combo, but our freezer is, shall I say, stuffed. Filled to the brim. There are many reasons for this. I have given up on buying chicken breast and now buy the whole dang bird, break it down, and separate the parts into meal-size portions. I capture strawberries at their peak ripeness, freeze them on cookie sheets, then bag them up to use in winter months when the only berries to be found are the imposters at the grocery store. Insanely, I recently made enough soup to open a deli and froze most of it because really, who wants soup in 95° weather?

Oh, and last summer, after foolishly planting seven basil plants that plotted to take over the world, it was all I could do to keep up with it by tossing it in the food processor with some nuts, garlic, parmesan, and a glug or two of olive oil before freezing it in my ice cube trays to make an army of pesto cubes. (Finding actual ice in our freezer is, coincidentally, impossible. Icy beverage lovers, beware.)

And then there are the pizza doughs. I made about twenty of them in the afterglow of my homemade mozzarella cheese experiment this spring with the leftover whey, and may have over-estimated the value of their convenience in relation to my precious freezer real estate.

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Breakfast Crostinis

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Weekend!

Weekend!

This is one of those rare weekends when I have not a single show to work. I love working in performing arts, but oooooh how I do relish these weekends with minimal events.


I feel like a superhero the Friday before a full weekend. So many potential things to do… elaborate cooking projects! Sleeping in! Planting seeds! Reading on the porch!

And of course, the opportunity to make fancy breakfasts. Or at least something fancier than a poached egg and an apple, my normal morning fare.

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Potica

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January.

Generally quiet, cold, and frugal, it’s never been my favorite month. The anticipation of the holidays has passed, and the next break seems distant. But I’m still juuuuuuuuust close enough to December that I am still savoring the memories of a holiday baking project conducted in my parents’ kitchen.

Potica (pronounced po-tee-tza) is one of those recipes that my grandma made rarely but talked of often as a favorite family treat. It apparently is known by many names and varies dramatically depending on which eastern European recipe you happen to be following. To create this spiral nut bread, a sweet dough is rolled extremely thin and slathered with a mixture of butter, pecans, and sugar before it bakes into lovely loaves, fitting for a simple breakfast or a stunning gift.

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Cheddar Pepper Garlic Biscuits

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I doubt flying home will ever get old. Stepping off the plane into the cool, breezy mountain air, encountering several people I know (or at least know of) on a quick grocery stop before we head out of town, watching the peaks I’ve grown up with becoming larger and larger as we drive home.

Since I left for college, my parents have sent me pictures of first snows, sunrises, and pretty clouds nestled around those peaks, and I never tire from seeing them. This morning is no different, after a night of fresh snow.

Comfort. Major.

But you know what else is comfort major? Hint: starts with cheddar, ends with biscuits.

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