Bad Bananas Gone Good

This morning, my bananas gave up on life. Maybe it was the interminable winter. Maybe it was avocado envy. Likely it was simply neglect. Truth be told, I'm not much for bananas, but they bring a happy wholesomeness to the kitchen, and so every week they dutifully find their way onto my grocery list.

Traditionally, this would be my cue to round up the baking pantry and whip up some banana bread. You know how it goes. But dream kitchen reno is on hold pending assessment of water damage from the Ice Dam Twins, and my oven, the 1989 original, is frankly not up to the task. It spews black dragon smoke and smells like burning hobbit when disturbed from slumber. I think I'll let it hibernate indefinitely. 

I mean, I'm totally RETRO, man.

Like, how hipster do I look?

TOTALLY hipster.

Why is only the pork fresh?

If you know me, you might say that I'm a person of extremes. I enjoy volatile swings from one end of the spectrum to the other, wind rushing in my hair, bugs splattering in my face. No oven? Fine. How's about the freezer?

And so, with just 2 ingredients and 20 minutes, I set out to resurrect those drama queens into ice cream. Ok, yes, so there's no dairy component, and therefore, technically, it's a sorbet, but bananas are so starchy and dense that they yield a texture much more akin to ice cream, so there!

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Seriously, just 2 ingredients: Bananas, meet almond butter. My banana (of large size) to butter (in TB) ratio = 5:4, but go with your gut! Go heavy, go BOLD, go...bananas ;) Combine in food processor (or blender) and blitz the shit out of it until the constituency is as smooth as milk pudding. Then blitz some more for good measure.

I think the bananas are quite sweet enough on their own, but I'm a savory girl. For you sugar fiends, a couple TB of honey or, my current favorite, agave sweeter, which doesn't have as dominant a taste, should satisfy your sweet tooth. Do NOT use granulated sugar; the crystals will not dissolve, and your ice cream will be crunchy, like sandy scallops. (If you don't have honey or agave, simple syrup to the rescue: equal parts sugar and water; thoroughly dissolve sugar over low heat; cool before using. I always keep some on hand; you never know when iced coffee is eminently necessary.) And of course, any nut butter will do. Peanut, cashew, sunflower, sesame, Nutella, etc. Why yes, I DO have all of these in my pantry currently. In fact, I have a designated nut butter shelf. I unabashedly LOVE nut butters and prefer a very diverse nut butter lineup. Keep giggling, you child.

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Once banana creaming is satisfactory (still giggling?), into the ice cream machine! (Don't have one? No worries! Amendments below.) Churn according to instructions. For my basic Cuisinart, 15 minutes will do. This will fluff the mixture (aaaannnd we're done giggling), giving you a nice airy texture. Pop the mixture into the freezer and let set for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. (Note: Do NOT leave the mixture in the ice cream freezer bowl. You will inevitably scrape and scratch the inside when scooping.)

No ice cream machine? GET ONE. It's hands down the best $40 I spent summer of 2010. There are few culinary feats that yield more pride for the cook and more joy for the glutton than homemade ice cream. You bet I'll be sharing some of my best come summertime (and I'm a Wisco girl, so my ice creams are classically custardy, which is, let's be honest, the only way to be if you're gonna be an ice cream.) But until then, here's what you do.

• Before you throw the bananas into the food pro, peel them and freeze them solid. I suggest breaking them into segments before freezing to give your blades a break.
• Blitz frozen bananas and nut butter as above and set in freezer.
• If you want to go the extra mile, manually aerate the ice cream every 30 minutes during the first 2 hours of freezing time. You can do this with an electric hand mixer or by hand with a sturdy whisk. This will mimic the churning of the ice cream machine.

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Three scoops + Green Tea Kit Kat Bars + Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Almonds. Nuff said.

I like a little salt with my ice cream. In fact, I serve all my ice cream with at least 2 toppings and a flavored sea salt. There is a method to my madness, and there is science to it as well. More on that in a later post. Suffice to say that the salt provides a delicate counterbalance to the sweet decadence. Today's sodium brought to you by Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Almonds (with sea salt and Turbinado sugar).

Dear Bananas,
Let's be honest, this IS your full potential. We wait patiently for you to age, soften, brown, atrophy, and just as your rotting carcass peaks, you are reincarnated, more glorious than you ever were in your unadulterated prime.
Be the phoenix. Accept your fate.
xoxo

Breakfast of Champions

The Morning Routine:

• 6:12 AM: Roll out of bed after multiple attempts by Hubs to coax me up (he has been awake and functioning, like a robot, since 5:30). *scrunchy, grumpy, not-a-morning-person Wex face*
• 6:20 AM: CAFFEINE. Cuisinart programmable machines FTW means the coffee machine is beeping its completion as I stumble downstairs (with just enough control so as not to fall flat). *faint stirrings of life and color in Wex face*
• 6:30 AM: Warm up car. Today is trash and recycling day. Drag respective bins to the curb. Slip on iced-over driveway. Slip again. Once more. *more Wex scrunchy face*
• 6:40 AM: Drop Hubs off at the train station where he will invariably wait between 15–85 minutes in subzero wind chill for the commuter train. *sad Wex face*
• 7:15 AM: Back home. Apollo peeks through the trees on his ascent. The kitchen begins to warm. More coffee + NYTimes.com. Yes, I am liberal and bougie. *unapologetic Wex face*

Sufficiently updated on and depressed by the headlines, I click down the rabbit hole of the food section, a scurried retreat back to my dream-world microcosm where food and love can solve everything. Join me.

• Click: “A Family Affair,” by Mark Bittman, reminiscing about cozy Neapolitan home cooking.
• Click: “A Measured Approach to Cooking,” by Tamar Adler, echoing my carefree, recipes-are-just-guidelines philosophy on cooking.
• Click: “What Happens When Second Graders Are Treated to a Seven-Course, $220 Tasting Meal,” by Jeffrey Blitz, documenting the hilarity and hope of taking little taste buds on a big adventure.

I am one shuffle-ball-change away from being solidly back in my happy place, when this grumpy little face catches my eye.

“Rise and Shine. What kids around the world eat for breakfast.”
Culturally-based cuisine anthropology? I’m IN. Click.

I salivate over Doga and Okyu’s bountiful spreads, which remind me that tahini has been on my grocery list going on a fortnight now, I’m clean out of Nutella, and Lonely Planet Istanbul has been on my bookshelf beckoning since 2002, woefully outdated, and WHEN AM I GOING?? I wonder whether my friend Ya-Hsuan ate groundnut porridge and drank hibiscus juice during her Malawi Fulbright stint. I wonder how the Dutch manage to eat 300 million slices of white bread smothered in chocolate sprinkles annually without astronomical rates of diabetes. And I understand why Tiago, bringing up the rear of this global food porn parade, scowls at his soggy cornflakes and white bread. *same Wex face* when cold cereal is my breakfast fate. Just ask my husband.

And then delight turns to bewilderment. WHERE ARE THE CHINESE BREAKFASTS?? 1.355 billion people, 20% of the world’s population, unrepresented! (Sorry, India, in addition to liberal and bougie, I am also ethnocentric. I leave it to someone better qualified to champion your cause.) We eat breakfast! Savory, sweet, filling Chinese-y breakfast often on the go but never missed.

So how DO the Chinese, who eat just about everything that crawls, swims, or flies (or at least we’ll try), start off their day? Something like this:

Just your average breakfast...

Plain white rice never looked so good.

Double fried = extra crispy.

Never was a tart so tasty!

• Zhou 粥 (rice congee): Boil the shit out of last night’s leftover rice, adding lots of water, until the rice breaks down completely. Dig deep through your fridge, pantry, flavor wheel and top with tastpiration. Chinese favorites: zhacai 榨菜 (pickled vegetables), peanuts, cilantro, pidan 皮蛋  (century egg or preserved egg), xian yadan 咸鸭蛋 (salted duck egg), jiang doufu 酱豆腐 (fermented tofu), rousong 肉松 (pork floss). And for the sweet tooth: red beans in syrup.
  Today: scallions, fermented tofu, Sriracha, and rousong (which I eat by the spoonful, BTW, because it is so weird and magical and delicious).
• Jiaozi 饺子 (dumplings): The Chitalian New Year that keeps on giving.
• Danta 蛋挞 (egg tart): Not part of a traditional Chinese breakfast unless you’re in Hong Kong, these addictive custards came to China by way of Portugal via Macau (forget the casinos, go for the tarts. Note: I'm only vouching for the food version, here, not the occupation).
  Tip of the day: Kam Man’s bakery makes the BEST Portuguese egg tarts I have ever EVER eaten. Earnestly eggy, sinfully smooth, quietly quivering.

Breakfast is an informal affair. Leftovers reheated and wolfed down with negative pomp and circumstance or picked up to go. Every street corner invariably has at least one breakfast vendor ready to supply the hungry hordes with their Breakfast of Champions. Of course, it all varies by region. In the southeast, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, dim sum is the perennial favorite; in the mid-lands of the country, you will find noodles swimming in pork broth, pickles and other salty/sweet accouterments bobbing along; while we northerners prefer less noodly affairs: jiaozi, baozi 包子 (filled buns), rice congee, and we LOVE our youtiao 油条 (fried dough or Chinese crullers).

No matter where you go, you will find chaye dan 茶叶蛋 (tea eggs boiled in a spiced tea/soy broth), fresh doujiang 豆漿 (soybean milk), and douhua 豆花 also doufu nao (tofu pudding) rounding out the mix.

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Homemade soy milk and tea eggs. Almond tofu pudding topped with a 5-minute blueberry ginger compote. And yeah, I got serving bowls with some serious Asian game face. Pudding and bowls courtesy of Kam Man. Place has got my back.

I left China when I was four years old. Memories, real memories I know to be true and not figments of a child’s imagination strung together, are few. Memories like watercolors. Walking with Nainai 奶奶 (paternal grandmother) every morning to the street, milk tin in hand, where we would buy soybean milk from the soybean vendor then youtiao from the youtiao vendor then sometimes jianbing 煎饼 (egg crepe) stuffed with chives from the jianbing vendor. By the time we had completed this 10-step circular waltz and walked back to the apartment, Yeye 爷爷 (paternal grandfather) would have boiled the congee and tea eggs for us, and maybe refried some jiaozi or Chinese frenchtoast (methinks an upcoming weekend post, yes?). Nainai’s palate was blandly unrefined, and she preferred simple foods—steamed buns and rice congee—that were painfully plain. She was a feminist, a qigong master, and a brilliant mind who parceled her time and effort as she saw worthwhile.

And so every morning at exactly the same time, she sat in her chair at the table and ate the same breakfast: alternating dunking youtiao into soybean milk and congee, slurping her liquids and smacking her lips as the Chinese do. And of all the memories I have of her, this is my favorite. 

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Our Chitalian New Year

F YOU, Snowpocalypse. No one and nothing will stand between my dumplings and me. No one. Nothing.

Dear Heavens,

Will you never cease your reign of terror?

• There is the wall of 9ft icicles hanging from the second floor, their tips flirting shamelessly at me through the first-floor kitchen windows, winking refracted sunlight.
• There are the Ice Dam Twins (children’s series pending), springing mirroring leaks in the living room all the way down into the garage, a rave of rotting plaster and molding insulation high on H2O drips.
• There are the roads so neglected by overworked plows, SUVs engage glancing kisses as they pass, and driving so treacherous that dropping Hubs off at the train station is like navigating a minefield.
• There is the mailbox (what mailbox?!), RIP: buried alive under 8ft of snow, our mail on hold until spring.

Do reconsider. Please.
Sincerely,
Wenxiao “Ingalls Wilder” Tiano
Tudor House on the Mass Tundra
February 2015

I am a Wisconsinite in the ways that count: Cheese makes my knees weak. Culver's is my happy place. And GO PACK! Snow and ice and frozen snot don't faze me. Just ask my husband, who might describe my interminable optimism in the face of Snowmygod as unreasonably annoying.

"Why yes, yes I can see that we got three inches of snow last night on top of the 97 and counting, and no, I have no idea where to put it either, and yes, the dams are leaking again, and your commuter train is definitely 85 minutes late again, oh, but look how beautiful the snow is clinging to the trees!"

. . . I could probably turn it down a notch.

But yesterday, Snowmaggedon got me. It got me good. Three inches of wet snow froze overnight into a glistening lacquer, and as we crawled past cars spinning wheels and ostriching in snow banks en route to the train station, my heart and stomach sank.

WHAT ABOUT THE DUMPLINGS?! No shrimp in the house. Nary a nugget of woodear nor water chestnut to be found. Not even a whisper of ground pork (can I even consider myself Chinese?). Plans to Kam Man, the closest Asian grocery store yet 30 minutes drive in the most optimal conditions, had been postponed for an entire week due to weather and road shenanigans, and today was not the day. I am of the Wisco north. Descended from the Mongol hordes. I am fearless and occasionally reckless. I am not suicidal.

But I MUST have dumplings this eve. A Chinese New Year without would shake me to my Chinese core. CNY is THE holiday. Officially a 15-day affair, it is the time when 2 billion-plus passengers journey home from all nooks and crannies of the globe to reunite with their families: the largest human migration in the world. Like moths to flame, we seek the satiation of love gathered in the kitchen, the bliss of communal preparation and shared glutting. As the years of my abstinence from this migration have stretched, preparing and eating this one simple dish--knowing that my family in Wisconsin, in Chicago, in Virginia, in Beijing are sharing this ritual with me--has become a cornerstone of who I am. The happy, humble dumpling, or jiaozi ( 餃子), epitomizes my deepest sentiments for the enigmatic bond between food and family. On this day, it is simply nonnegotiable.

"Necessity is the mother of invention." Truer words could not describe the Great Dumpling Crisis of CNY 2015. I scanned the dwindling protein stock in the fridge, last standing corporals of our weekend run to Shaw's when the roads were yet passable.

• Pork chop: Too lean. Unground. Meat grinder still queuing on my Amazon Wishlist.
• Sprouted tofu: Slim on volume. Medium firmness. Firmness woefully inadequate.
• Ground beef: Greying . . .

UGH. Instead of my pork + shrimp + chive bundles of golden glory, greying. ground. beef. A substitution that almost brought me to the brink of despair.

Almost. I woosa-ed and soldiered on. Because I am a Taurus. Because persistence (and obstinance) flow thick in my veins. Because I am huaqiao (华侨), meaning "Chinese overseas, " and it was mother f-ing Chinese New Year, and I. Would. Have. My. Dumplings.

A peek into the veggie bin: a couple of carrots, a bag of spinach, a box o' baby portobellos.

The haziest flutterings of something were taking shape. Like a dream you try to hold on to, suspending breath and thought to protect the wisps of memory, to shield it from the faintest ripple of disturbance lest it slip away.

• Beef in lieu of pork . . .
• Shredded carrots for water chestnuts . . . (!)
• Sauteéd portobellos for woodears . . . !
• Spinach for chives . . . !!

I was gaining momentum, the dumpling was taking off!!! Can you feel it???!

And then. Then,
I
         saw
                          the
                                         Tub
                                                       of
                                                                  RICOTTA.

And then there was light. (Illustration courtesy of What Mighty Contests.)

Beef bolognese + ricotta dumplings would save the day.

It would not be dramatic nor exaggerating at all to say that I felt like Atreyu defeating the Nothing.
A simultaneous tsunami of relief knowing that I would eat dumplings today--tasty dumplings that would not shame my heritage--and a welling of emotion at the sentimental ingenuity of making Italian dumplings for my Italian-American husband upon our first Chitalian (that's Chinese + Italian, yes, it's a thing) New Year as newlyweds.

Dough made.

Filling prepared.

Wrappers cut and rolled.

Dumplings stuffed and folded.

Into the frying pan.

And, finally, dunked in marinara sauce + balsamic vinegar dipping sauce.

We two sat down and picked up our chopsticks, he and I, and I was happy.

Happy to be eating dumplings. Full stop.
Happy that the dumplings turned out to be so clever (if I do say so myself) and delicious.
Happy to have merged the newest part of me with the oldest part of me so perfectly.
Happy that this humble little thing can completely encapsulate my past, present, and future.

If I make you dumplings, it is because I love you.

新年快乐, 恭喜发财! Happiness and prosperity in the Year of the Sheep, dear ones.