Banana-nanna Bread

What do you with 6 over ripe bananas?  Why make Banana-nanna Bread of course!  This is by far the best Banana Bread I've ever had. 
Its perfectly moist and is packed with bananas so you get the full flavor of the fruit.

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp kosher salt (or 1/4 tsp table salt)
1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2 1/2 cups mashed overripe bananas (about 4 bananas)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan.  

In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and brown sugar. Stir in eggs and mashed bananas until well blended. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture; stir until well combined.  Pour batter into prepared loaf pan.

Bake in preheated oven for 60 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into center of the loaf comes out clean. Let bread cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.

I love using my Pampered Chef loaf pan for this.  The kids LOVE this bread warm with some butter.

Korean BBQ - Kalbi

Korean BBQ - Kalbi, originally uploaded by jadenhair.

Saturday night we prepared a Korean BBQ feast for our friends. This is Kalbi - which is grilled short ribs. I ran out of kimchee for the photo! Traditionally, you take a lettuce leaf, place rice, a piece of meat and kimchee, roll it up and eat. I enjoy using seasoned seaweed instead of the lettuce. I love the crunch and saltiness of the seaweed! Recipe will come soon.  

I'm using my new macro lens that my husband bought for me for Christmas. I still have to work on the lighting.  My next purchase will probably be some lights on a stand so that I can control the shadows and highlights better.  I would have liked to get the grains of rice in the shot better, but the sunlight-through-window created a glare on the white rice.  And darn! This pic would have been perfect with some kimchee but my friend Mac chowed down!  This pic was taken the next day after our dinner.

The biggest challenge I'm facing is once I'm done preparing a meal, its TIME TO EAT! Not time to take out the camera and fiddle with the zoom and fuss about the lighting.  So half the time I forgot to take the picture, and the other half of the time, there aren't any LEFTOVERS to take a pic of.  I had also made Chap Chae (Korean noodle dish), but didn't have any left to photograph.  I'm going to have to re-think my whole food photography strategy!

Tapioca Pearls with Sweet Coconut & Cantelope

This is a recipe from my Mom - she used to serve this in the summer time to cool off.  Usually its made with honeydew, but the cantelope was on sale, ripe and smelled so fresh!  This isn't a very well-known dessert in Asian American restaurants, but it can be found in dim-sum eateries in Hong Kong as a perfect ending to a meal.

We served this as dessert after our Korean BBQ feast.  It was just the right dessert to enjoy to cool us down after all the smoky heat of BBQ.  

Tapioca Pearls with Sweet Coconut & Cantelope
2/3 cup Tapioca (tapioca pearls - not the instant stuff!  I used the small size)
1 cup whole milk
2 cups coconut milk (full fat)
4 cups water
1 1/2 cups sugar
Fruit: honeydew or cantelope, diced small

Bring water and sugar to boil. Turn heat down to low, add the milk and stir.  Once the mixture is almost back to a boil, turn off the heat.  Add the coconut milk and stir.  Remove from heat and cool in refrigerator.

While coconut milk mixture is cooling, soak tapioca pearls in cold water for 20 minutes. The pearls will expand a little and turn bright white.  Bring 4 cups of water to a boil - and add the tapioca pearls.  Stir constantly for 2 minutes.  The pearls will turn translucent.   Turn off the heat and drain the pearls in a fine colander.  Use cold running water to rinse the pearls and stop the cooking process.  Set the pearls aside until ready to serve.  

When ready to serve, ladle the coconut milk into each bowl, add a spoonful of tapioca and top with diced fruit.  Enjoy!

Some Notes  
Don't boil the coconut milk - it makes it oily.  For curries, its fine, because its a hot spicy dish. But for a cool, simple dessert, you need to make sure that the heat is turned off before stirring.

Don't add the tapioca or fruit until right before serving. If you add it in and let it sit, the dish will become bitter.  Why? I don't know....my momma said so!

Use full fat coconut milk. I rarely use lite because its just not worth it.  Save your calories on something else, but not the coconut milk!  I also get my coconut milk at an Asian market. I've tried other brands at regular supermarkets, but they never are as full flavored, thick and rich as the Thai brands. The brand that I consistently reach for is "Chaokoh."

Tapioca pearls come in different sizes - I like using small size pearls, it goes really nicely with finely diced honeydew or cantelope.  

Other variations:  Use canned lychee or diced mangoes instead.  Top the dessert with shaved coconut.  Add ginger to the coconut milk mixture (grate the ginger on a rasp or a traditional Japanese ginger grater, squeeze the pulp and only use the juice.  
there is nothing more annoying than getting ginger fibers stuck in your teeth!)

Brothers

IMG_2823, originally uploaded by jadenhair.

Hi, I haven't posted in a while. Its been very very busy here at the business (which is great!) but leaves me very little time for fun things like keeping up with this blog.

Here are some pics of the boys! I'm also busy designing a new website just for my cooking and posting of recipes.