eating well and looking good for less

Monday, March 15, 2010

I'm sorry, I'm plum out of good titles today.

Since there's a popular conception out there that it's impossible to buy/cook/eat healthy and delicious foods when you use coupons (because they're all for junk food, you know!), and since I loooooooooove cooking (and food blogs), I thought it would be fun to create a series that shows some of the meals I create.

I made a delicious black bean and sweet potato stew/burrito filling the other night, but unfortunately the photo I took of it makes it look like a giant pot of sick. It didn't taste like hot vomit, but you'd never know that from the photo. It doesn't help that my flash is broken and the lighting in my house is wholly inadequate. Oh well.

Instead, let me share with you a loaf of bread.

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It is my current favorite, the banana feather loaf from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible. You can find a recipe here. (I replace all of the all purpose flour in the starter with whole wheat, for a fluffy whole wheat sandwich loaf.) Although this is a bread with banana in it, it is not the dense, sweet cakey loaf that you think of when you hear "banana bread." It's a light and fluffy sandwich bread, in which mashed banana replaces most of the butter. It has just a hint of banana flavor. It's also pretty inexpensive to make, since it calls for very ripe bananas. Butter is usually at least $2 a pound on sale, twice that if not, and bruised bananas can be had for 19c a lb at my supermarket. I buy up all the manky bananas, just to use here.

I bought about 7 lbs of ripe bananas, and let them sit for a few days. They were finally at the point of use 'em or freeze 'em or else tomorrow you're gonna have to throw them in the compost heap, so I made a quadruple batch of dough and froze the remainder of the bananas.

For this recipe, I like to break out Big Mama, a professional series bowl lift KitchenAid mixer. I am so lucky to have not one, but TWO KitchenAid stand mixers. The pale yellow Artisan tilt-head was a Christmas present from my lovely husband. I found the K5SS for sale on my local Craigslist. She had no bowls or beaters, but was only $35, if I recall correctly. Big Mama handles doughs a lot better than Little Sister (the Artisan), since stiff doughs tend to work the pin out of the tilt-head, and you have to stand there pushing the pin back in the whole time the mixer is kneading.

Big Mama's doing her job.
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Whoa! A quadruple batch of dough is more dough than I thought it was gonna be. No way is that 4-qt dough doubler going to hold that much dough.
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Yeah, the six quart doubler is a much better choice.
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Slightly more than doubled.
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Took it out, folded it, left it to rise again, got a bath. Came back to find I had left it too long, and it had grown like The Blob!
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Shaping! I made two loaves and a bunch of sweet little braided rolls, plus one little mini-roll for my mini-man.
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Time for the yeast to do the rest of its magic!
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Out of the oven! Look at all that yummy bread. Mmm, freshly baked bread. One of the little joys of my life.
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I was going to freeze it, but this bread goes so quickly in my household that I'm not even sure it's worth the effort, since I have no doubt that it'll be gone before it even gets a chance to go stale.

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