Chocolate Banana Cream Pie

Oh man this was such a fail I don't even want to post it, but this recipe is so good I'll share it anyways. It all started with a crazy craving for banana cream pie and lo and behold I had a few brown bananas. It was looking good until I made the pastry cream. It looked thick enough in the pan, but it was just messing with me. It was a runny mess. I hoped it would firm up in the fridge - nope! And I made some whipped cream.... which un-whipped itself. And a fat layer of chocolate. But the crust was delicious.

So when I cut the first slice, the cream slid down and so did the whipped cream.... and then the chocolate sort of melted into it. The pie plate was a funky mess of brown, white and pie crust. It still tasted good, but it was the ugliest pie I have ever made/eaten.

Apple Pie, Apple Jam and Apple Tart

It's raining apples. Let me start from the beginning.... Ilya requested an apple tart for his birthday so I bought a few apples, which turned out to be too much. So I bought a few more apples to make miniature apple pies... and I STILL had some apples left over so I made some apple jam.

My first time making jam and despite boiling ALL the peels and leftover apple bits my jam would not thicken. A night in the fridge helped a little, but it was still a soupier jam than I would've liked. I have to work on this- Summer 2011 is going to be the summer of jam for me.

The pies were delicious and cute! The apple tart really was the simplest apple tart ever. There's very little sugar in the apples so it was rather tart, not sure if I like that or not... But if you find yourself with a lot of apples, give these recipes a try.

Whole Wheat Brownies and Apple Pie Ice Cream

In an attempt to be more healthy I bought white whole wheat flour. I've been using it in regular APF recipes- usually substituting 1/4 of the APF with whole wheat. This recipe is all whole wheat and somehow it's still good- usually you can still feel the difference (like whole wheat pasta vs regular pasta). Also since a brownie doesn't have to be fluffy or tender it's a good place to start with whole wheat flour. I couldn't tell the difference between this brownie and any other brownie even though I ate it right after baking (the recipe has you wait overnight for the wheat germ to soften).


I had apple pie ice cream at Scoops and it started an apple pie obsession. I don't even LIKE pie- the filling is too sweet and goopy. I ate some form of apple pie every couple of days for 3 weeks- including the tasty apple pie from the Apple Pan. Finally my wallet was bled dry and I set out to make my own apple pie ice cream via this recipe. The only thing it's missing is the crust and it doesn't make that much- it was enough for 4 servings.

Arroz Verde and Strawberry Sorbet

Green rice! Weird, right? I found the recipe from NY Time's recipes for health - I had a huge bag of baby spinach that was about to go bad. It tasted like rice with onions and garlic, not spinach-y, but maybe that's the point. I don't know why my rice looks so wet compared to the NY Times' one- I'm just not very good at making fluffy rice in a pan, that's what rice cookers are for! I'm sure this would be a hit with kids and it's a good way to use up some extra produce.

Sorry this is the only photo I took of the strawberry sorbet! The recipe is once again from David Lebovitz. It's a very strawberry-y sorbet because the only ingredients are strawberries, sugar and salt (and kirsch if you want). I used the full amount of sugar because my strawberries didn't taste very sweet, but it came out to be too sweet- I added lemon juice to balance it out again.

Citrus Salad

I ate at Chez Panisse Cafe in February, using my sister's birthday as an excuse to eat here :) I called to make reservations exactly 2 months before, although they also take them through Open Table. It is not cheap, but it was worth it. The food was delicious and the staff was attentive. The prices... well it's not an everyday place (for me at least).

the Chez Panisse Cafe salad

I ordered their citrus salad with crab toasts. I've never been a big fan of citrus in salad, but this seemed so right. The crab on little toasts didn't hurt either. The combination of creamy avocado and sweet citrus stayed with me after the dinner, so I set out to make a version at home. I added arugula for some spiciness and heft so it could be a meal.

I used organic baby arugula, blood oranges, oranges, grapefruits, avocado, extra virgin olive oil and sea salt. That's it. Just supreme the fruit or slice horizontally (this is how chez panisse did it, but it was easier to for me to eat the supremes). I liked how the pieces of avocado weren't sliced into neat shapes, but in sort of organic shapes, like they just happened to fall off the pit onto my plate so I tried to do the same with a spoon.

How to supreme:
(btw I can't stop cutting fruit like this! I usually peel grapefruits section by section, but this is so much faster)

Slice off the top and bottom. (I use a ralphs bag for trash so the juice doesn't drip everywhere)

The slice vertically, going with the curve of the fruit. You can do small sections at once as long as you get the white pith off.



The third part I don't have a picture of because my hands were dripping with fruit juice at this point, but you will have a big naked ball of grapefruit. Hold the fruit in one hand and the knife in the other and cut each section out, leaving the bits of skin behind. That probably didn't help, so watch this video instead. Don't worry about wasting fruit, you'll be squeezing what's left into the salad.

Here I just sliced the fruit horizontally, instead of with the sections.

I used about a handful of arugula to half an orange, half a grapefruit, a whole blood orange (mine were small), half an avocado, all the fruit juice I could squeeze out, a pinch of salt and a heavy dosing of extra virgin olive oil.