#recipe test

[sadyew]

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⎯──﹏﹏゛ ➢⠀֦ like σr reblog ™️᷃ ᩁʿ⠀; ⏨ ᅟᅟ᤺⏱ʿ ⠀切る ⋮⠀⠀🍴⠀ ༦⠀♡ֶ᪶ ⠀ˀ⠀﹏﹙v.⠀𝖋̇𝗅̫𝗈𝗐𝖾𝗋 ⠀ ᭧⠀٫⠀▒᤹

[sunsetsmakebeans]

Dark Chocolate and Banana muffins

[thegothiclibrary]

Frankenstein’s Berry Bites—A Gothic Cookbook Recipe Test

Frankenstein’s Berry Bites—A Gothic Cookbook Recipe Test

As you may remember, a few weeks ago I hosted a guest post by Ella Buchan, one of the co-authors of A Gothic Cookbook, on the role of food in Gothic literature. A Gothic Cookbook, by Ella Buchan and Alessandra Pino, with illustrations by Lee Henry, is currently in development and being crowdfunded on Unbound (read to the end of this post for a discount code you can use on your pledge!). The book…

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[babyloncandle]

Palak paneer recipe

https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/palak-paneer/ Recipe was tasty but could have used more flavor and don’t cook it in the cast iron skillet next time. Don’t be afraid to make more sauce, too!

[babyloncandle]

Palak paneer recipe

https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/palak-paneer/ Recipe was tasty but could have used more flavor and don’t cook it in the cast iron skillet next time. Don’t be afraid to make more sauce, too!

[ovenfood]

Recipe 2: myrecipes.com’s Kale, Apple, and Almond Chicken Salad (except it’s fish)

It’s gotten really hot here in the last week, so I decided a salad might be the way to go! (I needed the oven anyway, joke’s on me)

myrecipes.com’s Kale, Apple and Almond Chicken Salad

First thing I did was find a pound of Steelhead trout (looks a lot like salmon, tastes a little less fishy) for half off...so I swapped that out instead of chicken. I’m gonna post the nutrition values for the recipe as shown with chicken. If you sub, the MFP recipe builder is a great help for your nutrition information!

There’s the fish cooked up in the background. doing that means a whole step of the recipe was skipped re: marinating and cooking the chicken lol (are you testing recipes or not?!)

Cooking the steelhead was as easy as putting it in the oven, and setting it for 12 minutes and coming back after prepping everything else. Had to toast the almonds, but that’s just keeping an eye on them. Almonds burn very easily. Now I have some spare toasted almonds too!

Making the rest of the salad was just chopping, measuring, and whisking. Then throwing everything in a bowl!

As for taste, the dressing is lemony but not too strong. The salad feels light but it’s very filling between the meat and the almonds. Very crunchy, I liked it quite a bit!

                                                         tasty greens!

I think you could sub any protein you prefer into this one, though for me beef would be a little heavy. Also if you don’t like kale, or like more than one note in your greens some arugula or spinach could be good additions!

PROS:

Easy

Some substitutions wouldn’t hurt it 

Filling

Good for summer - can make the warm stuff the night before

“Superfoods and Antioxidants” if you’re into buzzwords ;D

CONS: 

For a salad it does take a little extra time with cooking the meat

I can’t really think of another con. Recipe was written easy to follow

Rating: Tasty and would suggest it but would probably forget to make it a second time/10

Nutrition provided on recipe for 3oz chicken and 2 cups salad (1 serving) (always remember I’m not a nutrition expert, just someone cooking through the internet, one hopefully healthy recipe at a time. Always do your own nutrition research if you have questions.)

Calories 318

Fat 20.6g

Satfat 3g

Monofat 12.9g

Polyfat 3g

Protein 20g

Carbohydrate 14g

Fiber 4g

Cholesterol 81mg

Iron 2mg

Sodium 447mg

Calcium 159mg

Sugars 6g

Est. added sugars 0g

[ovenfood]

Recipe 1: eatwell101.com’s Tomato Spinach Shrimp Pasta

I enjoy food, a lot, so the idea of calorie counting was something that worried me until I realized I could just cook things that weren't filled with butter and whole cows. CRAZY.

Disclaimers: sometimes I have to substitute ingredients because of the kitchen i'm working with and I tend to double recipes that look small because while I'm trying to eat less and better...the other people in this house are not. But I'll put in the information as I see it on the recipes I pull from the internet!

That said, today's recipe!

Eatwell101's Tomato Spinach Shrimp Pasta

I don't want to post a million in progress shots or talk about how my 4 year old just loves this dish on a saturday during Summer or all that. For one thing, I have no 4 year olds or children of any kind!

You can get that sort of food blogging from the recipes I'm trying out. I DO want to give my personal review of what I thought about making it and how it tastes

Gathering everything beforehand and cutting or prepping helps cooking time a LOT.

Making this recipe was incredibly simple. I think the only thing I had to cut up was the mint (subbed for basil we didn't have)

The thing I have to suggest heavily is cook your pasta beforehand! This recipe has it as step three, but boiling the water and all that takes so long that the rest of your meal will be overdone and cold before you can finish! Terrible.

Also, re: shrimp, a lot of recipes involving shrimp tend to give a time to cook them, but using your eyeballs is a lot better. 5 minutes for shrimp can be a lot. Once they're pink and just opaque and curling a little bit they're good to go for me. I suggest watching them instead of setting up a timer so they can be cooked as you want them.

Maybe i'll get better at food pics >.> maybe

PROS:

Easy

Can sub chicken or fish or any protein. This isn't a dish made or broken by shrimp

Filling meal. (I ate about half what I would have eaten before I joined MyFitnessPal and I was still full after)

CONS:  

the website makes you pay actual money for the nutrition information. (I'll be avoiding them in the future) I loaded the recipe into MFP to get the cal count.

Bland except the shrimp*

*this recipe suffered from the idea that the spices used on the shrimp would carry over into a whole lotta pasta from the same pan. This is how you get well-spiced shrimp and super extra bland spaghetti/penne/other pasta brand pasta that tastes a little like last night's pasta from the fridge.

Rating:  Edible but bland/10

-----

Remember to research all nutrition values listed for yourself as well. I'm also just a member of MFP learning how to eat better and I am not a licensed nutritionist in any way. Just poking internet recipes that are labeled "healthy" and seeing how they cook and how they taste :D

Nutrition Facts (from MFP's Recipe Importer) Servings 4.0 Amount Per Serving  Calories 423 % Daily Value* Total Fat 16g 25% Saturated Fat 1g 5% Monounsaturated Fat 6g Polyunsaturated Fat 1g Trans Fat 0g Cholesterol 120mg 40% Sodium 147mg 6% Potassium 62mg 2% Total Carbohydrate 47g 16% Dietary Fiber 5g 18% Sugars 0g Protein 22g 43% Vitamin A 34% Vitamin C 41% Calcium 7% Iron 7%

* The Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet, so your values may change depending on your calorie needs. The values here may not be 100% accurate because the recipes have not been professionally evaluated nor have they been evaluated by the U.S. FDA.

[foodinliterature]

Oh good god.

I’m not sure where to begin with this one, you guys - I’d been planning on doing recipe tests from books for awhile, and had initially intended to make this one much later in the rotation than I did. I’m not a sandwich fan generally, and I’m especially not a fan of ham and banana as a flavor combination. (Is anyone?)

But sometimes you go to the grocery store and things are just conveniently located by the checkout, and you hear the ghost of Florence A Cowles saying YES. 

PSSSST, MAKE ONE OF MY STRANGE SANDWICHES.

All 1001 of them. I’m not sure why you’d need this many sandwiches, but I can confirm that she does run out of ideas pretty quickly.

I’m not the first historical food blog to cover this book - Four Pounds Flour did an amazing recipe test back in 2013 - but I was here specifically for the HAMNANA. 

The hamnana, the ham banana, whatever weird combo of flavors this is, has haunted my life for over five years. I am fascinated and repulsed by it. Every time I have a conversation with someone about historical and/or vintage food, I can’t help circling back to the hamnana flavor profile - a lot of times it’s the only vintage recipe anyone’s familiar with, because it’s become a little bit of a meme. Infamously, Paula Deen made a truly disgusting looking casserole with ham, cheese and bananas. I was privileged (cursed?) enough to finally try ham and banana with hollandaise for myself at a retro food party I hosted last summer. In 6 years or so of reading about and researching this stuff, it was the only thing I’ve never been able to finish even a single bite of. And I regularly, willingly, eat bizarre aspics and hotdishes made out of piles of canned spaghetti. It’s legitimately that bad.

Ah, my nemesis. We meet again.

Naturally, earlier this week when @steamchef​ and I were discussing the White House cookbook, I mentioned that there was a recipe for mutton and bananas, and the conversation turned back to THE HAMNANA. 

Thankfully (or regrettably), 1001 sandwich recipes didn’t fail me, and there was a recipe for hamnana sandwich. 

Now, we can’t fully blame Florence for this one. This is a compilation book, and several recipes in here match the text from other cookbooks on archive.org or from my own collection. I’m pretty sure this sandwich is taken from “Bananas in the Modern Manner,” revised 1930, or an earlier banana growers’ promotional cooking pamphlet. There seems to have been a bit of a craze around the 1930s-1940s for meat and bananas as a pairing. The cookbook of the US Navy, both the 1944 and 1945 editions, lists Ham Banana Rolls on page 175 as a food that would’ve been regularly provided to sailors. Yikes.

A banana cart full of Gros Michel bananas, in Detroit.

It’s important to note, for fairness’ sake, that these would’ve been the Gros Michel banana, which went extinct in the 1960s. So there’s no real way one could recreate exactly what the original writers of these recipes intended, but we can do our best!

(Image from Four Pounds Flour, original text from 1001 Sandwiches by Florence A Cowles.)

Some of the hallmarks of Gros Michel vs Cavendish are:

- sweeter

- more complex flavor profile, described alternately as “floral” and “tangy”

- softer texture

- more notable “banana” smell

Additionally, most people in their mid-20s and 30s, at least according to sellers interviewed by the New York Times, currently prefer a firm textured Cavendish banana that’s just barely past green. 

So for our experiment, we’re assuming that Baby Boomers not only preferred a riper banana, but were working with a sweeter, slightly more complex fruit. I happened to have a fairly overripe red banana in my fruit basket, which I thought was acceptably close enough for making a sandwich with. I found several sources referencing The Cabbagetown Store by John V McAree that claimed red bananas were imported to and sold in Toronto even prior to the Gros Michel, but no other primary sources to confirm this. But let’s assume this could be historically accurate.

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, LET’S TRY THIS WEIRD BANANA SANDWICH.

Note: This recipe test mostly follows the first variation, omitting the lettuce and using the toasted bread suggestion from the original recipe. I used premade ham sandwich spread rather than canned deviled ham, as I needed to purchase it for another recipe test later this week. I didn’t notice much of a significant difference in taste between this and the deviled ham.

The recipe didn’t clarify how much ham to be used with how much banana, so I kind of guesstimated a little bit. An entire banana seemed like a bit much for one person. So, 1/2 banana : 3 tablespoons of ham salad. Not pictured: a squeeze of lemon.

Mmm. Kind of like cat food. You feel that nagging, tingling feeling at the back of your neck? That’s your self-preservation instinct telling you to please, please not mix this deviled ham with this banana.

All mixed up.

At this point I was starting to really, seriously, doubt my choices. The last time I tried this combo I nearly threw up. I frantically sent a couple selfies of myself, afraid to eat it, for posterity’s sake. If I somehow died from the hamnana, the world deserved to see my last moments.

Applied to toasted white bread. I’m not sure there’s a good way to photograph or present this - by its nature, it just kind of looks like chewed gum. I understand now why so much of the recipe required either hiding it under a second slice of bread, or adding lettuce or sautéed banana slices. You have to distract from the weird not-quite-pate texture somehow, especially if you were planning on serving this for guests at tea. 

I wasn’t planning on having guests though - just myself and the hamnana sandwich. A+ plating, me.

WAS IT GOOD?

Weirdly? It kind of was.

The lemon juice was essential to making this edible, as was toasting the bread. There’s no way this would’ve been remotely okay texture or tastewise on soggy bread, without the added brightness from the lemon. There’s also absolutely no way this would work with a less ripe, less sweet banana. The chunks of banana would be way too noticeable, and adding the slightly sour flavor of almost green Cavendish would have been totally disgusting.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d eat it again. It’s never going to be my favorite sandwich, but if you don’t think about the ingredients too hard, it’s an interesting flavor. It’s incredibly difficult to even tell that the banana’s there - it seems to be mostly in this to cut the saltiness of the ham spread, which is definitely necessary. After a few bites, when the bread got soggier, I added potato chips as a topping, and that mostly solved it. I imagine this is best with only a very thin spread of the filling on the toast, and served immediately.

I’d love to try it with the buttered toast triangles and sautéed bananas, and may do so later this week.

I will note, however, that if you have a sensitive stomach or problems with texture, this isn’t the sandwich for you. I had a bit of a hangover today, and this was erring on the side of much too rich and much too heavy for me. I was a little nauseous for an hour or so following it.

5/10 stars. Much higher than expected. I’m genuinely surprised.