Milk Calendar Mondays: Kids Crazy Meatball Wraps

Yes, I'm cutting it close. No I didn't forget or bail out of this month's recipe. Just poor time management.

I thought, for a change of pace, it would be good to have someone (who's not me) who ate the meal actually report on it...just in case anyone's thinking I've lost my objectivity with this project.

So...here's the exbf with his take on this month's recipe. My comments are bracketed and in pinky-mauve.

Jasmine has been working her way through the recipes on the Milk Calendar and I have the distinct honour (or shall I say I seem to be paying a penance for things I’ve done and have yet to do) by playing the occasional role of guinea-pig.

I have to admit that while I like her cooking, I dread meals taken from Milk Calendar recipes. The mere mention of those words strike terror in my stomach because that it’s apparent the Milk Calendar’s approach seems to be to take some innocent recipe whose original form involves no milk and inflict dairy upon it. They seem to have little regard for how this affects the taste or texture. The end results are usually nearly tasteless and only barely digestible.

Since Jasmine’s cooking is usually a lot better than that, I have to assume the problem is the recipes and not the cook.

I would expect that this does not need to be said but if you are at all lactose intolerant, avoid the Milk Calendar recipes. After many I’ve tried, I can say the same caveat goes if you have functional taste buds combined with any level of desire to use them while eating.

This month’s offering was Kids’ Crazy Meatball Wraps which was meat-balls in a ketchup and I assume milk-based sauce that had corn in it in a wrap (Jasmine: yes, I chose the ketchup version...after so many disappointing meals I wasn't going to use my homemade tomato sauce, the good bottled tomato sauce or my homemade ketchup) :

“A fun dinner will get the kids excited and parents will be thrilled to make an easy, nutritious meal that everyone will love. Serve crisp veggie sticks on the side.”

The title of the recipe is like “employee empowerment”: if they have to tell you that they’re empowering their employees, they aren’t. In the same way, if they tell you it’s “crazy” and a “meal that everyone will love” it isn’t insane (Jasmine: Well, I question the thought processes behind mixing milk with ketchup and corn and carrots--exactly how much sugar should one have in a meal?) and you’ll probably be hard pressed to find a group of people who value good flavoured food to love it…choke it down, maybe.

I swear they’ve got a time warp back there to the 1950s or 1960s. It struck me as something a cautiously adventurous cook circa 1963 [1] who had heard of a burrito, but who had never actually seen one and who was a bit worried their families might reject anything truly exotic, might have come up with. The best one can say for it was that it was inoffensively bland and easy to chew. My favourite part of the meal was the pickles she served with them.

I would recommend this recipe for people easy intimidated by flavour. It might also be suitable for people in a persistent vegetative state, assuming they can handle semi-solid food.


1: Young readers should be grateful that they missed the era in which cutting-edge home-cooked cuisine in Ontario involved such knee-trembling excitement as Jell-O With Things That Are Almost Certainly Food (or at least Food-like) In and Pork Chops Baked to the Consistency of Tent Pegs. The reason Canadians have in recent years tended to be a little chubbier than previous generations is because until the 1970s, a surprising percentage of our food was only barely edible (Jasmine: Hmmm…you seem to forget the processed foods, fast foods and all those other things that the Milk Calendar people apparently want their readers to not rely so heavily upon, but I'd usually gladly take over certain Milk Calendar recipes I've made).


cheers!
jasmine

Daring Bakers: Lavosh crackers and toppings

Note to self: there's a reason you named your stove Beelzebub

Sigh...

You see, he fed me a line and I believed him. He actually made me believe he wasn't demon spawn, he wasn't a product of an unholy alliance between (insert your own despised political party *here*) and (insert your own despised corporate sector *here*), he wasn't put on this planet to convince people that big box prepared processed and cooked takeaway foods really is the way to eat

I thought we had a break through. I stopped cursing at him and he stopped playing with the temps to keep a constant heat. It was a lovely three weeks. I made banana breads, scones and cookies and lost nary a one.

Admittedly, my time management has been in the loo this month. I didn't get around to this month's Daring Bakers' challenge until this morning. Our dearest Natalie of Gluten a Go-Go and Shel from Fishbowl challenged the vast DB masses to make Lavosh crackers and toppings. The lavosh recipe is easy and I will keep it on hand to make again...hopefully with a different stove, whether mine or borrowed

Maybe Beelzebub picked upon my slightly elevated stress levels or he picked up on the urgency of the issue (heck, the post needs to be up today). Maybe he thought he was being taken for granted. I don't know, but he was a naughty boy. Whatever he thought, he played with the temperature dial like a bored teenager with his PSP.

The dough is very simple and easily adaptable to your palate. I had no issues making the ball, passing the window pane test, letting it rise, getting it to double in size or rolling out the dough. I had no issues choosing its flavourings--I chose freshly cracked black pepper, ground salt and sesame seeds. I wound up baking them on two trays...and I'm glad I did.

This is what happened to the first tray. I suppose if I were making cocoa or molasses lavosh, it would be fine...but I wasn't. Yes, I tasted a shard. Apart from the heavy charcoalish notes along with the bonfire-like aromas left in the condo, it was quite tasty.




Here's the second tray. MUCH better. Okay...slightly underdone in spots, but I can live with that. I think next time I'll toast the sesame seeds before sprinkling them on the wet dough.

Same dough. Same oven. Same cooking time.

Sigh.

The second part of the challenge was to make a dip for the crackers. Our lovely hosts suggested salsa. Even though we were recently in the throes of tomato season, I wasn't in the mood to make (or buy) a salsa. Instead, I opened a bottle of my lascivious peach chutney and tried the crackers with it--absolutely delicious.

Yes. It was my breakfast.


To read what the other DBs did with this challenge, take a meander through our blogroll.


cheers!
jasmine

White chocolate banana muffins

It used to be that I'd make banana bread once every four or six weeks-- usually when I found myself with fruit far too overripened even for me (the joke with my parents is that I won't touch bananas until all traces of green have been taken over by black spots and they won't eat bananas with any trace of spotted goodness).

Then all of a sudden I stopped. It's not that I stopped making banana bread--I just stopped buying bananas. I don't know why or exactly when, but I've not had a banana in the house for what seem like ages and ages.

Just as suddenly the bananas reappeared. The first bunch was courtesy of my parents--more spotted than green. I made muffins and they were good. Since then there seems to have been at least one banana in the house.

This week I just couldn't get through them all and they morphed into a gooey-and-slimy-on-the-inside and pitch-like-on-the-outside existence. It would almost be sad if they weren't finding themselves to a better fate. Well..okay, not better...just tasty.

My standard banana bread recipe is from Nigella's How To Be A Domestic Goddess. I've tried others and as good as they are, this one is the one I always come back to. Sometimes I add dried fruit or frozen berries, sometimes nuts, sometimes a combination. This time I decided to reach for my jar of white chocolate chippies.

I'm not a fan of white chocolate--I find it too sweet and even the smallest amount seems to leave me glugging water. I keep it in the house in case I need to make an emergency special cheesecake or I want a visual contrast in some midnight-like chocolatey cookies. But this time the chippies just called out to me from the cupboard (it's amazing how they do that).

The end result was sweeter than I'd prefer--a combination of the bananas, chips and brown sugar--so next time I'd probably lessen the amount of sugar. Friends who've tried them really like them. They're easy and relatively quick and are good with a nice hot cup of tea.

White Chocolate Banana Muffins
adapted from Nigella Lawson's Banana Bread in How To Be A Domestic Goddess

Yield 15 muffins

175g plain flour
1 dspn baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
3/4 tsp salt
125g butter, melted
150g brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
300g mashed overripe bananas
100g white chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 170C/325F; paper the bowls of a cupcake tin.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt. In a separate bowl, mix together the butter and bananas with sugar. Beat in the eggs and vanilla. Fold in the flour mixture, then the chips. Pour into lined tins and bake for 20-30 minutes or until done.


cheers!
jasmine