Apple-Cinnamon-Oatmeal Bread, or, Banana Bread without the Bananas

Okay, so I'm pretty fond of making quick breads. Extremely fond. I can make real bread, too, but I don't always have the patience or time for it.

I'd been hankering for some time to try making the Chai-Spiced Apple Oatmeal Bread over at Cheap Healthy Good. However, my recent move to Boston means I'm on a tighter budget and no longer have access to my parents' accumulated baking supplies. I gave it a lot of thought, but I just couldn't justify shelling out 10 bucks for a little jar of cardamom that I only wanted for the one recipe. Nor did I feel like buying honey, as I hardly use that outside of baking recipes that specifically call for it either. I decided to start looking elsewhere for my quick-bread fix, for now-- I'm a fan of adapting recipes to ingredients I have on hand, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't attempt to make chai-spiced bread without chai spices.

This weekend I just happened to spot a quick-breads cookbook for fifty cents at a thrift store. Just what I needed-- there had to be something in there I could make.

Flipping through it, though, I realized that although the book contained lots of lovely recipes that I will be trying for many years to come, they didn't quite have the recipe I was craving right now. I wanted apples. I wanted oatmeal. Maybe a little spice. But I wanted a savory, hearty, grainy kind of bread, one I could have alongside a thick stew-- not a sweet dessert bread like the recipes for cinnamon-raisin bread or blueberry bread. Pumpkin bread or gingerbread seemed a better choice for autumn. Other intriguing recipes contained lots of ingredients I didn't have on hand, and half the point was to make something without going on an epic and expensive shopping expedition. What was I to do?

That's when I flipped back to the recipe for Old-Fashioned Banana Bread. This one I had mentally ruled out right away. I have an intense aversion to bananas; always have, always will. For whatever reason, bananas are a food I just cannot eat in any capacity.

But being an experienced baker, for an amateur, I know that any fruit puree can work as a substitute for oil or shortening in a recipe: in banana bread, mashed bananas are used, but that doesn't mean you couldn't substitute applesauce if you wanted to. Banana bread without the bananas? Oh, this was sounding good.

Using the banana bread recipe as a reference for amounts and baking time, I cobbled this together with my own inventive flair.

Apple-Cinnamon-Oatmeal Bread

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup oat bran
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk or buttermilk substitute (1/2 teaspoon lemon juice plus enough milk to fill to 1/2 cup mark; let stand)
1/4 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup rolled or quick oats (not instant)
1 1/2 cup applesauce, unsweetened


Preheat oven to 375 F.

In a small bowl, combine flour, oat bran, baking powder, white sugar, and salt.

In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and frothy; stir in buttermilk, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Mix well.

Stir in oats until combined, then add the brown sugar. Make sure there are no lumps! Add in flour mixture slowly. Finally, beat in the applesauce.

Pour batter into greased and floured 9.5" loaf pan. Bake in the preheated oven for 50-55 minutes until edges begin to come away from pan and toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. Bread will be very hot and steamy; allow to cool or it may fall apart upon cutting. Close your eyes and enjoy.

Grilled Peaches

This is the easiest recipe yet on The Weekly Delicious, but the results are just as wonderful as the others.

Perfectly ripe peaches are my favorite food. The texture, and flavor, the beautiful perfume... mmm. Because I love good peaches so much, bad peaches are a huge disappointment. They piss me off irrationally. Instead of warm and juicy and sweet, they are dry and grainy and sour and sad. Bad peaches go straight from unripe to rotten. What a waste of peach potential! However, there is a way to make lying no-good excuses for peaches into something wonderful.

After you are done cooking something delicious on the grill, cut your inferior peaches in half, and cover the cut sides with sugar. Put these skin-side down on the grill. If the grill is still quite hot, put them around the edges, away from the direct heat. You want to cook the peaches through without scorching the skin too badly. Do not flip them. They will bubble so happily, eager to finally live up to their potential. The sugar will melt and macerate the fruit as it cooks, making it even juicier. If you put them on just before you start eating your main course, they'll be ready in time for dessert.

Theoretically, you could eat this with ice cream, but that requires waiting a few seconds more before eating the peaches. Obviously, I have never tried it.

Smoked pork, buccaneer style

This may be one of the few times you'll ever see just meat here on Weekly Delicious. This is what happens when you're a college student with a limited budget and even more limited means of production. A bit of background:

For my Pirates of the World final project, we could do whatever we wanted so long as we could relate it back to pirates. So I decided to apply what I learned about the history of pirates by producing my take on the smoked meat (boucan) that gave the buccaneers their name (boucanier). The nature of this is really kind of haphazard and inexact in many aspects, since... well, pirates were like that. Feel free to scale up or scale down as you like.

Ingredients:
- About 5 lbs of pork loin
- About 5 - 6 tablespoons of whole allspice
- About 5 - 6 tablespoons of kosher salt (you can use regular salt if you want)

Materials:
- About 6 handfuls of hickory wood chips (or whatever smoking chips you have)
- A grill
- Aluminum foil
- Mortar and pestle
- Meat or probe thermometer

Preparation:
Put your wood chips to soak in water for about an hour. I just used my ever so fancy multipurpose bucket. While the chips are soaking, crush the allspice in the mortar and pestle until it's about look of coarse pepper. Now, why did I make you grind your own allspice when you can just buy preground at the store? 1. It's a different, better flavor and 2. Pirates didn't have preground allspice, silly.

Mix your freshly ground allspice and salt together (you can even give it another smashing with the mortar and pestle, if you want the salt crystals to help you grind up the allspice a bit more) and apply liberally to the pork. Not enough? Just make more, because you want all of the meat completely covered. Made too much? You're not trying hard enough at covering the meat. Let the meat sit in the fridge like that until your wood chips are ready.

Hands on works well.

After an hour, take your wood chips out of the water and put them in the middle of a two large sheets of foil (lay two sheets on top of each other to double them up), leaving plenty of room around the edges. Fold those edges up and towards the middle, while making sure to not seal it up completely. Basically, you're folding this packet up like how an envelope is folded, but instead of closing, you want to leave some space for the smoke to get out of the top. A very flat volcano, if you will.

Light your grill and have it going about as low as you can manage it (I tried for a temperature of about 210° to 220° F). If you're using gas, only light one side of the grill. If you're using charcoal, only put the charcoal on one side. Put your wood chip packet (smoke hole side up) on the flame/coals, under the grill grate.

Cooking:
Take your pork out of the fridge and place your thermometer in the thickest cut you have. Put your meat on the side of the grill that doesn't have the smoke packet under it. You aren't cooking with the direct heat of the coals, you're cooking with the smoke and the ambient heat of the grill.

My smoke packet is in the back, so my meat is in the front.

Close the lid. You're aiming for the pork to be about 170° F. You could probably go a little less if you're impatient or brave, but I'm a bit wary of any meat that's not guaranteed cooked into that safety zone that kills off anything nasty. About half way through the cooking process (170 - your starting temperature, then divide that by 2. That's your halfway cooking temperature point), flip the meat.

Look. Smoke. That's supposed to be there.

I started off a bit colder than I was supposed to (plus it was autumn, so it was colder outside), so I took 4 hours to cook this all the way through. What I ended up doing was checking and recording the temperature of the grill every half hour so I knew how long I had to wait and if I had to make any adjustments. It may seem like forever, and you'll be tortured by the amazing smell, but it's all worth it. When you reach 170° F, remove from the grill and place on a clean platter and allow to sit for at least 10 minutes to keep the juices from running out when you cut the meat.

It's absolutely amazing hot off the smoker, but surprisingly also really good cold from the fridge too (especially if you precut it into snacking sized medallions). It's good reheated, it's good a week or two later too (That's why the pirates smoked the meat, the smoking process, salt, and allspice act as preservatives). It's just good.

Award-Winning Berry Custard Pie

I have just remembered that I am a contributor on this blog and could, perhaps, contribute something. So here's the recipe I made (and adapted) for Night of 1000 Pies:

Yes, this really is an award-winning pie, though I didn't win the award. This recipe won the Washington Post Magazine's annual pie contest in the category of custard pies. The berries really snazz it up. It's also a great recipe because of its adaptability: you can put in whatever berries you like, and because they're going to be encased in a custard, fresh berries are not essential; frozen will work just as well. Enjoy this pie in the dead of winter if you like.

I made this as a strawberry pie, but like I said, any berries will do, in any combination. Go wild.

The original recipe called for simply a 9" pie crust. Possibly a store-bought one. But as I had long ago discovered the perfect pie crust recipe, I just used that, with one special modification of my own: to enhance the sweetness of the pie and the strawberry flavor, I substituted strawberry cream cheese for half of the butter. This can get a little bit tricky because the cream cheese will be softer than the COLD butter you need to use to make a good pie crust, but in the end, it all worked out beautifully. Just be patient, and keep all the ingredients as cold as you can.

Pie Crust recipe, with modifications:

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter, chilled and diced (if using salted butter, omit the 1/4 tsp salt)
  
• 1/4 cup cream cheese, chilled
  
• 1/4 cup ice water

1. In a large bowl, combine flour and salt. Rub in butter and cream cheese until mixture resembles coarse crumbs (I recommend using your hands. It's the only way.) Stir in water, a tablespoon at a time, until mixture forms a ball. (Make sure the water stays COLD.) Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 4 hours or overnight.
2. Roll dough out to fit a 9 inch pie plate, adding more flour or ice water as needed. Place crust in pie plate. Press the dough evenly into the bottom and sides of the pie plate.

The pie recipe:

• 12 oz. fresh or frozen berries (I used Nature's Promise organic frozen strawberries. Defrost berries overnight if using frozen.)
  
• 4 eggs
• 3/4 cup whole milk (or, if you're me and don't want to buy whole milk because you'll never drink the rest of it, substitute. I had a can of evaporated fat-free milk sitting in the pantry, so I used that. I wouldn't recommend using plain skim milk, though; I think it would compromise the creamy taste needed here)
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon flour

Position oven rack in middle of oven; preheat to 375 degrees.
Make sure berries are defrosted fully if using frozen. Retain any juices from the berries.
Whisk together the eggs, milk, and vanilla in a medium bowl. Stir in the sugar and flour; combine until smooth.
Arrange the berries in an even layer in the unbaked pie shell. (I cut the strawberries into halves here, also.) Pour in any reserved juices.
Pour the egg-milk mixture over the berries. (Warning: You may have more mixture than will fit into your pie crust. This recipe's ingredient amounts may need some adjustments.)
Bake for about 45 to 50 minutes or until the center of the pie has set.
Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before serving.


Enjoy! I know I did.