Banana bread

What do you do on a Sunday afternoon when you have frozen bananas in the freezer?  Banana bread of course!  

Preheat your oven to 175C and grease a silicone bundt pan with oil. 

Whisk together 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, 1 tsp baking soda and a pinch of salt in a bowl and set that aside. 

Next, get a room temperature egg, and whisk that in a separate bowl. Add 3-4 mashed ripe or over-ripe bananas. Mix in 1/3 cup melted margarine or butter making sure to temper the eggs first to avoid scrambled eggs. Add 1 cup or a bit less of granulated sugar making sure the sugar dissolves in the butter. Add 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract to the wet ingredient mixture. 

Add in the flour mixture to the wet ingredients until incorporated. Do not over mix or the bread will be tough!

Pour all that into your prepared pan and bake for 20-30 min or until you can smell your cake and the top browns. You'll get a lovely crispy crust on the bread. Do a cake test to determine done ness. 

I couldn't help but cut a piece to taste it!

Restaurant review: Mu Noodle bar Glorietta Makati City

Small place with simple design. Small menu but good food!

I visited Mu Noodle bar in Glorietta last June 2013.  I forgot to take pictures, but here is one from wanderwithmee.  The place looks calm with clean lines and mostly black furniture. Their menu only has 2 pages, but the dishes were well presented.

We ordered their Seafood Chao Mein, extra soy sauce based soup and extra egg.  The Chao Mein was delivered promptly and most pleasing of all was that their shrimp and squid were cooked to perfection!  The extra soup was a perfect complement to the noodles. Extra egg is only actually half an egg, but it went well in the soup.

The meal was not more that P300, and good for 2 not-so-hungry girls.  I would definitely come back again to try their other dishes.

One thing about the Glorietta restaurant, they have seats lined up on the wall, and many of the customers take seats there.  There are high seats and tables in the center of the restaurant, but nobody likes sitting there.  You will often find the seats on the wall full, but the higher stools empty.  Customers tend to choose another restaurant if only the high seats are available.

Chocolate chip cookie science

 Some nights you just want to have a light dinner and then retreat to your comfy bed and relax for the rest of the evening, but then you start watching Man VS. Food and hunger strikes. Don't you wish you had a jar of cookies to reach for?

For the next two weeks, I will be experimenting with chocolate chip cookies recipes to see which mix of ingredients will bring me THE chocolate chip cookie.

I want a big, fat, crisp on the outside chewy on the inside, chocolatey bite.  Thanks to Bakerbettie, I will be mixing bread flour and regular flour, brown sugar and white sugar, and putting quality chocolate and maybe even a bit of cornstarch or graham crackers.

I want my cookies to look like this

and not like this

After lots of experimentation here are what mycookies look like

 

Successful beef pie with 2 crusts

Golden brown from top to bottom :)

Breakfast today

Breakfast today was hot tea, leftover spinach lasagne, a banana and peanut butter

Beef pie trial

Saw a butter crust pastry from foodwishes and decided to try it for beef pies

 

My favorite version is this.  The hand pie. 

Small beef and mushroom pot pie.

Growing basil

My basil plant is dying! I think the weather is too hot this summer. Two stalks dried up already. The leaves are falling out easily and they are very crisp like lays potato chips. :(

I tried again and basil was doing really good and now that it is summer again the basil is drying up. Why are you so hot Philippine summer?

Instead of buying plants I just buy a pack of basil from the grocery store, tear off the leaves to make pesto then line up the stalks, make a fresh cut and stick em in the soil of a pot. They always grow large leaves.