The New Chef's Journal

While I am a big fan of banana bread, the primary reason I decided to make this recipe is that I'd forgotten I'd bought some bananas and they had gotten a bit overripe. Fortunately, being a bit too old to be eaten raw made them perfect for baking. This recipe, which I love, comes from simplyrecipes.com . Appropriately, it is a very simple recipe. I added some chocolate chips and you could just as easily add chopped nuts if you wanted. The bread turned out gooey and delicious. It wasn't one of my more challenging entries, but still one that I was very happy with. Ingredients: 3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed 1/3 cup melted butter 1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup) 1 egg, beaten 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 teaspoon baking soda Pinch of salt 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour Chocolate chips (However many you feel like) Directions: 1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). 2. With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. 3. Mix in the sug...

Recently, I realized that I've been spending a bit more than I intended to put together these food blog entries. So I decided to go to Eastern Market, a farmers market/flea market in Southeast Washington DC, and shop  for a cost effective dinner option. After looking around I decided to go with some tilapia fillets, which were $7.50 per pound. I'd previously found a recipe for tilapia fingers on onceuponachef.com, which I'd been wanting try, so this all worked out well. This was a really simple recipe and aside from the tilapia I had all of the ingredients ready at home. I was very happy with how this recipe turned out. The fish turned out very crispy and flavorful without tasting too heavy and fried. I cooked it in three batches and realized after the first batch that it's important to make sure to add enough oil so the breading gets nice and crispy. This wound up being three meals worth of food for a very reasonable price. The original recipe suggests making a lem...

I was recently searching for dessert to make my girlfriend for our second anniversary and stumbled across the website eatingwell.com. This site has a lot of good recipes. Their slogan is "where good taste meets good health," but I can't really say that this recipe is healthy in any way. It's a very rich, mousse-like chocolate cake. Mine turned out slightly overcooked. It was still rich and delicious, but probably should have been a bit softer and gooier. The recipe says to bake it for 20-25 minutes and my oven managed to overcook it in 17. I hate my oven. A lot. I picked this recipe for two reasons. The first is that it looked delicious. The second its that it had a very unusual cooking method that I'd never tried before. Rather than simply placing the cake pan in the oven, the cake pan is placed in a larger baking pan partially filled with boiling water and then baked. This method worked out pretty well for me, but it is kind of a death trap. Transporting boil...