Celestial Banana Bread

This is not hyperbole. I am certain that this banana bread was thought up by Zeus himself. It is other wordly, like you couldn’t believe. It’s incredibly simple, but would make anybody fall in love with you. Since acquiring this recipe I have been on the lookout for banana bread competitions, because I’m sure this could win me any number of awards. Sharing this recipe with the internet may be the single greatest thing for humankind that I will ever accomplish in my life. Here it goes.

I veganized this recipe from a book called something like Recipes from Viriginia, Georgia, and North Carolina, a bizarrely obscure cookbook of home recipes found at my second family’s home. Now, just incase the title didn’t make it clear, this is deep south baking, at its most unhealthy. That’s just the price you pay for delectable. It was super easy to veganize, I just swapped butter with Earth Balance and the egg with an extra banana. However, once I got home I decided to add an egg worth of egg replacer powder as well as cinnamon and vanilla extract.

Ingredients

3-4 very ripe bananas

1 egg worth of egg replacer powder (1 1/2 tsp powder + 2 tbsp water, whisked)

1/2 cup melted earth balance butter

1 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

We start with the bananas. I recently had a banana bread revelation. Not all bananas can make the long trip from South America and Southeast Asia in the pristine condition you see them in in the produce section, unfortunately some age more quickly than others and get beat up along the way, and these get hidden in the back of the grocery store as there is no convalescent home for bananas. Instead of planning your banana bread many days in advance and waiting in agony for your bananas to over ripen, at the grocery store find the produce manager and ask for the beat up and overripe bananas in the back, and she’ll find them and give them to you for a discount. Bingo! Now you can go straight home and get to banana bread making–what a great day!

Preheat to 350 degrees

Mash the bananas until there are no big lumps. Mix in the sugar, melted butter, and extract. Sift in the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Mix until combined. Pour into a greased or parchment paper lined loaf pan and bake for 1 hour (or, if you’re like me and for some reason can never locate your loaf pan, an 8×8 or 9×9 greased/lined pan will work fine, just shorten the baking time to 45 minutes). This recipe makes one pan/loaf, but I doubled it in hopes that it wouldn’t disappear as quickly.

You’re welcome.

Breakfast Sammies!

Alright, I admit it, I’m a failure at blogging. I used the excuse of school to keep me from posting for all these weeks and now that midterms are this week I am procrastinating by writing this blog. Hopefully it’ll get me back on track! Now I have that out of the way and none of you can make me feel guilty any more. We’ll move on to what all your resentment was really about–not having access to my breakfast sammie recipe. Also, due to the huge gap in posts I had time to take a copious amount of pictures to better suit your sammie making process.

Again, this recipe was inspired by overpriced food from Sticky Fingers Bakery (Now of Cupcake Wars fame) during my visit to D.C.  In the prepared food section there they had a breakfast sandwich that consisted of a nutritional yeast spread, tomato, tempeh bacon, and tofu egg on a bagel. It cost like five bucks, and tasted good. I thought, this would be such a great thing to have in the fridge. You could just make a handful at the beginning of the week and grab one whenever you knew you’d be out long enough to need a meal. So I did, and they rock. Even my little sister, the ultimate judge due to her pickyness and irritating habit of not lying to me when my food doesn’t meet her standards, likes them! It takes a little while to make them, but the result is protein filled sandwich meals ready whenever you need them.

I use Vegan Brunch for my tofu egg and “nooch” spread recipe. I love Vegan Brunch. Initially I shied away from it because I wasn’t a big brunch person, but after buying it that problem was quickly solved as I was instantly converted to brunch personhood. It’s full of mouth watering recipes and it’s super dependable. It also serves as a great reference for crazy awesome brunches which I’ve started doing for just about any reason. Vegan Brunch has a tempeh bacon recipe but while I was at the Co Op I decided to just buy tempeh bacon, because I can. I didn’t do exact calculations, but I thought that maybe the extra price would even out if I factored in the liquid smoke I would need to buy to make tempeh bacon. Nevertheless, tempeh bacon recipes are easy to find, or you can cheat like me. Lastly, I really want these to be affordable. I live a block away from an awesome bagel shop, so I use the bagels from there which are 90 cents a piece, which is pretty pricy, but they’re crazy delicious. You could save money by buying bagels from the grocery store, but my best recommendation is to never buy bagels. Ever. Bagel shops, like any other bakery, always make more than they sell. So at the end of every day they fill a trash bag up with bagels and usually just leave it next to the dumpster. Let me make clear what this is–free fresh bagels. They’re not even a day old! No one should ever pay for bagels, instead harvest the waste of our excessive capitalist society.

On to the ingredients!

Tofu Egg (this is just a small version of the omelette recipe in Vegan Brunch. So if you feel like omelette double it and fill it up with something delicious, like mushrooms and spinach or marinated asparagus):

1 clove of garlic

1/2 lbs silken tofu (not mori-nu), nasoya recommended due to its water content.

1 tbsp nutritional yeast

1 tbsp olive oil

1/2 tsp turmeric

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup chickpea flour

1 1/2 tsp arrowroot powder (for more on the magic of arrowroot powder see my Pasta Carbonara post)

“Nooch” spread

1 cup vegetable broth

1/4 cup all purpose flour

2 garlic cloves, minced

a pinch of dried thyme, salt, pepper, and turmeric (for those that don’t know, a pinch is roughly 1/8 tsp)

1/4 & 2 tbsp nutritional yeast

1 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice

1 tsp mustard

Also needed:

Bagels

Tempeh Bacon

Tomatoes

I know you’re all super brilliant, but I’ll just mention that you should adjust all your ingredients based on the amount of sammies you plan on making. The recipe I’m presenting makes around 4-6 sammies, most of the rationing is dependant upon how much tempeh bacon you want to allot to each sandwich. If I’m feeling generous I do 1 1/2 strips of tempeh bacon per sandwich. I just cook my tempeh all together in my nonstick pan before or after I do the egg. I trust you are all capable of ad-libbing cooking tempeh bacon.

Egg! As I mentioned in the ingredient list, this egg is adapted from Isa’s recipe for omelette, so feel free to tuck it into your repertoire of awesome breakfast recipes as it is quite versatile. For this I use my awesome immersion blender (which is awesome) but can also be done in a normal blender or food processor/prep. Blend/process the garlic, tofu, nutritional yeast, olive oil, turmeric, and salt until smooth. Add chickpea flour and arrowroot and puree until combined.

To cook I use my Scanpan (the best purchase I made as a Sur La Table employee, I highly recommend checking them out) and my trigger ice cream scoop. If not using a nonstick pan, spray or cover with a thin layer of oil and scoop an ice cream scoop worth (about a 1/3 cup) onto the pan once hot.

When the top has turned a matte yellow give it a flip. Takes around 8 minutes per egg, depending on how much heat is applied.

Next–the nooch! This sandwich basically emulates a bacon, egg, and cheese (with tomato), so the nutritional yeast spread is supposed to serve as the cheese. The recipe is kind of tricky since it’s intended to be more of a gravy like sauce, but I manipulate it into being a spread. I do this by halving everything in the recipe except the thickener (the flour) and mixing the flour into the broth when it’s piping hot (very important!). When I mix the flour in when the broth isn’t hot enough it doesn’t ever thicken like it should and I’m forced to start over. That being said, step one: combine broth and flour.

In a small saucepan saute oil and garlic and cook over medium low heat for around two minutes being careful not to burn the garlic. Once nicely browned and fragrant and a pinch of all listed herbs and let cook for another quarter minute. Add broth mixture, turmeric, and nutritional yeast and turn heat up to medium. Cook stirring frequently with a whisk or fork, it should start bubbling in around three minutes, if not, add more heat.

After sauce has been bubbling for around two minutes add lemon juice and mustard, take off the heat. I usually let it cool a bit and transfer to a container that I refrigerate. If you did it right, here’s what it should look like when cooled and ready for spreading:

Lastly, take a tomato and slice it into 1/4-1/2 inch slices. If using a big tomato, one slice per sammie will do. If you only have cherry tomatoes on hand, one sliced cherry tomato per sammie is my usual ratio.

Congratulations, you’ve made all the constituent parts of your breakfast sammie! All you have left to do is assemble it! This is super easy: spread nooch on both sides of bagel, top with egg, bacon, and tomato, and then again with bagel! I even took awesome photos to assist you:

Rock out to lots of fanfare in your head ’cause now you have all these delicious sammies to eat! Go you! I usually wrap them individually in plastic wrap or aluminum foil. They last in the fridge for a week, but if using fresh bagels the bagels become very chewy with time.

Totally awesome!