Banana Bread with a chocolate twist

I am totally aware that there have been 2-3 recipes of Banana nut bread that have already been posted on green tea....Nevertheless I am posting the one I use very very often for a couple of reasons :

a. My cousin Divu told me to....since every recipe has something different in it and it is true.You will see why!!
b. It is a Banana bread with choco chips rather than nuts recipe!! See I told you its different.

Well I will cut the crap here and get to the main point of the blog. Here is the recipe:

* 3 ripe bananas, mashed
* 1 egg, well beaten
* 4 ounces (1 stick) butter, melted, cooled
* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 cup granulated sugar
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 cup chopped nuts : I like to use a lot (as much as you want) of semi-sweet chocolate morsels in place of nuts....tastes WAAAAYYYY better. Nuts are ubiquitous and get pretty monotonous!!

In a large mixing bowl, mix together the mashed bananas, beaten egg, and melted butter. Sift together the flour, sugar, salt, and soda and stir into banana mixture until well blended. Stir in semi-sweet chocolate morsels (more the merrier)

Pour banana nut bread batter into a 9x5-inch loaf pan and bake at 350° for 55 to 60 minutes, until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.

Have fun baking!!

Fridays + Friends + Food + Fun

Last weekend I had friends over at home(quite a gang I should say). In such occasions(especially with a group of hungry boys) usually I like to experiment some new dishes because even if something goes wrong in the process, there are still no leftovers and I really can not see food go waste(which is why I am trying hard to finish the box of chocolate covered rice crispy treats at home despite the fact that I am trying hard to loose the last few pounds of my monthly goal). I made chicken 65 which was applauded by everybody that evening. It was definitely a HUGE hit.. I mean who doesn't like spicy fried chicken? ;). It was really easy to make and I wanted to share the recipe with you here. Next time you are looking to please a crowd, go ahead and make this. You'll be star of the evening :). This recipe is definitely a keeper.

Ingredients:

Boneless skinless chicken  - 1lb (Cut into 1" cubes. I used both the breast and thigh meat)

Corn Flour                       - 3tbspns

Egg                                - 1

Ginger Garlic paste           - 1 1/2 tspn

Salt                                - To taste

Pepper                            - 1 tspn

Red food color                  - 8 drops

For Gravy/Sauce:

Canola oil                - 3 tbspns

Ginger                     - 1 tbspn (finely chopped))

Garlic                      - 5 Cloves (finely chopped)

Green Chillies           - 5

Chilli Sauce              - 2 tbspns

Cumin seeds            - 1 tspn

Cumin powder          - 1 tspn

Ginger Garlic paste   - 1/2 tspn

Curry leaves             - 6-7 leaves torn in half

Chilli powder            - 1/2 tspn

Pepper powder          - 1/2 tspn

Red food color           - 10-12 drops

Salt                          - To taste

Water                       - 1/2 cup

Procedure:

• In a bowl, take the chicken and add the cornflour, ginger garlic paste, salt, pepper, egg, red food color and mix till the chicken is coated well. If you find the mixture too liquidy then add some more cornflour.
• Heat oil in a deep bottom pan and deep fry the chicken in the oil.
• After all the chicken is fried, heat a skillet on medium flame, add oil and let it heat up a little.
• Now add the cumin seeds. After they sputter a little, add the ginger and garlic and let it fry for a minute.
• Now add the green chillies and the curry leaves to pan and fry for another minute.
• Add the ginger garlic paste and fry till the raw flavor goes away.
• Add the chilli sauce, chilli powder, cumin powder, pepper powder, salt at this stage and fry for a minute.
• Add the red color, water and the fried chicken at this point. Mix well so the gravy coats the chicken and wait for the chicken to heat up in the sauce.
• Serve hot.

Sadly, I do not have a picture of this recipe :(

This recipe was inspired from my neighbor and adapted from wahreywah.com

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I had the pic I had posted on facebook! Though it is notthe perfect pic, you can see that 1/4th of the dish is already hogged.. :) I vouch the chicken was awesome!
-Div

The pink health

Food habits and exercise alone cannot comprise a healthy life.Personal hygiene goes a long way and  I thought I should share a few things, which i learnt the hard way and hope it helps someone else without having to face it with difficulty like i did-

1. Floss. I have inherited bad teeth, had braces as a fifteen year old, cheated brushing a million times, even after seeing my mother suffer through many painful root canals. Two wisdom tooth extractions and three fillings and after, I have turned over a new 'teeth'... Do brush at least twice a day. And dont neglect flossing. I wont go into the benefits of flossing; the web is filled with that. But if you have never tried flossing before, try this product. Its battery operated, soft on your gums and really useful and I am sure you will never go back to regular brushing once you realise how useful it is.

2. Q-tips. I would run away from them as a child. Hence more than often, I would suffer immense ear pain due to a wax solidified attack and undergo the wax-melting medicine being poured down my ears at least once every month.I have come into terms with being regular on the usage of q-tip, though I am still working towards not letting it slip my mind!

3. Pedicure: No, I am not refering to the exorbitant 40$ pedicure at the nearest Nails you get done when you want to pamper yourself. I am talking about keeping your feet happy and breathing even otherwise. I learnt it from my cousin Villus and her older sisters. All you need is a dallop of shampoo, a small basin with warm/hot water, a squeeze of face scrub. Give your feet a treat every fortnight! Is a great help during summer.

Have you learnt something new that has helped make your life healthy and happy? Do share!

Tofu recipes

The email chain floating around with shritu's suggestions for tofu recipes, I thought I will add it as a post instead...

Divya's experiment -

I made tofu sandwich. I got the extra firm tofu from traders joe. But, the tofu still needs to be handled delicately or it will easily break. If you open the pack, make sure you change the water in which the tofu is immersed everyday of refrigeration.

Procedure -

• Cut the tofu into slabs thick enough for your sandwich/burger bread. Gently squeeze out as much water as you can.
• In a flat vessel, add spices of your choice - I added oregano, basil, ground pepper, ground cumin, red chilly flakes. Add 2 tsp of olive oil and mix the spices so that it forms a "dosa-podi" type consistency. Add salt.
• Smother the tofu pieces with this marinade. Keep it aside for atleast 1 hour. I had it marinated for 3 hours.
• Toast the tofu in a flat bottom pan. To make it more crunchy, you can add more oil. I was surprised myself that the marinade powders stuck to the tofu really well and didnt wither away while toasting. Toast until it is a golden brown.
• Enjoy it with honey mustard/ketchup/pickles/ other veggies in your sandwich

My cousin Villus suggests -

Add the tofu pieces like you would add paneer to the paneer mutter recipe. Add them towards the end of the preparation however.

Sandhya's plans-

I was looking for Kung-Pao-tofu recipe last week as I was planning on making one. I got the Kung-Pao sauce from the grocery store to start with :) http://appetiteforchina.com/recipes/kung-pao-tofu

Have you tried any recipe with tofu lately, something you have never cooked before or often do? If so post the recipe. Simply edit this post and add on to it or leave a comment.

Mithra's tips

I like firm tofu crumbles with my salad.. a signature one would be to add mesculun greens, cherry tomatoes, sunflower seeds & tofu tossed with Olive oil or balsamic vinaigrette for a crisp snack or side.

I've heard a lot about these tofu noodles as a great pasta substitute, but I haven't had the courage to try yet!

Healthy Frying!

In response to Divyas' question, I read this relevant article this week: healthy frying

Hope this helps! I was pleasantly surprised to discover how health(ier) bajjis were in the fried category.

My frequented food blogs on the internet:

Some nice recipes

A must visit for New yorkers

A nice blog on travel food. I found it very unique

My friends food blog

Run Baby Run - Update

Its great to see some wonderful progress on the miles! Though i admit, I grossly underestimated the miles :-)

I bet many of the participants are going to zoom past the required 95 way before the end of the year!

So here are a few things to note -

• I have created a spreadsheet to make it easier to track your miles on a everyday basis. Here is the link to it. The link is also available below the label of Run Baby Run on the left bottom of the blog where the mile meter is. I will be checking the spreadsheet every Friday and updating the mile-meter.
• You can continue way beyond 95 miles and the mile meter would simply show over a 100%. I bet we all love that. So i am not changing the miles or requirements. Let keep the good work going!

I am thinking of adding a mini-challenge part of the mile meter. Since its possible to get weary of the treadmill and other such indoor recycled air workouts, we can aim to do an activity other than machines and play some games. Be it squash, BB, FB, badminton anything you dig. The challenge is to aim to be part of at least one sport activity every week. Let me know if you have other ideas to build towards the mile-meter...

Happy workout everyone!

Bagara Baingan,Bakes,BlockOfLard

When it comes to cooking, I am more of a follower. I prefer the recipes scribbled on the diary, with words of wisdom doled out by my mother in law and mother, to experiments. I also love the colorful cookery books, exact proportions and a few culinary websites I frequent; so like I term it, I am a bookish-cook. Going by the norm, I found the perfect bagara baingan recipe suiting our taste buds and N and I slurped it clean with home-made parathas yesterday for lunch. You can find the recipe here. I vouch it is foolproof! =)

A few other websites I love and frequent are -

Priya's Akshayapatram

Solai chidambaram for chettinad cooking (especially chicken varieties)

Mahanandi for the andhra veggie fix

Most evidently, my second favorite cuisine (first being kerala, of course!) is the andhra bone, hyderabadi to be specific!

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So, I make my entry to the bake-a-thon by following sush's simple recipe of vanilla flavor cake. For my first ever bake it turned out pretty yum and believe it or not, there is just one-eighth of the loaf (as seen in the picture) left. Saiz and sandhya were also party to the cake-eating.

The whole nuts peeping out is N's doing! He plopped them into the batter before I could break them! So as we let the soft cake melt in the mouth, we were rudely awakened by a huge almond to crunch into, from time to time.

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Before you wonder if this section is about a 'block of lard', let me clarify that it is about me feeling like one!

I am a deep-fry-hater. Other than the waist-watch perspective, it is the oil clinging to the carpets rendering the house into a greasy rancor that is a put off. Hence, I stick to the frying bit only on special occasions like N's birthday when I cannot veto the idea. This year, it seems I have become more lenient and ventured for the second time deep frying bajjis and paruppu vadais last evening. Company for the evening coffee made up for the incentive. Knowing fried items are a delicacy; N often makes the best of the deep-fry-occasions to fry anything he can lay hands on, until the oil turns a savage red and retching slick.

I bet two molaga bajjis (green waxy chilly bajjis), few handfuls onion pakodas, couple of paruppu vadais were more than unwelcome to the stomach that hadn't feasted to oil in a long time. Gone are the days when in the name of group-studies, I would wolf down desi french-fries and onion bajjis, which my mother would make for the "hard-working" students.

I was an acidic mess by the time I retired to bed feeling like a completely useless piece of  lard swearing to never deep fry ever again! Until next time….

Hope everyone else had a healthy weekend! =)

Questions – 

How do you balance deep frying and healthy eating? 

What are the options for making deep frying healthy?(now that's an oxymoron! :D )

Totally unrelated

This post has no relation whatsover to the blog except for another common passion of its readers, that of Books! I read an article in NYTimes yesterday which made me think a little about what to do. I have been wanting to clean out my bookshelf for a while now; and this article suggested that people shouldn't donate books to the library if they don't feel passionate about them. It said that we are doing a disservice to someone by making them read a book that we didn't care about in the first place, and that they'd have read one better book in their lifetime.

What do you girls think? Would you rather donate to the library or recycle? Do share your thoughts..

What kind of hungry are you?

Yesterday I spent  hours "working-from-home" by the window, expecting a snow-white scene to unfold and a blizzard to envelope my brownish yellow grass. But, as the day unwound, I watched the warning on weather.com turn from red to orange to nothing and was left with 8 mm of snow instead of the predicted 8 inches! Like someone said.."they just messed up the metrics"! 

The point of the post wasn't the snow or the lack of it really... but the hunger pangs that seemed to gnaw harder while I was at home! Almost four years back, when I had gained a lousy fifteen pounds in three months (blame it on the overdose of dating one does strictly pre-marriage times, sadly with the same guy..) anyways.. I am still trying to lose the left overs from that era and striving hard to fit into my skinny jeans again!

My first intitiative to lose the pounds was to barely run 1.25 miles, pant like a dog, drink an iota of milk in the name of breakfast, let the stomach rumble until it hurt, eat a meagre lunch, feel proud of it and then 3 pm would strike; the hunger devil (as coined by my cousin villus) would cause me to burn and crash. I would give in to a heavy dinner and feel guilty. The cycle would continue. No surprises - I gained more in the bargain.

Over time, I have finally come into consensus with my body and learnt to manage the food-health-fitness cycle. Although, I am still hit with between-meals hunger accompanied by a pity-emanating-stomach-rumbling noise that can be heard two cubes away! I have tamed the beast to fat free fruit yogurt or a bowl of fresh veggies or a fruit or handful of nuts for the past sixteen months or so.

But yesterday, being home and having a shelf of haldirams displayed for the benefit of the weak-hearted, I was tempted to take more between-meal breaks and pop a spoon of snacks down my throat. When one spoon gave way to one too many, I had decided that WFH wasn't good for the heart (figuratively and literally). I finally tied the growling beast and many crunchy carrots were eaten instead and ran the risk of being called a "cow" by N (technically it should have been rabbit.. but whatever!) .

So here is what I figured about hunger in general yesterday -

1. Hungry every two hours - eat meager meals every two hours.

2. Ravenous during meal times - eat like no tomorrow each of these times

3. Balance hunger - crazy-I-will-die during breakfast, I-will-eat--to-survive at lunch, I-will-eat-because-its-dinner-time during dinner.

4. Snacker - eat whenever i please even if I am not hungry. My heart wants it.

5. Un-foodie - never know when it is meal-time. Who needs food, I say?
6. Skipper - I am too busy to be wasting time eating.. I will skip now and hog later when famished

7. the in-between - Big hungry during meal times. Small hungry between meal times.
8. superman err... super-human hungry (for fear of sounding politically incorrect!) - interleaved, cyclic, biological clock keeping, scrupulous, always fit hunger! phew!

So what kind of hungry are you?? How do you deal with hunger pangs? How do you deal with cravings that have nothing to do with hunger pangs?

Share your thoughts and let it be a help and inspiration for better or worse! =)

Mail/chat/facebook me the miles for the week tomorrow!

The team factor

Apart from the zillion calories I lip-smacked at shecwang, guzzled down as empty margarita shots on saturday night and yummed to a heavenly tiramisu that Saiz and Sandhya had surprised us with...my weekend was err.. healthy?! 

Sometimes, it okay to indulge in the guilty side of life don't you think? Its the guilt and the imperfectness that comes with it, that keeps us motivated to stay fit. Well.. thats how I convinced myself and hence thats the truth :p

While we are hovering on the motivation bit, N has joined me in the wii active goal-keeping-endeavor. And working as a team seems to be a lot more fun, atleast until now ;)  And talking of team, I am wondering if we can close in on a group 5K run? 

Friends, Romans and err.. fellow-bloggers,

What about locking June 6th for the 5K along the Charles in Boston?? Here is the link to the details. Hope we can all join for this date. may be even get a couple of t-shirts with 'green tea brownies' printed across and take up the 5K challenge ( I was kidding about the t-shirt. sigh! ). Let me know. Will be a good kick-start to a future date for a marathon!

And as we move to the running topic, Vikram has joined the mile-meter and in his effortless ability to come up with instant quips about anything, he has the following to say about the event - "A mile a day, smile a day!" So whether it is the miles making you run, or running to make the miles, I am happy the event is taking us where we want to!

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!

Mithra bakes!

Our trip to BJs last week left us with a 2 dozen bag of bananas which were slowly consumed for fear of unnecessary wastage. We got down to the final two today and their skins had started turning black. Not wanting to waste them, and in light of Divya's baking suggestion I turned them into a cake here using this recipe. I did add a handful of walnuts though, and used Sush's suggestion to use a blender to beat the eggs.

Here are the results (we nibbled a little)



I was quite pleased, and albeit a bit on the sweeter side, it was quite tasty. Planning to bake a bit more tonight, will post with pictures if attempt succeeds!

This week is NYC's restaurant week, so me & S went to get dinner last night here. We were simply amazed by the yumminess of the food, and have vowed to keep ourselves off of cheaper restaurant fare & indulge in NY C's goodness at least once every quarter! The tab was a little high (The Prix frie restaurant week dinners include a starter, main course and dessert for each person for $35) but totally worth it, since it pleased both our vegetarian & meaty tastes. So if you folks visit next time, we know where we are taking you!

I STALKED the soup ( pun intended! ;-) )

Last time (almost 2 years ago) I had encountered a particular debacle with my soup making. I had attempted the mixer to pulp the scorching hot veggies straight off the pressure cooker, only to have the steaming pieces go haywire and splash on my face. I had however escaped with a few burn scars and caused everyone around a near heart-attack with my screeching!

Hence, I never braved myself to try soups again for a long time; until last week, when I went for minestrone like soup which didn’t require the mixer. My soup-making-soul was kindled and to top it, I have gleefully hit common grounds with N on a soupy dinner love. Going forward, I have decided to make at least one dinner per fortnight supplemented with a hot soup!

This week’s veggie soup seems a lot healthier, for I deviously dumped in it the broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage stalks, which we otherwise throw, for the fear of turning into cows chewing cuds! :P

                                  Colorful veggies for the soup! :)

Recipe –

*  Stir fry Cuds/stalks/all veggies you dig or don’t like to eat in the original form in a spoon of olive oil.

*  Throw in (in Ratatouille style) couple of broken red chillies, few peppercorns, basil leaves, ginger and garlic  to taste and breathe in the green flavor combined with spices!

*  Add tomato in the end, before removing the veggies from the stove, so that it’s semi-cooked.

*  Let them cool down (wait for about an hour!)

*  Add them to the mixer and pulp it adding as little water as possible.

*  In a heavy bottom vessel, add a small scoop of butter. Splutter jeera seeds (optional)

*  Add the pulp to this and enough water to get a soupy consistency. Add salt to taste.

*  Let it simmer with tiny almost-boiling bubbles for about 10 to 15 min.

Serve hot smeared with crushed pepper and oregano flakes.

Note: Add atleast 2 tomatoes to get the tangy touch. I also added the pineapple hard center, which is not otherwise eaten, to give a tinge of sweetness to the soup.

So the next time, before you throw away that hard stalk, think again!

Please share other thoughts on the parts we throw away but are the most nutritious. I recently read about potatoes having most of the good nutrients in the skin. So I am thinking of attempting cooking them with the skin the next time!

Hope everyone is eating healthy and working harder!
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Noteworthy - Guess who has graced us with her presence and involvement in the blog by signing up for the miles?? I will keep you at bay and leave a small clue - the beacon of vegetarianism among us who does not like vegetables! :)

Bake-a-thon!

It is great to see the enthusiasm for soups, salads and workouts exploding all over the blog! I am aware of a few sleeping/snoring members and I am hoping to wake them up this week!! And while the momentum lasts for the rest of us, I thought lets indulge in some common goal for each month.

What about baking something before the end of Feb? Not confined to cakes alone, but anything invented, borrowed, inherited, internet-searched; but straight off the oven! Let it be something you have never tried before! And let’s post the recipe however it turns out! Or simply post thoughts on a baked dish you ordered at a restaurant!

Let’s welcome Fabulous Feb and enjoy the wait for spring… I am definitely waiting for spring to be able to run outside! I am tired of exercising in recycled air!!

Hope everyone participates!