Hiya!

Ok, so I’m on a permadiet until the wedding and I’ve been trying to just adjust my diet rather then count calories or eat only things that begin with the letter “R” or something crazy like that (yes, I consider counting calories crazy. It’s math, and math is nuts to me). So what I’ve been doing is trying to eat mostly fruits and veg. I figure you can’t go too wrong with that and so far it’s been working (woot! 7lbs!). So in my quest for something that tastes more like cake then carrot, I found this little bit of awesomeness. It’s kind of amazing, really. I kind of feel like a sorcerer. This is some water into wine type of shit right here. Are you ready? Are you? OK – just realize your life may never be the same.

Get a few bananas. The first time I tried this I effed it up so royally, it’s actually kind of hilarious, so I’m going to give you the secret I wish I’d had…get some bananas and PEEL THEM. Sigh. You don’t want to try to peel a banana that’s been frozen. Trust. So you peel them, pop them into smallish pieces (like 4 per nanner) and put them in a freezer bag. Put them in the freezer for a few hours. Take them out and put them into a food processor like this:Then press start. It’s loud. And if you have a kind of janky food processor like I do, it’s not a quick job. But it will look something like this when it’s ready…

If you end up instead with a powdery substance that looks like tiny snowflakes and doesn’t stick together at all, don’t sweat it. It just means your bananas are too cold, just add a little milk (0r soy milk if you’re lactose ignorant like I am) and blend it back up.

And that’s it. Seriously. It could not be any healthier unless the bananas were made of spinach or something and it honestly tastes just like full on ice cream. If you want to make it 20% more awesome, you can add a tablespoon of Nutella. I count Nutella as a veg, FYI.

My mom used to make this back in “the day”. We were out of bread this morning (due to the massive amount of garlic bread we made and nommed last night) but had the stuff to make this puppy. I did have to look up the proportions, because I couldn’t remember, so I’m going to credit this site with the recipe, even though it’s really a Rose Marie (and I’m guessing Better Homes and Gardens cookbook) staple. But I can’t vouch for putting salmon on this bizatch – here’s how we did it:

3/4 cup of milk
3/4 cup of flour
3 Eggs
powdered sugar
one lemon, juiced
a tablespoon-ish of butter

Heat up your oven to about 400º F (200º C). Pop the butter in a skillet and put it in the oven. While it’s melting you can put the flour, milk and eggs in a bowl. Whisk it up until it’s got some air in it, but don’t worry about getting the batter smooth. The butter should be melted by now, so pour your batter into the pan.

Walk around, listen to music, do whatever Sunday morning things you do for about 15 minutes. When you come back, it should look like this:

Yum. Golden brown deliciousness. Take it out and pour the lemon juice all over it, followed by the powdered sugar.

If you’re Alex you’ll then put jam or honey or both all over it. If you’re like me, you might put some red caviar on it (don’t judge, it’s a salty/sweet thing) or just eat it as is.

My Grandma used to make this horrifying fish soup every year for Christmas. She was Bohemian, and since moving overseas I’ve met some people from Prague and have heard about how they have a carpfest every year around Christmas. I’m guessing that this is where her tradition took hold, and maybe part of the reason I always hated it was because I don’t really like carp, but I do remember trying to get away from that soup every year at Christmas.

Now that I’m “all grown up” I was thinking that a fish soup for New Year’s Day sounded pretty good. We found this one recipe that we both thought sounded good – although Alex kept going “but with some Pernod, right?”. Plus we couldn’t find any clams on New Year’s Eve in the 3 hours that markets were open, so we modified it more by adding more fish. It came out great, and I think that you could really dump just about anything seafoodie in here and rock it. Maybe not carp….

Here’s the original recipe, and based on the comments and what we could find, here’s what we used to make it:
1 octopus – about 1 pound
two pounds of whatever white fish you like
1 tomato cored and chopped
a handful of flat leaf parsley chopped
one cup of water
one cup of white wine
Pernod – splashes here and there
salt and pepper
1/4 tsb red pepper flakes
two cloves of chopped garlic

1. Take your octopus, scrub it off and put it in hot, simmering salted water for about 40 minutes. Pull ‘er out, scrub it again until it’s not slimy (blech) and cut it into bite size pieces, minus the beak and any other grossness associated with the bit between the legs and the head. You may want someone else to do this part (thanks, Alex) or, you know, buy some frozen smaller calamari which we will so be doing next time.

2. Heat up a pot, put the garlic and red pepper in and sautee for a couple of minutes. Then toss in the squid bits and let that go for a minute or two. Pop in the wine, tomatoes, parsley, and splash of Pernod. Salt and pepper and simmer on high until most of the liquid is gone.

3. Pour in crushed tomatoes and about a cup of water and another dash of Pernod.

4. Then toss in the fish, let it simmer covered for about 5-10 more minutes and that’s it.

Make some garlic bread, cut up a lemon and don’t let the rest of that bottle of wine go to waste. Ingest. Mmmmm. This was pretty good – it’s a little bland, and the lemon helped a lot – I think that next time we do this we’ll spice it up a bit more, but the leftovers went on some whole wheat pasta tonight, which was also good. We’ll be doing this one again.