Category: Jessica’s Adventures in Cooking

Attempting to make cheesecake for my mom’s birthday cake. The crust turned into a total disaster though, it wouldn’t stick together so it woudn’t pres into the pan. NOT using that recipe again.

Homemade biscuits are probably my all time favorite comfort food! Even in Australia I found some time to make some. I’ve been making them with the exact same recipe (well, quantity of small or large batch changes) since I was a kid, this is one of the first things I ever learned to cook, and the recipe is appropriately titled Jessica’s Favorite Biscuits cuz really they are.

finished

almost ready!

ooooh, oven glow~

cookie cutters make good biscuits

needs a little more water

a little water added, needs more

butter evenly mixed

butter is clumpy, needs more mixing

Having had leftover tacos (home-made of course!) for dinner, I still had energy left over to cook some desert tonight. I got a couple cookbooks at the Library’s monthly book sale yesterday, and had been eying a recipe for fried bananas from the 1979 Sunset Mexican Cookbook. Another one of my sub-goals for broadening my culinary experiences is attempting more international dishes, being able to make meals with different ethnic flare. In Costa Rica they served a lot of fried bananas, and being something they just don’t have in San Diego, even if I was sort of ho-hum about them at first (until I realized with ketchup on them they tasted like a french fry) .

Looked pretty simple too, requires one banana (green-tipped, not overly ripe) and 1.5 teaspons of butter.

Melt butter over medium-low heat in a saucepan (“wide frying pan”).

Cut the banana lengthwise. I cut it in half as well since my saucepan was a little on the small side.

Add the banana (cut side down) in the saucepan (in the butter) and continue cooking on medium-low heat for 10 minutes (until lightly browned on the bottom). Oh my goodness a teaspoon and a half looks like a lot of butter melted!

Carefully turn the bananas over and cook for another 5-10 minutes (until lightly browned on both sides now).

Serve warm.

My rating? It really doesn’t taste anything like the fried bananas in Costa Rica, a lot more juicy and buttery tasting. But none the less it made a fantastic (fairly) healthy desert, definitely worthy of repeating. And it really was every bit as simple as it appeared. It didn’t require a lot of babysitting while it cooked or anything, I only checked it a couple times and set the timer. The only thing that was sort of hard was figuring out how to flip the bananas over. I ended up using a combination of a pancake spatula and a pair of tongs. It sort of worked, but was a little awkward. That part of the process could be improved perhaps with different tools.

I was feeling a craving for some curried *something*, curry seasonings being on my list of ones I’d like to learn to cook with more. So I went to the grocery store and bought some curry powder, but also found a box of basmati rice with pre-mixed “curry” seasonings and couldn’t decide and got both. So I made the rice per the instructions on the box, and then mixed in some cooked shrimps and cooked green beans (just simple cooked in water on the stove over medium heat for a while) and tomato chunks. So far so good, looks pretty appealing.

But then I tasted it and decided it was a bit bland and dry, and mixed in some plain yogurt and freshly squeezed lime. Tastes much better, but now it looked gross. In hindsight to improve the aesthetic appeal of the dish, perhaps the yogurt could be gravied (or at least mixed in some milk or something to thin it to the point its pourable) and drizzed over the dish artistically.

But overall, I’d probably attempt something like this again, though I might want to try more of an indian butter sauce for the topping. And I would definitely mix the rice seasonings myself rather than relying on rice in a box.

I actually cheated and started my new years resolution a little early, making broiled chicken on New Year’s Eve. Not a new recipe, but it looked so cool with the broiler reflections on the pan that I thought I might work on new pictures or step by step pictures for recipes on my website.