Ring ring ring ring ring Bananaphone!

8. Cook 5 new recipes from Nicholas cookbook

Restaurant Nicholas is the single greatest restaurant I’ve ever eaten at.  I’ve had the good fortune to dine there on numerous occasions with Steph, with friends and with family, and I still find their food to be conceived and executed at the highest level.  I’ve met the chef on more than one occasion, have his autographed cookbook, and have even contributed my friend Rob’s blog (who I met thanks to our mutual love of the restaurant) as he cooks his way through said cookbook.

You could say I’m a Nicholas groupie, but I like to say I’ve got a great deal of respect and appreciation for his food.

I’ve attempted a few recipes from the Restaurant Nicholas cookbook, and have had a decent amount of success in pulling them off.  One of my goals for my 101 was to take the time to make 5 more recipes out of the book, especially since some of them would pose a challenge in terms of ingredients and technique.  That being said, of course the first one I chose to make was probably the easiest in the book.  One of the highlights of a meal at Nicholas comes at the end, when they present the ladies at the table with a small bag containing a freshly baked loaf of bread or cake, so that the dining experience can continue the next morning after they’ve left the restaurant.  Brilliant idea, and we always look forward to tasting what seasonal variation the pastry chef is baking up.

I’ve started eating bananas, but apparently I haven’t mastered understanding their life cycle, since I invariably end up with a few brown and mushy bananas by the end of the week.  What to do with mushy bananas?  Banana bread!  Talk about an easy recipe, with a short list of ingredients consisting of butter, sugar, eggs, bananas, salt, flour and baking soda*.  I’ll admit that I need to do a better job of scaling the recipe, as it was a pain in the butt to add ’2.5 eggs’ to my bread batter.  Cream butter & sugar, add eggs & pureed bananas, sift in flour, baking soda and salt, then put in an oven and bake.  Easy!  I don’t have my own picture, but check out the sweet shot that Rob took when he made this recipe.

photo courtesy of Rob Timko

*As I’m typing this entry, I realized I used baking powder by mistake.  No wonder I didn’t get as much of a rise as I’d have liked in the bread.  No matter, still delicious!