Life In Limbo

Chocolate Banana Bread

November 26, 2015

On my original 25 before 25 list, I’d challenged myself to bake 4 new types of bread. I love the idea of a bread challenge for so many reasons: because by the end, I’ll be more comfortable baking, because bread is so wonderful, and because it means that everyday life will be that much more delicious and cozy.

A few days ago, I decided to up my challenge, considering that I’d made 3 out of 4 breads in a span of only a couple weeks. In honour of the 25 list, the new challenge is to make 25! They can be anything from a naan to a cinnamon bun, the only qualifications being that it’s some kind of bread-like product, and that it’s a recipe I’ve never tried before. I’ll be trying to document all of them here on the blog, so stay tuned!

Bread #4: Adapted from Chocolate Banana Bread by Smitten Kitchen

Ingredients:

3 medium bananas (I used plantains accidentally but it still turned out great!)
1/2 cup melted butter
3/4 brown sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
Optional: 1 cup chocolate chips (I tragically didn’t have any)

Preheat the oven to 350F and grease a loaf pan with butter.

Mash your bananas (or in my case, plantains!) in a large mixing bowl. Add the melted butter, sugar, egg and vanilla, and stir together. Put your dry ingredients into a fine sieve and sift it all into the bowl. If you have chocolate chips, add them and stir everything together until it’s blended well.

Put the batter into the loaf pan and smooth the top with the back of a spoon. Bake for 55 minutes, then check that a cake tester comes out clean. Let it cool for 10 minutes, then use a knife to loosen the loaf from the pan (mine came out very easily) and turn it out onto a cooling rack. Enjoy!!

Notes: Next time, I’d definitely add the chocolate chips. Although the bread wasn’t too dry, it would have been improved with the extra chocolate. I’d also love to try this bread with bananas instead of plantains. We ate the majority of the loaf in a single afternoon. This one was easy, delicious and will definitely be made again. That crack in the top! Beautiful.

Observations in Ecuador / 01

November 24, 2015

As you may know, I’ve been living in Quito, Ecuador for almost two months! My boyfriend and I live in a bright apartment with yellow walls and a gorgeous view of Pichincha Volcano. Just like when I moved to Korea, I have been noticing the tiny little differences between Ecuador and where I’m from. I am really loving my time here and to me, the country is definitely less foreign to me than Korea was. It’s such an interesting and wonderful opportunity to live in another country, and I love to notice the little things that make up a country’s distinct culture.

Here are some of my initial observations from my time in Ecuador:

On almost every single street corner, there are street performers doing everything from contortion to harp-playing to juggling to acrobatics. They perform in front of the cars stopped at a red light, and time their performances perfectly so that they have time to walk down the rows of cars collecting tips. There are also a lot of classic window-washers and people walking among the cars selling everything from Ecuador soccer jerseys to mandarin oranges, but the street performers are the most interesting to me. Apparently my boyfriend even tried juggling as a street performer just for fun when he was a teenager!

There are mountains absolutely everywhere. Never have I ever seen so many mountains, even having lived in Busan, a city built amidst mountains. Quito is wedged between two mountains, so you can see gorgeous vistas from almost everywhere in the city. There are also a handful of volcanos nearby!

In Quito, there are a lot of gated neighbourhoods with 24-hour guards. Once you’re inside the gates, these neighbourhoods are totally normal and seem like nice suburbs back home, apart from the tall walls and additional gates around the houses. There are tall walls and gates in front of almost every house, whether or not it’s inside a private neighbourhood. Some of the walls have electric shock wiring around the top, others have barbed wire or broken glass affixed to the top.

There is a ton of traffic in Quito, so much so that there are a number of protocols in place to improve the flow. One of these is that one of the major tunnels between the downtown and suburbs (which is surprisingly only two lanes, one each way) becomes unidirectional in the morning and at night to get people into and out of the city. Another rule is something called “pico y placa” which means “peak and plate”. Depending on the last digit of your license plate, you aren’t able to use your car between 7 and 9:30AM and 4 and 7:30PM, one day per week – for us, it’s Fridays. I personally find this rule highly annoying for planning purposes.

Unlike in Korea, in Ecuador you see animals wherever you go, even though we live in a big city. Walking in the park near our house, I’ve seen little dogs and cats, of course, but I’ve also seen a huge pack of llamas, horses hanging out near the edge of the cliff, and cows grazing in the woods by themselves. And on trips out to more rural areas, we’ve seen even more animals, including goats, sheep, and adorable little black pigs.

In Quito, they have typical convenience stores like back home, but they also have corner stores for fruit and vegetables! These are called fruiterias, and they’re really just tiny stores selling a few bags of chips, maybe a few drinks and candies, and a bounty of fresh produce: watermelon, oranges, cucumbers, papayas, pineapples, almost any kind of produce that your heart desires.

In the park near us, there are little barbecue stations you can rent out and host your own cookout with your family. Most of them have stunning views, a BBQ pit, a picnic table and are covered by a roof in case it rains. We haven’t tried them yet, but I can’t wait to have a little barbecue with this kind of view.

Basic household things are more expensive here. It definitely doesn’t help that the currency in Ecuador is the American dollar and the exchange rate with Canadian dollars right now is abysmal. But even with that being taken into account, things are more pricey. My boyfriend encouraged me to buy shampoo and other toiletries in Canada before coming because they’d be twice as expensive here – and it’s been so true.

On most big streets around Quito, in our apartment building, and at parking garages around the city, there will be at least one person working to help you park properly (parking tends to be tight here). You usually tip them about 40 cents for their help.

***

So far, I am loving Ecuador. This country has a beautiful and totally unique culture that I’m only beginning to discover. I’ll officially be coming back to Ecuador after Christmas for a few more months at least, so I’ll be able to keep observing and learning about this lovely place.

Inspiration | November 20

November 20, 2015

What a gorgeous idea: a Thanksgiving Reader full of ideas for gratitude and appreciation, to be read around the table at your family’s celebration. Read more about it here or download it for free here.

I found a lot of fresh ideas in this post about habits for healthy relationships.

Barbie put a boy in an ad for the very first time! He’s adorable, and moreover, it’s awesome to have some more different kinds of representation happening.

In response to the tragic events all around the world this past week: How to Stay Optimistic When Everything Feels Horrible. Great advice in here.

From the same blog, another great post: How to Chase Your Dreams (without hating your life).

I’ve been so enjoying a couple new podcasts: Women of the Hour with Lena Dunham and Hidden Brain from NPR.

I’m trying this new thing on Instagram where I unfollow almost everyone – my goal is to get down to only 100. The reasons are twofold: to spend less time checking Instagram overall, and to only follow accounts I really like. So far it’s been going so well – less time spent on my phone, less time scrolling quickly past photos to make sure I see “everything I missed”, more peace of mind. Oh and I never miss any posts from the accounts I really like because my feed was clogged with yet another photo of a mountain from one of those travel photography accounts or a delicately placed coffee cup from one of those lifestyle accounts. Win-win-win.

Delicious things I baked this week: sticky buns and chocolate banana bread.

***

This week went by in a blink! I was feeling under the weather for part of it, but I still had some lovely walks outside, a chat with one of my sweet Grandmas, time to read, a recording session with my fave podcast partner, a work meeting and a chance to bake delicious new recipes. Overall, I’d say that this week was a big success. This weekend we’re teaching yoga in the park, driving out to see some of Paulo’s family, and participating in another one of those horse parades in a small town nearby! Wish me luck. Hope you have a fabulous weekend! xo.

Homemade Pizza, Revisited

November 18, 2015

A few years back, in 2012, my friends and I threw a pizza party. We prepped a ton of different toppings, I made a pizza dough (for my first bread-baking goal), we invited some people over and all chowed down. I also took some dark, fluorescent-overhead-light-lit photos because it was night-time and I hate flash.

Since then, homemade pizza has been one of my favourite easy dinners to make, especially at home with my family. This dough recipe has continued to be a go-to because of how easy it is, and how perfect the crust comes out every time. The key is to crank the oven up AHAP (as high as possible) – like 500F – so that you get the perfect cook.

Sadly, when I was in Korea I didn’t own an oven. A friend of mine had a teeny tiny toaster oven suitable mostly for melting cheese on a sandwich, but nobody I knew had the hardware to make even a small pizza in their tiny apartments. That, plus the absurdly inflated cost of cheese in Asia meant that we only ever went out for pizza (with occasionally mixed results – sweet potato purée on a pizza, for example).

And now I’m in Ecuador, yet another country where ovens aren’t dime a dozen – though far more common than in Korea, that’s for sure. We have a toaster oven only slightly bigger than the aforementioned teeny tiny one, and my boyfriend’s parents have a regular oven only slightly smaller than the ones we’re used to in Canada. I consider having access to these ovens a gigantic win. After a year without the ability to roast or toast or bake or broil or otherwise make all things awesome and delicious, I am thrilled.

So of course I’ve been baking up a storm. One of the first things on my list was trying to make pizza in our toaster oven – how would that go? It does have temperature settings up to 450F, but it is also a toaster oven. Could it handle it? Was it possible?!?

It’s so possible! Is this obvious to all of you? It certainly wasn’t to me, but I now have the utmost confidence in my toaster oven and have since used it to bake sticky buns and made plans for it to make our pumpkin pie for Christmas.

In honour of this year’s bread-baking goal (which I may in fact augment considering I’ve baked 3 yeasty things in the past two weeks) I tried a new pizza dough recipe from Elise Joy, called The Only Pizza Dough Recipe You Will Ever Need. I can’t say the title is completely accurate, considering my deep enduring love of Jim Lahey’s recipe, but it was excellent. We made a few adjustments, shown below.

Dough

1 Tbsp yeast (we bought a bag of it and keep it in the freezer)
1 tsp honey instead of white sugar
3/4 cup warm water
1.5 cups white flour
1/2 cup wheat bran (we didn’t have whole wheat, but it turned out really well using this instead)
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp olive oil
Cornmeal for rolling out the dough

Mix together the honey and yeast in a large bowl, and add the warm water. Let it sit for about 10 minutes to activate the yeast.

When it’s a bit foamy, add your flours and salt. Stir with a wooden spoon, then add the olive oil. Mix until it’s too thick to stir and then knead with clean hands until it comes together into a nice ball. Let it rise for a few hours.

We found that we could store the dough in the fridge overnight without any problems, and used it for a lunch pizza the next day. Because we have a toaster oven, this recipe made enough for two pizzas on our small tray.

To create the pizza, we coated the bottom of the tray with olive oil and cornmeal. Preheat the oven to 450F. We stretched the dough out with our hands into a rectangle and pressed it into our tray. Although the recipe says to heat up the tray in the oven and then use a pizza peel to slide your pie onto the hot tray or stone, we didn’t have those tools and instead just built the pizza on the tray and then put it in the preheated oven. It still worked!

Bake for 15 minutes, then check it (and turn your tray around if you, too, are using a toaster oven) and bake for 5-10 minutes more.

Simple Tomato Sauce

2-3 fresh tomatoes, quartered
2 cloves of peeled garlic
2 Tbsp tomato paste
5-10 leaves of fresh basil
a little olive oil
salt to taste

Mix everything together in the blender and season to taste with your favourite herbs and spices. This is a very simple sauce that can be improved by roasting the tomatoes first, or simmering the sauce on the stove after to thicken it, but for this pizza it worked perfectly for us. It is kind of liquid, so careful not to add too much sauce or it may make your pizza slightly soft on top.

For the pizza shown above, we used tomato sauce, caramelized onions and mushrooms, mozzarella and parmesan cheese, and chopped fresh basil. It was delicious.

We’re planning to make pizza every Friday. I’m hoping to share the various topping combos we try out kind of like Elise’s 40 Pizzas project, here on the blog so stay tuned for that! Enjoy, guys.