Posts by Sanaë:

04/21/2013 breakfast, tea, dessert by Sanae

Banana Bread

 

Carrot Almond Cake

 
Breakfast: Banana Bread
(Adapted from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book)
 
I still remember when I first baked banana bread not so long ago in a west Philly kitchen. The recipe was from a Tyler Florence cookbook. I’d never tried banana bread before, but I had a handful of overripe sweet-smelling bananas that crumbled in my fingers as I unpeeled them and I didn’t know what to do with them. I’ve eaten bananas prepared many ways: chopped into fruit salads or Greek yogurt, caramelized with butter in a pan, poached in coconut milk. But it always struck me as strange to cook them in a cake. That is, until I tasted banana bread freshly baked, still warm from the oven, so moist its consistency was of challah French toast, with the occasional pop of a nut and pocket of molten dark chocolate.
 

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04/02/2013 salvadoran breakfast quesadillas by Sanae

 

 
A little while ago I bought a bag of rice flour with the ambition of baking gluten-free cookies for my mother, but along the way I was side swept by buckwheat flour. The rice flour sat in my kitchen in a glass recipient on the back of a shelf, untouched, until this weekend. The inspiration came two weeks ago. While visiting a Thai store in LA, I tasted these marvelous coconut sweets called Khanom Krok. They are crisp on the outside and warm and soft on the inside. The interior tastes like a smooth coconut rice pudding. The ones I had were small and bite sized, and I devoured them until my younger brother accidentally tipped our box of Khanom Krok onto the ground (we still salvaged a few). But I had tasted enough to feel hungry for more. The main ingredients in this recipe are rice flour and coconut cream. They are cooked like tiny pancakes in a skillet specially constructed and sized for these desserts. Since then, I’ve been thinking about rice flour and the creamy texture of those Thai pancakes, and as I flipped through my cookbooks, I wondered how I could make my own breakfast treats without the special skillet.
 
Then I found Salvadoran breakfast quesadillas. Close to the end of food52’s Volume Two cookbook (one of my Christmas gift acquisitions from a friend who noticed how obsessively I browse their website), this recipe intrigued me by its photo: muffin shaped, with a snow-white interior, golden crumbed edges, and sesame seeds speckling its top. I am always on the hunt for unusual breakfast treats. When I saw the list of ingredients, and spotted the Parmesan, I set down the book, slipped on my shoes, and headed for the grocery store. Any breakfast dish that combines a salty edge with a sweet base deserves my time.
 

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03/21/2013 A week in Los Angeles, and Tom Kha Gai by Sanae

 



The last time I was in Los Angeles I was ten years old, gangly, with a boy haircut, visiting my mother’s filmmaker cousin in the Hollywood hills. After a few days on the West Coast, away from the loudness and cold winds of New York, I’m enthralled by the palm trees, the expansive roads, the flat houses, the beaches lining the shore and bursting with bronzed bodies even if the weather is too brisk for swimming. My father moved to LA for a new job and he’s only just found a house to rent, so there are boxes strewn in the living room, no soap in the showers. The house is sparingly furnished, leaving wide spaces for my lively brothers to stampede around on the hardwood floors.
 

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03/03/2013 cooking with rice by Sanae


 
My name, Sanaë, in Japanese means little rice seedling. It seems fitting that my mother raised me on a diet of rice, rice three times a day from breakfast to dinner. The way I know rice is brown, or short-grain and white, prepared in a rice-cooker. Rather than being the colorful centerpiece, rice was our base, the necessary binding ingredient that held the vegetables and fish together. And so, it was a familiar but often dull or under-appreciated part of the meal. I was always thrilled when my mother chose to dress it up and sauté the rice in minced carrots, onions and olive oil before cooking. On those nights the kitchen filled with the caramel notes of a carrot-onion infused rice. It was the kind that I could eat by the spoonful without accompaniment.
 
But I still resort to cooking rice the simple way, in a rice cooker where I can let it sit for hours. It requires little attention and the smell of steaming rice is as close to home as I can get on most days. So I was delighted when I found a new way to cook rice: with chicken. By this I mean, cooking the rice and the chicken together in the same pot. It seems like an obvious combination, but until I came across the recipe in Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi I’d never tried my hand at it. A friend once told me about a Thai street food dish of chicken cooked in rice. He described it with so much enthusiasm (the rice has the light flavor of chicken broth — but it’s so much more!), and yet I couldn’t understand what was so exciting. Then I discovered a recipe of rice cooked in sea bream in a Japanese cookbook, which happens to be a popular dish with its salty flavors and delicate dashi stock.
 

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02/19/2013 Night granola by Sanae

 

 

 
We have been meaning to write brief reviews of a few gems in our neighborhood, and instead we return as diners during our short breaks from work and school, and we grow somewhat lazy. But they are coming, we promise, soon!
 

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02/15/2013 snow and spice by Sanae

A friend gave me beautiful Muji cat cookie cutters and I made these: (some of the chocolate cats have wrinkles, but I think Murakami would approve)
 

 
It seems that a night of snow and wild winds battering at my window requires that I turn on the oven and bring out the chocolate. And what is better than a cookie bursting with spices, currents, and chocolate? I’ll be brief here, because biting into this cookie is a velvety experience. Like overturning fresh snow with your shoes, it’s quite satisfying. The holiday season may be long gone, but with one of these, you will find yourself transported to the mulled wine and spiced cakes of winter eves. And I’ve never tasted a cookie quite like this one, with its snow-capped lemon icing and spicy, moist interior. I find they are best eaten the day of, but you can keep them a day or two in an air-tight container.
 

 

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