Meat, Potatoes and a special guest

I have to diverge from my usual blog topic for a minute to tell you about the strangest thing that happened the other morning. Apparently after I left for work, Ty looked out the kitchen window and saw this little guy hanging out in our backyard: 

Not sure if you can tell but yes, that's a pig. Now we do live pretty far out from the city, but not far enough to see farm animals wondering through our yard regularly. We assume he belongs to our neighbors through the woods who also own a very confused rooster (he's actually crowing right now and it's almost sunset) but in the event that some other resident of Montpelier is missing their pig, he has been sighted (since I originally wrote this post, I've also had my own encounter with Wilbur!)


On to the cooking! Since I didn't make my baked fries last night we decided to have mashed potatoes tonight. I still haven't perfected my mashed potato recipe but I have to say, it's actually really hard to mess up mashed potatoes even for me. I think they'd be good even if you only added a little butter, salt & pepper - which is pretty much what I did. I also threw in a little sour cream and topped them with shredded cheese.
Reason #87 why I'm a fan of Ty: he likes his mashed potatoes with the skin on :) which takes out the most laborous step: peeling. The only ones negatively affected by this are our cats, who love when I do anything in the kitchen that sends little bits of food flying through the air.
The biggest tip I've learned about making mashed potatoes is that after you cut them into small pieces, you put them in the empty pot, THEN add enough water to cover them and put them on the stove to boil. I wish someone had told me that before my first 3 attempts at making these on my own! Dropping hundreds of little pieces of potato into a pot of boiling water does not result in a positive outcome, take my word for it.
It took about 40 minutes from when I first put the pot on the stove for the potatoes to be ready. I just pull one out and see if i can easily mush it with my fingers (let it cool first!). I drained them and put them back in the pot and started mashing. Putting them back in the pot to mash is helpful because it can be a little messy, the high sides help contain that some. As I was about to add the butter (about 2 tablespoons) I remembered last time they came out dry and my mom told me to add a little milk. I added about 1/2 a cup of milk, the butter, garlic salt, salt and pepper and kept on mashing.

Ty was getting the steaks ready to grill while all this was going on but I put him to work anyway shredding up some white cheddar cheese. We bought a huge block on our last BJ's trip and have been putting it on everthing, it's so good! Did know cheese isn't naturally orange? Mark Summers told me this on a particularly interesting episode of Unwrapped. For some reason Americans prefer the look of orange cheese so companies add beta caratene to it. I guess that makes sense, have you ever seen orange milk?

I put the potatoes in a dish before I remembered I wanted to mix some of the cheese into them in addition to putting it on top. Not a problem, I took a little spoon and mixed the cheese in right in the dish. Then I topped the potatoes with more cheese and put it in the oven at 350 while Ty put the steaks on the grill. We've figured out the perfect way to time this up, the steaks take about 10 minutes and that also is the right amount of time to get the cheese really melty in the oven.

White cheddar certainly doesn't have the same visual appeal as regular cheddar once its melted on top,(maybe that's why Americans prefer orange cheese?) but you'll have to trust me it was awesome. Ty even said he thought it was my best attempt at mashed potatoes! And he didn't do too bad on the grill either :P

Fruit in the form of baked goods

Even if you bake it, they still count as fruit servings in my book!

We have a problem with food going bad before we eat it. Lately it's been happening with our bananas, mostly because we're forgetful and never remember to grab one on the way out the door during the week. Every time I say "oh I should bake something!" and plan to use the almost over-ripe bananas, but as you can tell by the fact that I haven't blogged about baking anything in a looong time, I never actually stand behind my statement. And somewhere a little monkey goes without his banana, or at least that's what I imagine as I throw it away :(

This time was different, we had 4 (4!!) bananas on the verge of turning to brown mush and I all of the sudden remembered I also bought a huge bag of walnuts that I had barely touched. So you know what that means, banana nut muffins! The last time I tried this was sort of successful, they were fabulous right out of the oven but I'd tried to go the healthy route and they ended up a little dry when we reheated them a few days later. This time I didn't focus on the healthy part as much (they're made from bananas for heavens sake, fruit hello!) and just looked for a recipe with the least amount of ingredients and preferably ingredients I already had. I found this Tyler Florence recipe and went with it.

First thing I did was assemble my ingredients - I've learned this is extremely important, rummaging around in the cabinets after you've started cooking usually ends up with something burning. His recipe calls for pecans which I substituted with walnuts and I also only had light brown sugar which I figured was close enough. I also got a little daring and decided to add in a little bit of cinnamon (maybe a teaspoon or so) since I had some.

So I'm feeling good as I look at all my ingredients lined up but as I started measuring them I ran into a big issue: my brown sugar was hard as a rock. Or brick really. I did my best to scrape at the brick with a spoon and eventually got the right amount. The cats loved this part of course because 1. I think they like when I have no idea what I'm doing, I say bad words and stomp around a lot and 2. I've mentioned before they also love when I do something that causes bits of food to fly around the kitchen, which this certainly did.

This was my first Tyler Florence recipe and I tried to follow his instructions exactly. He says to use an "electric mixer fitted with a wire whisk" to whip the bananas & brown sugar - I assume that's fancy stand mixer talk, which I don't own, but my plain little hand mixer worked just fine. It didn't take long to get everything mixed up and ready to put in the muffin tin, but once I started filling the cups I realized this was going to make way more than 12 muffins. I was using a 12 cup muffin tin and maybe they're smaller? It ended up making about 18 muffins. I also thought my batter seemed a little thick, Tyler says once you fill the cups to "Give them a rap on the counter to get any air bubbles out" but mine definitely weren't having air bubble issues.

Verdict: The muffins were super moist and taste awesome with some melted butter on top! (Like they need more butter, again wasn't going the super healthy route this time) The only issue I had was they sort of stuck to the cupcake liners I used to line the muffin tin. This may be because we tried to eat them like 45 seconds after I pulled them out of the oven :) but even the next day when they were cool they still stuck a little? Anyone know why that might be?

Update: I actually wrote this post like...maybe 2 weeks ago? Since then, we had another bunch of bananas start to go bad so I tried this recipe again. The only thing I did different is Google how to soften brown sugar (don't know why I didn't think to do this the first time...) and found a bunch of good suggestions. I ended up trying the microwave trick - putting it in the microwave with a small bowl of water for 30-45 seconds - and that worked. Someone also suggested using a cheese grater which also would've been a better idea than a spoon :)