foodmusic no. 2

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Lio, "Le Banana Split." Ba-na-na-na, ba-na-na-na. Apparently this song was a hit in Europe in 1979.  There's a pretty good video for it but the only copy of it on YouTube begins with an ad so I didn't want to embed it. By "pretty good" I mean that another blogger who saw it as a 14-year old boy fondly recalls that "[r]ight after the song ended I suddenly had to run upstairs to my room." Put on your vintage European banana hammock and watch here. 

Smell the top banana! I can't understand why so few other bloggers are 

using Google's scratch-and-sniff technology. I feel it really adds something.

The latest banana music is produced using actual bananas. BBC News reports that MIT students Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum have released a kit called MakeyMakey that can turn any object that conducts electricity into a keyboard. Naturally cats have been early adopters of this technology ("[a]n animal-rights group contacted by the BBC did not express concerns"), but at present we are focused on bananas. Here is Stanford grad student Beau Silver rehearsing for the first public performance of his bananamaphone:

If you're interested in making your own bananoog or bananatar or just a basic bananapiano, he's generously shared info and links on YouTube here. I think this is an excellent use for bananas because taste-wise most of them are disappointing. I do like a good banana — remember the banana salsa? — but the ones we get here in the U.S. are mostly all the same, and they're flavorless compared to the bananas people elsewhere on the planet are eating. I discovered this when I was studying in India as a college student. After completing my work there I did a period of independent study in Nepal with a handful of other students, and rather than fly into Kathmandu we chartered a little bus. Roadside restaurants were few and far between so we ate an awful lot of bananas along the way. Nearly every time we pulled over for a stop, whether to eat or pee or wait for the driver to fix our grubby bus, someone would hand us bananas, excellent, creamy bananas full of flavor, bananas that made me wonder why the bananas at home were such crap. Other people have wondered about this too, and if you're curious about the reasons for it I recommend this article by Dan Koeppel in Saveur. (The short answer is that the vast majority of bananas destined for the American market are the Cavendish variety, a hybrid favored more for its disease-resistant properties than its taste). There's an interesting list of select banana varieties that goes with the article but good luck finding them at your local grocery store. Related additional reading: "Spaces of Banana Control" at Edible Geographies, which explains how NYC bananas are ripened. I've been keeping an eye out for good-looking bananas for a couple months now and the only ones I see regularly are the red ones and the little baby ones. I tend to buy my usual bananas at Commodities because they always have organic ones and I think they taste marginally better than non-organic. I think it's time for me to start going on banana-hunting expeditions to Latino and South Asian neighborhoods to see if anything more interesting has turned up in the two years since the Saveur article was published.

In the meantime here's a recipe for kitchen sink banana muffins. (In addition to bananas they've got carrots and candied ginger in them, and can probably happily handle whatever complementary ingredients you'd like to add). It's based on Mark Bittman's recipe for whole wheat muffins from the Feb. 5, 2010 New York Times. 

I feel like I get the best banana flavor in baked stuff if the bananas are frozen first. Specifically, if I wait until they're good and ripe — meaning quite brown and black on the outside, full-on ugly in the way that prissy banana-eaters seem to have a problem with — and freeze them then. They're even uglier when I pull them out of the freezer and I just don't care.

Cuter bananas in syrup form, €12 at Colette.

The original recipe calls for 1 cup of mashed fruit but I don't think there's any need to actually measure it for something like this. I used two ordinary bananas and two little bananas because that's what my banana stash contains, but if you just have two ordinary bananas I'm sure that's fine. Three might be pushing it in terms of fruit content but I feel like that would probably be fine too. (I've made these muffins with various spontaneous combinations of fruit and have never had a problem yet, though my pumpkin-blackberry ones were a bit too dense for my liking).

kitchen sink banana muffins

2 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on taste (I like a lesser amount)
1/4 cup maple syrup, preferably Grade B (it has a stronger flavor)
2 regular bananas, or more to taste (see above), mashed with a fork
1 heaping cup shredded carrots
1/2 cup finely chopped candied ginger
1/2 cup melted butter, plus a bit more for greasing your muffin pan if needed [ the original recipe calls for unsalted butter but I use salted for pretty much everything these days ]
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup buttermilk

for optional but recommended crunchy topping:
1/4 cup oat or barley flakes
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
2 teaspoons melted butter
2 teaspoons honey
pinch of fine sea salt

Heat the oven to 375°F and grease your muffin pan with butter if necessary. (I use a silicone pan so I don't bother with this step). Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl until just combined. Stir in the bananas, carrots, and everything else until ingredients are thoroughly combined. Don't over-stir because supposedly that's bad for muffins.

If you're making the optional crunchy topping, stir all the ingredients for that together in a small bowl.

Fill your muffin pans and spoon a half-tablespoon or so of the crunchy mixture on top of each muffin before baking. Bake for approximately 25 minutes, or until a toothpick poked in the center of your test-muffin comes comes out clean.

alternatively, just eat the crunchy mixture with a spoon

Makes at least a dozen muffins, possibly more depending on the size of your pan. (I use a "mini" muffin pan that isn't very mini at all and I got seventeen).

Foodmusic no. 1 is here.

meiji bananas, coming soon in Japanese Candy Quarterly Review

foodmusic no. 1

The Fall, "Eat Y'self Fitter"
recorded in Austurbæjarbíó, Reykjavik, Iceland, May 6th 1983

A sentimental choice for me to begin this series with; I fucking love the Fall. The amount of Fall in my iTunes is measured in days rather than hours. I'm not sure what to point you towards if you're not familiar with them. The band's Wiki page isn't bad; it succinctly explains, for example, that Mark E. Smith's lyrics are "abstract poetry filled with complicated wordplay, bone-dry wit, cutting social observations, and general misanthropy." This interview with Smith in the Independent last year is really good, actually, as reading and as a snapshot of what the band is about, but it's long. Likewise this Taylor Parkes essay in the Quietus about his lyrics. This review from Sasha Frere-Jones is relatively short and actually pretty good. (Smith "apparently imagines that the Fall is the only band that matters, and it’s a view that bears examination.") The best thing I've recently read about the Fall is this interview from Wire in the mid-90s, which opens with a quote observing that MES's "constant love-battle with his goblin-muse always leaves him stronger." 

I'm not going to have recipes accompany all of my foodmusic posts, I don't think, but I'm going to be very literal with this one and use it as an occasion to discuss home-made granola, which I've just started making. (There must be something in the air). It's granola-ah when the Fall is playing in the background. (Cf. Mynah (n): "Belonging to Mark E. Smith."). It's got to be the most un-Fall thing one can eat, this shit breakfast for soft middle class barley-bothering assholes, unless that dubious honor goes to the quince aioli I'm making later this week. 

What do your new running friends put in their granola?

I got all ascetic about my first batch of granola and cut way down on the oil. It's generally made with a lot of oil, both store-bought and home-made, but I'm reducing for summer. I've also tucked away some portraits of tubby food bloggers in my attic for good measure. Do you know what happens if you're stingy with the oil in your granola? Your granola is dry, dry and healthy-tasting. It's not quite mean granola but it's an acquired taste, like the Fall. I'm kind of into it right now but I'm assuming you won't be, so there's an alternate choose-your-own-granola-adventure quantity of oil in the recipe below. My dry granola is too dry to eat happily on its own but for me it's fine with yogurt because I tend to add wetter things with it: fresh fruit and a squeeze of sorghum syrup or a spoonful of honey.

If you're using coconut flakes in your granola,
add them before the last 5 minutes of baking.

The recipe is an adaptation of this one from Hungry Hippie (what kind of hippies do you get your granola recipes from?) and as I mentioned above I used way less oil. As in, half of what the original recipe called for. That's why mine didn't clump in that clumpy granola way. If you want clumps, double the oil. Note too that I left out the nuts — I cook with nuts a lot and always have different types on hand, and I prefer to add whatever needs using up when it's granola-eating time. If you have nuts you want to use, by all means, add them along with the other dry ingredients. I left out the dried fruit as well. Sliced apricots, figs, and dates are particularly nice, alone or in combination, but as I mentioned I tend to eat my granola with fresh fruit. If you want to use dried fruits add them at the end, after your granola has cooled and is ready to be transferred to the granola jar. I used coconut oil in this batch because it's rather a hip grease and I like the way it boosts the flavor of the coconut flakes, but my next batch will be coconut-free and made with olive oil like this.


homemade granola

makes 1 big jar of granola

1 cup whole rolled oats
1 cup barley flakes (I get mine from these people)
1/3 cup red quinoa (any kind of quinoa is OK)
1/2 cup raw pumpkin seeds
1/4 cup raw sunflower seeds
1/4 cup to 1/2 cup coconut oil
2 tablespoons maple syrup (I like Grade B for cooking because it's got a stronger flavor)
2 tablespoons agave syrup
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
2 teaspoons cinnamon
a generous pinch of fine sea salt
a generous grating of nutmeg
parchment paper for lining your pans, or a bit more coconut oil for greasing them

Heat your oven to 225º F. Stir the dry ingredients together in a large bowl except the coconut and the cinnamon, salt and nutmeg. Add the coconut oil and the sweeteners — feel free to use either one singly instead, or honey — and stir well until the dry ingredients are thoroughly coated. Only then should  you add the spices and the pinch of salt. Reserve the coconut flakes until later. Give everything in the bowl another good stir to make sure the spices are evenly distributed. Bake the granola on two sheet pans lined with parchment paper (or lightly greased with more coconut oil) for approximately one hour, rotating the pans and stirring the granola half way through. Five minutes or so before the end of the baking time, scatter the coconut flakes over the top of the pans. (The coconut would burn if baked along with the rest of the granola.)