I haven’t posted in more than just a few days.  It’s not because I have been busy and have pushed my blog to the back burner, nope.  I just haven’t been all that enthused about the recipes I have tried lately.  Then I thought, I should be posting the good, the bad, and the meh.

I found a couple of recipes that fall into what I call my “Quest for the Holy Grail” list.  Dishes that I have pretty darn good recipes for already but if I find a new recipe that sounds yummylicious, I’d try it.   Such is the case for Nancy Silverton’s Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits and 2 recipes for banana bread.  One from the Violet Bakery Cookbook and another from America’s Test Kitchen Essentials Cookbook.

So about those biscuits…I came across a cool website Panna Cooking that features a lot of heavyweight chefs in videos making their favorites.  Think of it as a video food magazine.  Their Facebook page has some of their videos or you can subscribe to their site.  I watched Nancy Silverton’s video for making her biscuits and immediately ran to my kitchen to make them.  Much like croissant dough, it calls for folding the dough and rolling it seven times.   This creates the flaky layers.  Mine had layers but the biscuits weren’t as tall as the ones in her video.   The biscuits  were tasty but not quite as light as I would have liked.  I did tweet Nancy Silverton asking if she had any tips..stay tuned, hope I get a response.

On to banana bread.  I love my recipe for banana bread, its moist, light, cake like and versatile but I have grown tired of making it.  Along comes this beautiful cookbook, the Violet Bakery Cookbook with this absolutely lovely looking banana bread.   Unlike many of the recipes for banana bread it contains double the amount of bananas.  Six bananas for 1 loaf of bread!  Zowie.  The bread came out a little heavy and gummy perhaps from insufficient baking time.  Disappointing  but I may try it again, I am thinking baker error (me, me, me) I have tasted it made by friends and it is filled with flavor and quite good.   The recipe can be found on the blog Local Milk.  Maybe you’ll have better luck.  While paging through ATK Essentials cookbook, I came across their Ultimate banana bread recipe which also called for 6 bananas but with an additional step of extracting the liquid from the bananas, reducing it, and adding the now banana syrup back to the recipe.  It also called for slices of bananas and nuts on top and sprinkling it with sugar.  The bread was definitely less gummy,  pretty dense but packed with banana flavor. The addition of the sliced bananas  and chopped pecans on top adds a nice carmelized finish.  Is it better then my original recipe?  I don’t think so.  The next time you have 12 or so very ripe bananas on your counter, give these recipes a try.  Let me know which one you like!