Emerson started daycare last week, which has likely been more devastating for me and her Babah than for the little lady herself. Wanting something extra-yummy to put in her lunch box — yes, she is 19 months old and I now need to pack a lunch box — I baked up a version of the amaranth date-nut banana bread I wrote about in December.
A teeny grain, amaranth offers the most protein you can get in a non-animal product, plus offers a nice crunch. But the recipe above also makes a rather dense loaf. To lighten it, and insure it didn’t travel back home with her, I added an extra egg, which rather amazingly did the trick. I made muffins and mini muffins and both were spongy and moist. Because I though it would complement the hot-weather dates and bananas, I also added about 2 tablespoons of shredded, unsweetened organic coconut, which was all that was left in the bag I had.
I also had a block a cream cheese in the fridge, which I didn’t want to spoil but generally have little use for, so I thought I’d make some cream cheese icing. I’d never made it before and had no idea 2 cups of confectioner’s sugar would be called for. Normally this is where I’d reach for the agave or honey, but I was out of both. After a moment of lip chewing, my eye landed on a way-overripe banana in the fruit bowl — the perfect sweetness and flavor to boot.
The icing wound up being roughly half a package of creamcheese, about 2TB of butter, half a teaspoon of vanilla extract, about 1/2 cup of confection’s sugar and half a black-on-the-outside-by-fine-though-mushy-on-the-inside banana. Blended with a handmixer, it came out the perfect consistency.
Emerson ravaged nearly two plain, large muffins after her morning nap. Later, when I gave her an iced mini muffin, she licked off every molecule of icing, put down the muffin and looked for her next victim. Point taken. Don’t mess with a good thing.
Bread dolls, using the recipe from the Tommie de Paola book Watch Out for the Chicken Feet in Your Soup, were an Easter tradition when I was a girl. The dolls, more like swaddled babies, had a colored Easter egg for a face and braided dough for their little bodies.
I think I may instead make Easter Ricotta Pie, or pizza di ricotta — as my mother calls it — a tradition with my own daughter, if only because I’m a ricotta fiend and it’s on my top-five list of favorite breakfast treats. There’s still a fun factor — Emmy can someday get creative with the lattice crust, if she likes. Plus, it solves the problem of whether those darn babies can stay on the counter (for a nice soft dough) or if their little egg faces mean they have to live in the dark of the fridge.
Should anyone need extra convincing to follow my lead, I suspect this beautiful ricotta pie photo, by Katie at The Parsley Thief blog, should do the trick. (Thanks again, Katie!)
There’s a recipe and more pie ideas on my Sweet Pea blog, here. xo!
The husband’s sesame-paste-filled tang yuan — glutinous rice balls — from our Chinese New Year post-dinner festivities. There were of course also tangerines, noodles and dumplings (recipe here). There are more in the freezer, in anyone still needs a tang yuan fix, friends…
Just posted my first-ever slideshow to my Forbes Sweet Pea blog, on making dumplings for Chinese New Year. Dear God am I starving now.
This is a two-year old article that I nearly lost track of — I just re-found the link! — despite thinking about it so often. It was in the Jan. 2010 issue of “Manhattan” magazine and written by Darrell Hartman, but it’s the photo shoot I think about. Not so much because it was my only one ever but because it was so much fun. The incredibly sweet and patient Gregg Delman came over on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and while I slouched and slumped and froze in various awkward poses, he somehow took lovely photographs.
What a good sport Rich was, too, acting as the foil in this shot — he even changed out of jeans into his pajama bottoms for it.
Maybe another reason I think about this day it is that Emerson was a little seed in my belly, and I didn’t yet know it.
