Sunday baking: Banana bread with spelt, oats and maple syrup

It’s a familiar problem – you’ve bought too many bananas, thinking it’s high time to up your potassium intake or whatever, and within the blink of an eye they’ve morphed from a verdant shade of not-quite-ripe to squidgy, squealchy, slimy, shrivelled shadows of their former selves.

Panic! What to do? What to DO?! For starters, don’t throw away the brown bananas. Either peel and freeze for morning smoothies, make banana ice cream or go bananas (haha) baking them, as I invariably do. Well I don’t go bananas, but you get my drift. Muffins, cakes, banoffee pie, you name it, this fruit is definitely not for wasting.

Banana bread is the simplest of loaves to make, just follow these directions and for knapp 1 hour, rest your aching legs, make a cuppa tea and relax while all those ingredients work their magic.

Something for the Weekend

Big fat juicy strawberries from Whole Foods

Midsummer is the most evocative of times, that “school’s out *hallelujah*! ” feeling still hasn’t disappeared even as I hit my thirties (or as I like to say, entering my prime). As a kid Mama & Papa Johansen dispatched me to visit the Johansen elders in Aurland, a tiny village nestled in one of the most picturesque parts of western Norway at the end of a long fjord surrounded by rather foreboding mountains. This is Peer Gynt country, or so Norwegians would have you believe, where mischief and melody reign. Midsummers in Aurland were spent hiking through the valleys, fishing in the Aurlandsfjord, and foraging for wild strawberries. Aside from all this frolicking in the wild we grandchildren generally putzed around on the farm, picking fruit and playing games and pestering my grandmother for her delicious sour cream waffles. Let’s not mention the model-esque and seriously evil aunts, suffice to say they make Attila the Hun look like a gentle soul.

I often get asked how fruit can possibly grow in Scandinavia. “Um, it’s not the North Pole” I reply, indeed midsummer days are so long that it never gets dark. The extra UV light coupled with a temperate climate during summer makes the region ideal for growing plump summer fruit such as strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, plums, apples, pears…you get the idea. Nothing will ever taste as good as my grandfather’s crimson Senga Sengana strawberries, the fecundity of his crops enhanced with what he called “super-dung” from the neighbouring farmers. Lord knows what his turbo-powered fertilizer contained but I’ve yet to find fruit as rich in flavour over here as the kind I grew up with in Aurland.

So in this vein of nostalgia I spend every June hunting down the best strawberries this side of the North Sea. Thus far, between M&S, Waitrose, Riverford Organic and Whole Foods the latter’s strawberry supplier wins hands-down. Typically as I mention this I’ve realised the Whole Foods strawberry carton and label have been thrown out but you’ll have to take my word for it: delicious, juicy and intensely fragrant English strawberries, just as nature intended.

Sunday baking to: (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66

Whisky, maple syrup and oolong tea bread

On a grey and gloomy (not to mention unseasonably cold) Sunday I decided to make this the day of music and baking. Re-visiting Henry Mancini, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald on my iTunes/Spotify lists I plumped for Nat King Cole, an old favourite who always reminds me of my dad, a man with a gentle yet sonororus voice who instilled in me a love of Nat’s music at an age when most little girls were dancing to Madonna’s Material Girl. Bring on Nat King Cole – (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 the perfect music for Sunday baking…

Since I had some odds and ends, including raisins, sultanas, cherries and dates and a miserly amount of maple syrup lurking in my kitchen cupboard, it seemed obvious to make tea bread with the fruit and throw the maple syrup in, damn (part) Yankee that  I am. Perhaps it was the music, or perhaps because dad was on his way to the States but I was clearly feeling the Yankee love.

A la recherche du pain perdu

With apologies to Proust…

Just back from a hectic road trip to France, the last of my summer travels! Managed to squeeze in four cities, plus a fantastic ‘wine & food’ walk through the picturesque vineyards of Beaujolais before returning to London. The Aubois city of Troyes was a revelation – full of ecclesiastical history, and the site of the violent Champagne riots of 1911 which nearly brought civil war to France. Troyes is also the capital of stained glass, and its cathedral has some magnificent examples of bright, colourful stained glass windows. On a less serious note, if you like shoes and colourful tennis apparel you might be interested to know that Troyes is also the home of Lacoste.

While we were there, we stayed at the excellent Maison de Rhodes – a beautiful, understated hotel, rated by The Observer as one of the ’20 best hotels in France’ no less. It was once the Bishop of Troyes’ mansion, a convent, and even the home to the Knights Templar, and recently converted to a delightful hotel with 11 rooms, each with their own individual character and decor – a happy blend of old and new. I would’ve stayed there a week if our schedule permitted it, and definitely recommend if you’re ever in Troyes then have a look at http://www.maisonderhodes.com and book this hotel as a special treat…

Just before leaving England I grabbed Don & Petie Kladstrup’s ‘Champagne: How the world’s most glamorous wine trimphed over war and hard times’, a wonderful book for wine enthusiasts and history buffs alike, compelling in its narrative of how this region transcended centuries of wars and invasions, and how la champagne – the drink – has defined the region in ways not immediately apparent when sipping this effervescent wine. The book is really worth reading, and if you’re interested in wine history generally, the Kladstrups also wrote ‘Wine & War‘ another excellent read…

Anyway, reading about le Champagne – the region – during our long car journey to Burgundy made the whole experience so much more interesting. Acres of champenois farmland bear a striking resemblance to the American midwest, gently rolling fields as far as the eye can see – a rather disconcerting sight to someone who grew up surrounded by mountains and fjords! Yet despite the benign landscape there’s an eeriness to places such as the Somme and Marne, where millions of lives were lost in the first world war, and every small town and the sleepiest of villages in the area have prominent memorials to remember the ‘Great War’, a visible reminder that France suffered more from the first of the 20th century wars than the second. 

But I digress, this post was originally intended for Bastille Day, or 14 juillet as they say in France, and is a recipe for one of my favourite breakfast treats. Pain perdu, known as French toast in the States, or eggy bread – a horrible name! – in England. Translated as lost bread, it’s what happens to old, or stale bread when industrious cooks transform it from something prosaic to something, well, delicious! Incidentally, I picked up a copy of ‘Tous les bons pains de nos regions’ or ‘all the good breads of our regions’ – a great way to practice one’s French and learn more about the bread-making techniques and traditions of each region.

The trick with pain perdu, as learnt from the wonderful Cook’s Illustrated website, is to preheat your oven and place each toast in after frying to keep it warm, also adding flour to the batter will create a crisp exterior to the bread. This recipe, although inspired by time spent in France, is unashamedly North American in that I pour maple syrup on the finished pain perdu, something that always reminds me of my Mother as she made this for my birthdays when growing up, but use whichever toppings/syrups you prefer, even if it’s a sacrilege to the French 😉

Serves 4

• 8 slices stale white bread, you can also use challah, cinnamon bread or brioche
• 2 large eggs
• 250 ml milk
• 2 tbsp melted butter
• 100g plain flour
• 2 tbsp caster sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tsp vanilla
• extra butter/oil for frying
• summer fruit for topping
• maple syrup and some fromage frais too

Preheat oven to 100ºC, place the 8 slices on a wire rack and allow to dry out 10-15 minutes in the oven

Meanwhile make your batter: mix all your wet ingredients in a medium bowl and whisk until smooth, then add your flour in increments, whisking continuously until a smooth batter forms.

Take 2 slices of bread and soak these in the batter for 20-30 seconds on each side, then heat your butter or oil in a large, non-stick frying pan over medium heat until the butter foams and place the battered bread in, ensuring that any excess batter drips back into the bowl, rather than in the frying pan!

Fry each side of bread for 2- 2 1/2 minutes, and then place the fried bread back on the wire rack in the oven. Keep warm while repeating the process with the remaining 6 slices. Serve warm with a dollop of fromage frais, some berries sprinkled over and a LOT of maple syrup..

* alternative suggestions for toppings*

• peaches, passionfruit, or try caramelised apples or pears – any fruit which is seasonal and has some acidity to cut through all the richness of the pain perdu
• sauces such as raspberry coulis, chocolate or butterscotch sauce, vanilla-infused acacia honey (see my previous post) or something floral like violet syrup. 
• Ice cream also goes extremely well, but then it becomes dessert, not breakfast!