Baking, cooking and mixing

It's the last weekend before Christmas and while everyone is busy shopping, I, on the contrary, hibernated and stayed at home for the entire weekend.  My Christmas parties were scheduled early on so no more parties this week.

The weather was very cooperative.  Mornings were sunny and afternoons were rainy which was perfect for just staying at home.  And eating.

And these are what I made/ate over the weekend.

Banana bread

We had some bananas in the kitchen waiting to be consumed.  And since banana bread is one my favourites, I tried my hand on making that.

My friend Dini has been maintaining a blog about her cooking and baking escapades for quite some time now so I knew that she will have something on banana breads.  And her blog didn't disappoint.

She had several recipes on banana bread! I chose Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Banana cake that she got from Averiecooks.

So here's how it turned out.

I have to say that my final product looked decent for a first timer :)  About the taste...it tasted ok.  Edible.  I mean I won't mind finishing it.  But I have to admit I'll still have to do a few more tries before I could get the taste and the consistency that I want.  My bread was too dense.  Maybe I overmixed the batter.  Or maybe I didn't stick to the measurements in the recipe.  I don't know.  This needs practice.

Salad

This is a random salad that I made for lunch and dinner for both Saturday and Sunday.  Well, except for the roast lamb which I only had on Sunday.  I had leftover baked orange chicken for Saturday.

I had too many meat and sweet food over the past couple of days so I wanted to do salads and veggies this time.  What I had was a mixture of red, iceberg and butter lettuce.  The dressing is mixed sesame oil, rice vinegar, light soy sauce, sugar, and salt with chopped coriander and grated ginger.  I figured I couldn't survive with just the salad so i bought 200gms of roast lamb from Fairprice to go with the salad.  And it tasted good!

Oven grilled chicken bbq

I initially wanted to do salted baked chicken but we just had baked orange chicken last week which to me resembles a bit how baked chicken looks like.  So I opted for BBQ chicken instead.

It's very simple.  I marinated my chicken in a mixture of soy sauce with calamansi and minced stalks of lemongrass for a sweet scent and popped it in the oven for 30 minutes to cook.  After 30 minutes, I brushed the chicken with a mixture of the marinate with banana ketchup and grilled it for another 15 minutes.  And this is how it turned out.

This was the chicken while cooking.  No, it didn't look appetising at all.

And this is how it looked after :) It tasted really good too!  Meat was soft, juicy and tasty!

Scent and taste of Christmas

Christmas tradition back home, aside from the simbang gabi, tiring gift hunting, monstrous traffic, countless parties, and reunions/meet-ups for lunch/dinner, is characterised by a quest to have that Starbucks planner.  So once December sets in and once Starbucks starts to serve their drinks in that red cup, yuppies would start to frequent the store more often to have their coffee binge, excited about collecting 20 or so stickers in exchange of a planner.

I was part of that culture too.  And silly as it may seem, I kinda miss it.  More than the planner, I miss the comfort and familiarity of being with old friends while sipping coffee at a cozy corner in Starbucks after work.

So when I saw this at the pantry the other day, that nostalgic feeling engulfed me.

The coffee wasn't really fantastic but I guess I was after the cherished memories that it's bringing back.