You wanna piece of this? Hunh? HUNH? You wanna piece? of THIS?

I was always taught that it is good and right to show people you love and respect them by feeding them. I think, had Moses been Italian-American, he'd have scribbled that down somewhere in the Ten Commandments. But I digress. This is not a freedom of religion post-- it's a "bad-ass" post (grrr!). My friend has a group of buddies with whom he plays Texas Hold 'Em and watches the UFC fights. I'm not so much into the poker (I have a wretched poker face, so it's easier for me just to give my money away directly to a charity), but I am definitely into the UFC (particularly Georges Rush St. Pierre: rowr!) So any chance to hang out with good company and watch very athletic men kick, punch, and grapple the snot out of each other-- heck yeah, I'm absolutely there. With food!

Now football may have its chili. Baseball may have its hotdogs and popcorn. (What does basketball have? Hmm...) But something about the UFC just screams "banana chocolate chip bread" to me. That something could just be that I have three over-ripe bananas in a basket in my kitchen who seem to be starting to attract fruit flies, or I could wax poetic and say something about how the banana grapples with the chocolate chips in this bread to produce a championship flavour that is ultimately dominated by the little kick of cinnamon. Anyhow, this is what I've baked to help share my love and respect for a really awesome guy-- a Gulf War veteran (remember Kuwait? Did you know there's an IKEA in Kuwait?), Harley rider, cool-headed boss, devoted husband and dad, and a man who knows how to laugh at himself.
Now, enough of the warm, fuzzy stuff: here's hoping Brock Lesnar gets a huge piece of humble pie handed to him, preferably hard enough that it puts him to sleep in the Octagon!

"Never interrupt me when I'm eating a banana." - Ryan Stiles

Banana Chocolate Chip Bread
source: adapted by me! from James Beard, "Beard on Bread"
Yield: 1 loaf

Original recipe:
2 cups sifted all-purpose flour (King Arthur Flour is best)
1 teaspoon baking soda1/2 teaspoon salt1/2 cup butter or other shortening (I used butter)1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 cup mashed, very ripe bananas (usually 2-3 bananas)
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon lemon juice or vinegar
1/2 cup chopped nuts

My changes/additions:
I substituted 1/3 cup buttermilk for the milk and lemon juice/vinegar
I substituted 1 cup chocolate chips for the 1/2 cup chopped nuts
I added 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon oil
I added 1/4 teaspoon almond extract
I sprinkled raw sugar (brown, large crystals) on the top of the bread

Sift the flour with the baking soda and salt. Set aside. Cream the butter and gradually add the sugar. Mix well. Add the eggs and bananas and blend thoroughly. Add the cinnamon oil and almond extract. Combine the milk and lemon juice, which will curdle a bit. Or just use the buttermilk, like I did. Slowly and alternately, fold in the flour mixture and milk mixture, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients. Blend well after each addition. Stir in the nuts (or chocolate chips!), then pour the batter into a lavishly buttered 9 x 5 x 3-inch pan and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 1 hour, or until the bread springs back when lightly touched in the center.

Serve however you like it! (My friend Sheryl likes it with peanut butter. Me, I prefer cream cheese...)

Some items of note in making this bread:
1. It is always best to sift the flour when baking, especially cakes. And with this bread, it is so easy to get a dense, thick, heavy bread. If that's what you want, however, by all means-- don't sift the flour. It's America and you can do what you want! Me? I wanted a light bread. So I sifted.

2. I used a glass pan, and only as I watched this bread rise and rise (and rise and rise) in the oven, did I begin to think I should have used my deeper-cornered, non-slanting walled silicone bread pan. Also, I should have decreased the temperature of the oven by about 25 degrees to compensate for the glass instead of baking it for only 55 minutes. So this is what happened to my bread:

At 25 minutes in: looking good! Hope it doesn't rise any higher, though!At 35 minutes in, I think it's time to take that top rack out-- "just in case."At 45 minutes in: yup! Time for the aluminum foil tent to keep the top from burning!

Now that, actually, doesn't look too bad! Phew!

Ooo! Sparkly top! So purdy!

Ms. Moxie is an off-road kind of girl!

I'm from Away. Technically, so is my husband (he was born in CA, lived in Lawrence, MA until he was 15, then moved to Jay, Maine) but he blends in significantly better than I since he actually knows where a lot of places are. Or used to be (more on that in a different post). So, when we decided to get a dog, the choice was easy: a black lab or lab mix. It seems like the majority of Mainers have labs-- a practice sanctioned by L.L. Bean: black labs abound on a variety of their products (yes, so do lobsters, but those tricky crustaceans are much harder to hike with and you can never take them to the beach for fear of being boiled and then served up with butter).

Enter Moxie. Originally named Annie Mae (think either mint juleps on the front porch swing or a tough Japanese heroine who masquerades by day as a dutiful school girl with pink hair), we felt our precocious 1 year old pooch needed a name as spirited as she. And funnily enough, Moxie only goes after my drink if I'm drinking Moxie. It's like she knows it's technically her birthright. Or maybe she hated her original name as much as we did? Either way, she's embraced her name.

Three years later, we're thinking we should have named her Scout. She loves going hiking with us at Mount Apatite (named for the product of the quarry, not misspelled hunger pangs), but she rarely stays on the trail. In fact, even at the base of the trail, this is usually how we hike "with" our dog. That black spot in the distance is our Moxie Moops (yes, she has a lot of goofy nicknames. Don't judge us.):






She also can't stay out of the water, and the great thing about Mount Apatite is there is plenty of it-- some running, some "ponds"-- and since we are religious about getting Moxie's Lepto vaccine every year, we can let her romp around in almost all of it without worrying about her getting sick:


Per Maine State Park regulations, dogs at Mount Apatite are supposed to be on leash at all times, but almost nobody follows that rule and we've never seen it enforced or even mentioned by other park frequenters in the 3 years we've been hiking there. If you are in the area and looking for a good place to let your dog get some good exercise (without requiring a TON of fitness from you!), Mount Apatite is a great option and it even has ample parking.

Score one for the L/A area!

Restaurant Review: Marché (Lewiston, ME)

I know of at least one friend of mine who does not agree with my opinion of Marché at all-- and normally we agree on lots of food-related topics (King Arthur Flour, chocolate as a food group, etc.). I think, however, that I just feel really strongly about Marché and its owners-- but I think that's more than obvious as you read along. This is the review I submitted to Google, so it's the same one you'll see if you Google the restaurant:

My husband and I were excited to try this place, despite our lukewarm experience at the same owner's upscale restaurant Fuel (located just across the street). We should have known better.

We ordered the "Frenchie" sandwich which allegedly consists of tomato compote, pulled pork, a burger, and brie cheese. The name and the cheese were the only thing French about this sandwich, but it sounded intriguing-- I wanted to know if it would work. It didn't. The tomato compote was simply some cherry tomatoes (2 of which were not fully ripe-- half yellow/green, half red) which had been barely mushed and sautéed. The pulled pork was bland. There were TWO thick (I mean over an inch thick each), bland, overcooked, dry burgers which overpowered the entire sandwich (and did not come close to filling the diameter of the bun-- why would you do that?). And the brie was a tiny piece perched on the top that was barely noticeable. I opted for the "fruit cup" instead of the potato chips and got 5 small chunks of what was probably canned pineapple. Thanks for the hint of fruit in my fruit 1/8-of-a-cup! My husband didn't even finish his half of the burger-- I think I've seen him leave behind only one other meal in our entire relationship because he abhores wasting money.

My husband ordered a crêpe dish-- chicken, spinach and béchamel sauce. This came unassembled with the mush of filling looking like it had been vomited up on top of the folded crêpes. Both crêpes were thick and had been overcooked, looking more like Indian nan bread than crêpes. And I can't tell you how lovely it was to spend half our lunch time scraping the filling off to the side so we could assemble our own crêpes. (Was this too hard for the chef to do? We saw employees darting back and forth between Marché and Fuel. Maybe our chef was on a break from his real job and that was why our crêpes were thrown on the plate in a disassembled heap?) This would have been forgivable, however, had it not been for the taste. We only noticed that there was spinach in the filling because of the green swirls deep within the sauce. And the chicken declared its presence only through its texture-- we sensed chewy chunks and figured (hoped?) they were chicken. Very bland béchamel sauce rounded out the unpleasant experience.

As two individuals who have lived in France, we can verify that these items would inflame any Frenchman or -woman into suing Marché for slander. As two individuals who have been fortunate to eat in some very fantastic restaurants around the country and even around the world-- we would assert that this food was not worth our trip around the corner. Save your money and your time-- whoever's running Marché certainly doesn't expend any on the food or the service! Why should you?