Mamaw Durkin's Banana Bread

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts about my cooking of recipes left to me by my grandmother, Ola Durkin (a.k.a. Mamaw).  The first recipe is for her famous banana bread.  The recipe is as follows:

1 stick butter
1 cup sugar

3-4 ripe bananas
1 tsp baking soda

2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

2 cups AP flour
1/2 - 3/4 tsp baking powder
pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 325.
Cream together the butter and sugar.
Mash the bananas with the baking soda, add to the butter/sugar mixture and mix in.
Add the eggs one at a time along with the vanilla, incorporating completely between additions.
Add the flour mixture half at a time, mixing in completely after each addition.
Pour the batter in to a greased loaf pan, smooth out the top with a spoon or off-set spatula and bake at 325 degrees for about an hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Allow the loaf to cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then loosen the sides with a knife and turn out to cool on a wire rack.

Mamaw usually gave us a thick slice of the banana bread with a little margarine spread on one side.  This is VERY good toasted!

Cedar Plank Salmon

For our July 4th dinner I decided to make cedar plank salmon instead of the usual burgers of steaks.  The process is pretty easy.  First, we picked up some cedar planks at Dominick's since Costo had sold out.  The planks were soaked for about an hour during which time I trimmed the salmon to fit and pulled together the ingredients I would use.  Once the plank was well soaked I removed it from the water and patted dry.  A generious coating of extra virgin olive oil was applied, the a sprinkling of Mrs. Dash, a few grinds of salt and some sprigs of fresh dill.  The salmon fillet was placed on top of the dill, then more Mrs. Dash, more salt, more sprigs of fresh dill, some very thin slices of lemon shingled on top and finally a squeeze of lemon.  The Weber kettle grill had been prepared with a full chimney of lit coals dumped on one side and spread out so they formed a uniform bed covering 1/2 of the bottom.  There were no coals on the other half.  The plank of salmon was first placed directly over the hot coals until I saw a bit of char on the sides of the plank, then it was moved over to the cool side.  The corn and other vegetables were grilled on the hot side until done, then a handful of soaked cherry wood chips were placed on the fire and the grill lid placed on so the salmon would finish cooking over indirect heat with a little smoke.  It took about 5-8 minutes for the salmon to just get to the point were the flesh was starting to flake.  The results were excellent, very moist salmon with loads of flavor.  It's important to keep a close eye on the fish and remove it just as the flesh will flake when a paring knife is inserted, leave it on too long and you get dry salmon.

A neglected blog

Ok, so it looks like I took an entire year off!  Life has been hectic and I just haven't had the motivation to keep my blogs up-to-date.  This is something I intend to change, later this week I'm going to post about the cedar plank salmon I made for July 4th, I just need to put together the recipe and find the picture I took of the finished product.  After that I hope to get back to a more regular schedule of posting.  Since my last post I lost my last grandparent, Mamaw.  She left me her boxes of recipes so I'm going to try and make something from that collection of hand-written recipes on a regular basis and post the results here.  This is mostly old-school Kentucky recipes and I'm sure I'm going to be surprised at what I find in there.

The other thing I've been watching lately is a Kickstarter project for a slick immersion circulator.  The Nomiku has already gone over 200% of their funding goal with a couple of days left to go.  I got in early at the $299 level, so if everything goes as planned I should get a Nomiku delivered sometime in December.  The Fisher Scientific circulator I am using now is nice, but I have to set it up using a beer cooler filled with water and I can't use it in the kitchen since it keeps tripping the GFCI on those outlets.  The Nomiku just clips on to a pot and should be much easier to use (though its heater is 25% less powerful).  Since their funding has gone so well, they've decided to open up the sous vide parties in San Francisco, New York and Chicago that were originally only open to those who donated at the $499 level.  For every additional $25,000 over the $400,000 funding level they are going to open up parties in an additional location as voted by the funders.  I'm looking forward to getting the circulator and attending the Chicago party!