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Turner and I were going to run to McDonalds this morning for their 10RMB breakfast special (egg sandwich, hash brown, and a coffee), but we forgot that they stop serving it at 9am. By the time we had finished our morning cup of coffee, it was too late. Someday we'll do it, just have to wait for the right day. Also, today dawned cloudy and cool, providing even less incentive to get out of bed early enough for the breakfast run.
After my mid-morning run around our university, I decided to use our last wedge of bread and last egg to make french toast. This was not to be just any french toast though. Last year my mom mailed me a cooking magazine that had a recipe for Swiss-style French Toast. I think it was Swiss anyway. The country of origin doesn't matter too much. All you need to know is that this makes a regular Sunday breakfast into a sweet treat.
Cut into cubes any day-old French bread. Challah or brioche would work wonderfully for this; however, they require a few days prep time in themselves. I used the bread I bake every other day (the no-knead bread).
In a bowl, whisk together an egg (for two people, use more eggs for more bread/people), a few tablespoons of milk, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla, some cinnamon and nutmeg. (My measurements for many recipes are really just "a shake of this" and "squirt of that," but I try to make some things reproduceable.) Anyway, at this point you're basically making French toast. The only difference so far is cubing the bread instead of leaving it in slices. Soak the bread in the egg mixture for a bit, tossing to make sure every piece is soaked through.Then heat a few pats of butter in a frying pan and toss in your eggy bread. Fry it in butter on all sides until it's golden brown. Essentially, you bring it to the stage where it looks like French toast ready to eat. 
Now comes the special part. Add another tablespoon of butter to the pan and sprinkle a 3-4 tablespoons of white sugar over the cubes of bread. Toss everything together in the pan so the bread is coated with butter and sugar. Now you are caramelizing the outside of the bread, so cook it for a few more minutes until the sugar crystals have dissolved and the bread has a deep brown caramel coating.
This is best eaten warm, obviously, so the caramel doesn't stick to your teeth as much. Turner and I drizzled what we have left of our maple syrup over the top. Needless to say, this is nowhere near healthy as it has a few tablespoons of butter and plenty of sugar, but it is delicious. We had some apple slices alongside so maybe the doctor will forgive us our trepasses.
In China, March comes in like a mango and goes out like a strawberry. No real metaphor for anything, other than the fact that my life seems to be dictated by food. Strawberries bring the promise of spring--tough little buggers braving Qingdao's temperamental weather like a band of brothers laid neatly in their flats on the sidewalks. While they appear hardy, these strawberries are much more delicate than their American brethren, to be eaten immediately, not baked in a pie, turned into jam, or left in the fridge for a few days. One touch and their flesh turns to mush.
But oh the smell when they tumble out of the plastic bag. That's spring.
I bought our first pint yesterday, hoping to make another quick bread as an easy way to use up fruit. I really should have taken more consideration with these first specimen. Browsing recipes on Martha Stewart and Epicurious left me with plenty that called for heavy cream or gelatin, neither of which are commonly available in China. Rather than go the shortcake or pie route, I found a Fresh Strawberry Bread recipe on Martha Stewart that seemed quick and didn't require any fancy ingrediants.
It did require me to cook the stawberries for about one minute. I should have known something was wrong when this...
Turned into this...
Another different characteristic of Chinese strawberries is the amount of liquid in them, making them delicate and difficult to cook with. American varieties stand up to heat much better, while these quickly disintegrated. Undaunted, I knew I would have to use them anyway.
Back to the bread batter (not dough, you'll find out why).
This is one of the times when I miss my gleaming ruby KitchenAid stand mixer. If a recipe calls for creaming butter, sugar, and eggs, I know my arm is in for a workout. I have gotten much better at whisking since moving to China and must be developing some sturdy shoulder muscles in my right arm. However, I will be thoroughly grateful to have my trusty sidekick back on the counter.
The recipe calls for adding the sifted dry ingredients to the wet alternating with 1/3 cup of water. Here I have soupy strawberries sitting on the counter and I go ahead with this water idea. I should have listened to my instincts and omitted the extra liquid. Before I added the strawberries, the batter looked acceptable, like a normal quick bread, but once the berries went in, I ended up with grey quick bread soup. (Chinese strawberries also lose their color quickly.) I could have made pancakes at this point. Instead, to try and salvage my disaster, I added an extra cup of flour and into the oven it went.
After the requisite hour, the bread looked almost normal.
One slice into it revealed what looked like uncooked purplish grey matter. C'est la vie. I have two slices in the toaster oven now, hoping they perk up a little to accompany my morning coffee.
UPDATE: Toasting the bread did not help, so the whole loaf went in the garbage. Bye-bye strawberries.
Mangoes are on sale! We're nearing the end of the season so they are marked down to move them out of the stores before they turn into a rotten mess of sticky fruit. There is a specific smell that I describe as "Mexican grocery store," which can be experienced from a bottle of Chardonnay to a pile of garbage, and stems from an amalgam of papaya, mango, melon over-ripeness. It's heady and knocks me off my feet whenever I catch a whiff. But I digress. The idea of a rotten mango just sends me over the edge.
Anyway, a few days ago I bought a whole mess of mangoes, medium and bite-sized. This happened to coincide with my mom buying me Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours. (I just couldn't stand not having this tome that so many great food bloggers reference.) While have to wait a few months before looking at it in person, my mom has flipped through noting some good recipes, and the first one she mentioned to me was for Fresh Mango Bread.
Divine culinary intervention, saving me from rotten mangoes!
For anyone unsure of how to cut this slippery, strangely shaped fruit, the best way is to slice the sides off the pit, score them, and then slice the flesh away from the skin.
The recipe is a basic quick bread with the addition of dried ginger, lemon zest, and two cups of diced mangoes. It calls for quite a bit of flour, and the dough seemed dry going in the pan, but the moisture of the mangoes counteracts what might have been dry, tough bread. Instead, it came out of the oven fragrant and nicely browned. The whole bread is brown actually, though I did not use any whole wheat flour. It even tastes healthy, with the mangoes acting as nice bits of moist surprise, almost like a built-in jam.
No rotten mangoes in this house! In fact, I might make another loaf to freeze.
The boys are off to Beijing, so it's nice to have some quiet time to relax and accomplish minor tasks like sweep the floor and buy groceries. I've taken our guest, Anya, around for some fun things too, mind you.
Just now I put banana bread in the oven and am contemplating a cocktail. Sounds like a lovely pairing to me. Banana bread always reminds me of my mom, but I think it's a quintessentially American food that many people remember from their childhoods--a quiet weekend afternoon and a loaf, hot from the oven, cooling on the counter. The smell penetrates the house and you can't wait for a slice.
It's warm, soft, but the best part for me is the crust that forms from the cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on the top. Quite a few foods remind me of the past, and the crust of banana bread is one of them. I never wanted the end though--that was always claimed by my mom--but I would eat around the top crust, saving it for last. The caramelized sugar with a few soft crumbs attached, heaven.
If you don't put cinnamon and sugar on the top of your banana bread before you bake it, you don't know what you're missing.
But back to the present.
I have been having difficulties baking for about a month now. Everything is sunken in the middle--cake, brownies, banana bread. I tested my baking powder, which is about a year and a half old, and it still fizzes. I know it's not my recipes because I have been using the same ones for years. I think the culprit may be my toaster oven and it's uneven heating element. I can still bake regular French bread but only because it bakes inside a ceramic pot in the oven, thus regulating the heat. I am going to buy fresh baking soda and powder to make sure it's not just old ingredients. I would rather not buy a new toaster oven since we will only be in China for four more months. If anyone has other thoughts on my failure-to-rise problem, please let me know.
Bread comes in two forms in China, one attempts to copy western recipes for baguettes or sandwich loaves, the other is strictly Chinese and involves steam and no flavor. The former is generally spongy, soft, or stale in a day. And while the latter goes well with a spicy, sweet Chinese meal, it can not be toasted or made into grilled cheese. Concerned with this lack of decent bread, last year I undertook baking bread at home.
While I had made bread before, my lack of oven in China presented a daunting obstacle. I knew I could not make a traditional loaf due to lack of space in my small toaster oven--the top would burn before the rest had cooked. I recalled reading an article in Vogue (of all places) a year or so before about "No-Knead Bread." The idea has since taken The New York Times and the rest of the world by storm and offered a perfect combination of easy preparation and necessity of a small, enclosed space for the bread to bake. Using a small ceramic pot (traditionally used for stew or something) in my toaster oven provided the bread a warm, moist space to rise and bake. For the last minutes of cooking, taking the cover off the pot created a crackling crust indicative of quality french bread. I had success with the first try!
Now I make this bread every other day, mixing the dough in the evening and letting it rise overnight, giving it a second proof for an hour in the morning, and then putting in the toaster oven for about 40 minutes and out comes this: 
