Boring Disclaimer. Marbled Chocolate-Banana Bread with Peanut Butter Frosting.

After almost a decade of their existence, I've realised the purpose of blogs. To be foist-fully heard.

No, I'm serious. I can text it, Status Update it and yell it along with the best of them, but I won't be heard as much as if I post it along with pictures of "deelishus!" food.

I'm so thoroughly grateful and happy to have people in my life who offer to send me cookies from across the seas and soup from across the streets. And to the people who make curious/concerned phone calls at the increasingly skyrocketing Bangalore-to-Madras rates. You're all very cool. Very occasionally.

Disclaimers aren't as cool, though. They are pesky, annoying and I almost always check "Agree to all terms and conditions" without reading them. You might want to read this bit.. You can doze off and pretend you have. I almost always do. Here goes.

Kindly take everything I say with a pinch of salt (make it Fleur de Sel, if you can lay your hands on some). I never, ever speak as a medical practitioner in this site. Butter and dark chocolate do not cancel each other out. My 8-year-old sister can tell you that. As a doctor who sees hoards of people with a plethora of lifestyle diseases, whose origins are almost always in the refrigerator, I know I have a responsibility. Which I hope I fulfill within the confines of my Outpatient Department and the people who call me for the purpose of medical advice.

On this blog? I'm your average twenty-four-year-old. I care equally about shockingly-blue skinny jeans and the fibrofatty plaques on  arterial walls. I blissfully lie to myself that Frozen-Yogurt is healthy. I touch the petri-dishes that handle-bars on the local trains are, without the fact even registering in. I regularly extol the virtues of raw cookie dough (the kind with eggs in it).

Sometimes I do not know if I'm typing out on a sordid Blogger text box or performing theatrics at The Globe. That's just me. I'm sorry. It's nearly impossible for me to completely cut the medicine out of it. I might tell you to add in flax seeds or talk about how crucial Calcium is.

But, please, please take caricature-ish verses on Butter with a pinch handful of salt. Call me during working hours, and I'll ask you to stay off both.

Not here. Of course, if it falls under the ambiguous umbrella of Healthy, I'll tag it.

I've spoken enough for my generation and the next. We'll head on to the Recipe of the Day.

Banana Bread. You can never have enough recipes for it.

This loaf has less calories than your average nut-studded, brown-butter-filled loaf. It has chocolate in it, though. Taste (and calorie count) is heightened by the addition of creamy, slightly salty Peanut Butter Frosting. That's all I'm saying.

Latha (tamil-muslim-word for big sister)'s little helper enjoys the cake of our labour!

Marbled Banana Bread:
(recipe source for bread: Post Punk Kitchen)


Ingredients:

1 cup mashed over-ripe banana
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 tablespoons neutral vegetable oil (canola, sunflower)
1/3 cup milk (make it almond to go Vegan!)
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
6 tablespoons boiling water, divided

Peanut Butter Frosting:
1/4 cup peanut butter (Creamy/crunchy are both fine)
2 tbsps milk
1 tbsp butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla
a pinch of salt.
Method:

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Mash bananas (3 or so), until you get a cup's worth.

Beat in the sugar, oil, vanilla and milk until you get a smooth mix.

In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda and salt until combined. Fold it into your banana-egg mix gently. It's OK if there are tiny streaks of flour. Do NOT overmix.

Measure out one cup's worth of batter in a separate bowl and keep both portions aside.

In a small cup, mix together 3 tbsps cocoa powder and 3 tbsps boiling water until it forms a homogeneous mix. Add this cocoa to the cup's worth of banana bread batter and fold with a fork until it's combined.

To the remaining plain banana bread batter, add 3 tbsps of boiling water and mix with fork until combined.

You now have your batter duo.

 Layer one batter over one corner of the greased loaf tin.

Add the chocolate-filled batter to the other half.

Swirl it around carefully with a blunt bread knife. Over mixing defeats the purpose of a marbled bread!

Bake for around 50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

Slice and frost with the Peanut Butter frosting while still warm.

Peanut butter frosting comprises of all the ingredients blitzed together in a blender. Thin out with more milk or sweeten/thicken it with more powdered sugar. It really is that simple!

Enjoy with a cup of tea/coffee.

Or just attack the frosting, then the bittersweet chocolate portion and then the scented banana portion.

Laatha's little helper is always right. When it comes to food.

Chocolate Chip Cookie 101, 201, so on and so forth.

If you've ever seen the "About Me" page, you would've read the bit about being "The Girl Who Makes Chocolate Chip Cookies."

After all that build up and a year-and-a-half's worth of frantic food blogging, I realised that there isn't ONE honest-to-God Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe on the blog. Shame on me.

My excuse is that I make these little babies so often that I don't pause to take photos of the process. I've been making the TollHouse cookies since Time Immemorial (actually, 2002). They've almost never gone wrong on me and I don't believe in fixing things if they aren't (can't bring myself to say ain't) broken. Then the food-blog lifestyle happened.

And thus began my search for the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie in the Whole Wide World.

After much experimentation, the thing I've inferred is that term "Best" is purely subjective. I love my cookies to be cakey and chewy, with a high chocolate:cookie dough ratio. I don't do crisp, biscuit-type cookies. I'll scarf down packet after packet of Walkers' shortbread, of course. But if there was a plate of biscotti versus a plate of cookies, I'd be pigging out on the cookies.

As would my trusted merry band of guinea pigs.

"B****, please. Don't be up in my space when I'm watching ToyStory3 for the 1000th time."

P.S.: We eat rice by the sack-and-drum full. However, we do not let our kids swear. I swear.

Nigbe's "B****, please, I'm eating" poker face. The expert judges don't give anything away.

It's an easy recipe... that automatically means it's easy enough to screw up. I'll show you pictorially (and spare you the thousand words), on what you should and shouldn't do.

The butter has to be softened and at room temperature, as per Nestle Tollhouse's original CCC recipe. I heat my butter until it's just about melted; this helps to melt down the dark brown sugar and imparts a robust flavour to the cookies. It's boring to wait around for the butter to soften... even at Madras, where it takes about two minutes.



The recipe originally calls for an egg and a egg yolk. Since our Indian eggs have very little albumin, I dump two full eggs in. I suck at separating whites and yolks, anyway.



Use the darkest demerara sugar you can find. Light brown sugar works, not as good as dark though. Not only does it stay a little granulated, giving your cookies some crunch, it melts into a delicious, chewy caramel goodness. As for the white sugar, use granulated, not powdered!

For cakey cookies, use All-Purpose flour (maida). Alton Brown recommends Bread Flour only, the NY Times recommends a blend of Bread flour and Cake flour, but this is a moot point at Madras. For authentic cookies, use AP flour. You can experiment with wholewheat once you master basic CCCs.

Oooh. The most important part. The chocolate chips. Could you buy a log of disgusting cooking chocolate and chop it into chunks? No.

Could you throw in whatever chocolate you have on hand? The pre-made chocolate chips you find at Nilgris and other supermarkets? HELL, no.

No. No. No. No. And no.

Use only chocolate that you love eating. It doesn't work otherwise. And make sure you chop big fat chunks out of it. Since I found Galaxy Smooth chocolate bars on sale, I bought eight bars of it, ate four, and used the remaining for these cookies. How I wish I were lying.

I've used milk and dark chocolate chips in the ratio of 2:1. It gets too sickeningly sweet, otherwise.

Beat the eggs, sugar and butter as much as you want. After you add in the flour, chocolate chips and other random mix-ins, get a hold of yourself.

Always, always, always add salt. Eat the cookie dough, if you don't feel very strongly about Salmonella. Even if you don't have the time to refrigerate it for 24 to 36 hours, stow it in the fridge for at least half an hour. It is a whole lot less messy and has a deeper flavour that way.

That texture, that grittiness, that colour, that's what you want.

Browned edges, pale-ish centre. That's the cookie cooked. Let it cool for a couple of minutes before you take it off the pan/sheet.



Ooooh. Yes.



Cool completely on a wire rack before you throw it in an air-tight box. Remember, baked cookies keep up to three days. If you freeze the dough in the form of balls, in a Ziploc bag, it lasts for a couple of months. Refrigerating cookie dough is permissible for up to 5 days.

Nothing like a plate full of freshly baked cookies, though. That's Love, that is.

Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe:
(Adapted from Baking Illustrated)

Ingredients:

2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled until warm
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated white sugar
2 eggs, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
1.5 cups milk and dark chocolate chunks.
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped. (optional)

Method:

Preheat the oven to 325 F or 160 C. Line a baking tin with aluminium foil. You don't have to grease it.

In a medium-sized bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda and salt. Mix well and keep aside.

In another bowl, melt the butter and let it turn lukewarm. Add in the sugars and beat for around 2 minutes. Blend in the eggs and vanilla essence until combined.

Now add in the flour mix. It's better to fold in by hand, but if you must use the beater, do it at the lowest speed and STOP when it's moderately combined.

Stir in the nuts (if using) and chocolate chips.

At this point, refrigerate the cookie dough (after eating several spoonfuls raw, of course) for at least half an hour. Using a ice-cream scoop or a soup spoon/ladle type thing, form balls out of the cookie dough.

You can Saran/cling-film wrap the bowl with the dough in it, so that it doesn't absorb any of the refrigerator smells.

Place about 1/4 cup worth of cookie dough on the sheet. Space the cookies, as they tend to spread and bake.

Bake for 15 minutes and check if the edges are mildly brown and hard. The centres have to be puffy, soft and tan. Rotate the sheet once during the baking process so that all of the cookies get equal heat.

Take it out and cool it on the sheet for 2 minutes. Let it completely cool on the wire rack.

Enjoy!

Variation:

This is fun variation I found at Kevin and Amanda's site when I had a hankering for Red Lobster's Chocolate Chip Cookie Lava Cake.

It's supremely simple.

You can do this in a muffin tin or biscuit tin. Press down about quarter cup of cookie dough. Add a square or two of chocolate.

Stuff back with more cookie dough.

Bake away until the edges are golden brown! After a minute or two, turn out the cookie/cake monstrosity (in a GREAT way).

Serve with vanilla ice cream and fudgy sauce of your choice.

This is Lust. This is.

"Mmm. Food." tries Vegan!

I'm a big believer in chocolate and butter and sugar. That's how the world goes around.

But my favourite type of thing to eat? Grilled chicken breast on top of a hearty fattoush salad. Broiled teppanyaki-type fish with wilted greens and rice. Nutella.

I absolutely love light, healthy food, cooked with the freshest of ingredients and minimal cooking techniques. I abstain from posting these from the blog, because my Stats-meter always shows heavy leanings toward Falooda and Chocolate Biscuit Cake.

Even then, if the dish is good enough, I will break my own rules and post it for the world to see. Case in point: Oven Roasted Chickpeas, Muhammara and Garden Pesto Pasta.

My family is another whole story... they don't go a day without eating poultry, meat, fish or worst-case scenario, eggs. And I go rogue. I make Vegan food.

You heard me. Vegan. No meat. No eggs. No dairy. No honey, even!

The sister-in-law said even "poor" people didn't eat this way... and that she wasn't brought up eating "this type of food". The brother said he was 99.99% sure that it was unlawful to shun all that God made rightful (Muslim men love bringing up religion when it suits them). On a side note, annoyingly-ignorant match made in heaven. I told them that I wouldn't be offended if they didn't taste, and that I'd make enough only for me and my health-freak of a mother.

So for today, I give you a savoury dish and a dessert... the tiniest steps you can take into Vegan-dom. There are plenty of amazing, exclusively Vegan food blogs like Chocolate-Covered Katie (from where both recipes du jour have been adapted from) and Oh She Glows. However, if you're hesitant about starting with Chia seeds and Virgin coconut oil, these two dishes could be your happy crutches into the land of all things Vegan.

The first is my excuse for Nutella. I'm a Nutella-holic. I make my own from peanuts. I buy bottles of the stuff from a whole-sale retailer. No lie.

The second is an Italian spin on Hummus. Pizza hummus! I had to add Parmesan cheese and de-Veganise it, but that's just me.

Chocolate-Banana-Peanut butter fudge:

Ingredients:

2 tbsp peanut butter
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tbsp coconut butter (can substitute with extra peanut butter)
80 g over-ripe banana
a pinch of salt

Method:

If you want to make your own coconut butter, just whiz around 3 tbsp of freshly grated coconut in the mixie/food processor until it forms a smooth buttery/chutney-like mix.

Add the peanut butter, salt and cocoa powder, and blend some more.

Add in the overripe banana, and give it a final blitz.

Taste the mix, to see if you'd like a teensy bit of brown or white sugar.

Pour it out into a bowl and freeze until firm. You can also refrigerate and eat it like frosting/Nutella.

Pizza Hummus:

Ingredients:
1/2 cup garbanzo beans, drained (chickpeas that have been soaked and pressure-cooked)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese (sub with nutritional yeast to keep it Vegan)
1 cup cherry tomatoes (or regular)
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 an onion (un-chopped)
1/4 tsp dried basil
2 tsps tomato paste/ketchup
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Microwave or boil the tomatoes until the skin bursts.

 If you're microwaving, poking all over with a fork prevents them from splattering out.

In a medium sauce, heat the olive oil. Add the peeled, deseeded tomatoes, half an onion (unchopped) and the garlic with some fresh basil (if available).

Let it stew on medium heat for around 15 minutes.

Once this has cooled down, remove the onion. Blitz the rest of it in a mixie/food processor, along with the ketchup. Add in the chickpeas/garbanzo and blend will until no chunks remain.

Add in the dried basil and the cheese and give one final whirl. Taste it.

Add more olive oil for richness, extra salt, pepper and ketchup to taste. You might need more of the "pizza sauce" if the consistency isn't that of hummus.

Serve with crackers or veggie sticks.

My sister-in-law, the veggie-hater, ate the whole bowl, albeit with plenty of extra shaved parmesan.

My brother nearly cut his hands trying to get the last bits of the Chocolate-PB fudge out of the mixie cup.

I'd be more smug about the whole thing if they had bothered to save me some.

Of Non-Halal Pizza and Liquor-filled Dessert/Papa John's and 5enses!

It's been a while since I did a review. Most restaurants tend to let me down by serving substandard food (arty-farty alert) and take all of my money. True story. And I really don't like trashing people who work with food and health care.

The fact that all of the photos and reviews of the places I've been to are from a few months back is another matter. What if they've gone downhill or decided to clean up their act (the latter is highly unlikely) since then?

So, I'm doing a quick review of a couple of places The W and I went to, less than 48 hours back.

The W is one of your typical born-and-brought-up-in-Saudi kids. He can wax eloquent on the cheesiness of Burger King's double-patty burgers and the crispiness of Al-Baik's chicken nuggets. But what he really, really misses are the pizzas.

I don't mean the fancy wood-fired thin crust pizzas you get at The Park or Tuscana. I'm referring to the American-origin chain-restaurants' DeepDish/Pan Pizza concoctions. The ones where you have to search for the toppings with Sherlock Holmes' hand-lens. Not in Saudi, though (according to W, everything is big in Saudi).

Speaking of chain restaurants, Pizza Hut in India is NOT HALAL. I didn't know of this for the longest time. Post-discovery, we had to submit to the rules of Pizza once a month at home and the very occasional Tuscana run.

So when we spotted Papa John's Pizzeria on Nungambakkam High Road (erstwhile Marks & Spencer building), we made a beeline for it. Nobody would expect a non-Halal outlet on an a densely-Kilakarai populated offshoot of Khader Nawaz Khan/Shafee Mohammed/Wallace Garden Road to be lucrative, right?

We weren't sure if it was open, having seen no full-blown advertisements in the papers or the Internet. I pore over the supplements for over an hour each day, savant-style. I'd be one of those people who answers Duggu correctly in The Hindu adverts, except that I'd know about the UPA and Baichung Bhutia as well, because we get three newspapers and I read them like they're going to help me save lives... there's such joy in procrastinating course-material work in favour of knowing what is happening in every body's life.

Back to Papa John's. It looked functional and festive, so we assumed it was open for business. We were told, however, that today was the By-invite-only opening (spotted a couple of Page 3 celebs!) and that they would start in a couple of days. The surprising part was that they invited us to join them anyway, and give our honest opinion.

We gave them our honest opinion then, and I'm giving it now.

We decided to order the Meal for Two, motivated by the photo of the drool-inducing Chicken Sausage Pizza.

Sadly, Papa John's is NOT Halal. The staff told us just in the nick of time. The meat is machine-cut, so there's no assurance. They do not serve Pork, so it was easy to assume that the place is Halal, but, the moral of the story is that it isn't.

Sigh. Is there any point in continuing the review/meal, we wondered. I mean, I'm strong enough. I was practically Vegetarian throughout school, as all but two of my friends were (are) Vegetarian. And by that I mean they haven't ever tried a carrot or mushroom in their lifetimes. I could totally eat corn and cheese in ten different isomeric forms. I can, and I have.

The W? Whose Pathani blood forbids the eating of cattle-feed? Well. Surgical residency has eliminated any last vestige of picky-ness.

We ordered basic things:

The Meal for Two consisted of a medium-sized pizza, potato wedges/chicken wings and two sodas.

We asked for Pepsi. Guess what it tasted like? Pepsi!! When was the last time you've had "fountain" Pepsi that wasn't 75% water and 15% ice? +1.

The wedges were fluffy inside and crisp outside, with a dusting of salt and herbs. I tentatively asked if they were baked. What do you know? Turns out that they are baked! +100. This little snippet of information ensured that I did not share any of it with the W.

You get a jalapeno and a mustard-butter to dip them into. And the ketchup, obviously.

And then came the piece de resistance. The Barbecue Corn Pizza.

Corn, I take back every sarcastic thing I said about you. Can we be friends again?

When baked under a blanket of melty, gooey mozzarella and smothered with a killer Barbecue sauce, you taste pretty fine.

The pizza base was fantastic. I don't know if it's because it was the first base ever baked for a customer in that outlet. It was spongy, doughy, yummy and most importantly, fresh.

The entire meal reminded me of dining out in the '90s. Pizza Hut was the coolest thing to have happened to Madras. Standing in the queue for hours; pitchers of coke, baskets of cheesy garlic bread and pizza doused with oregano and chilli flakes crowding the tiny tables; everybody fighting for the last slice of pizza left over. Some of the best memories I have of family.

I'll repeat: this isn't olive and feta-topped pizza with a herb-infused dough. It's a fresh, delicious version of Chain-Restaurant Pizza with fantastic sauce and generous cheese. All under four-hundred bucks.

Not that they'd take any money from us. The meal was on the house, since we were the first customers (and I mentioned I was a food blogger).

You should take a bunch of teenage boys who've won the Under-16 Basketball tournament there. They'd win more. You should take your little sister and her posse. So they'd have memories like you do. You should take your Madras-bred, non-high maintenance date: a little bit of the late nineties/early noughties environment will ensure you have loads to talk about.

As for us, since we technically didn't spend any money, we decided to splurge on dessert and headed over to 5enses.

The place had a live band playing. The lighting was dim, the setting cozy and possibly, romantic. As for the food:

Really glad we ate quite a bit beforehand, because while the portions of food are very elegant and pretty, they are tiny. Maybe if a whole of bunch of people went, for the sole purpose of having a nice night out and wear their best duds, YES. Not for a hungry person who just returned three back-to-back surgeries or The Girl with Four Stomachs and/or an ?Insulinoma.

Dessert there was a bit of a bust. Most of the dessert had liquor/liqueur in it. The tiramisu had Kahlua. The Cheesecake had Amaretto, and so on. Exasperating after the whole no-meat thing.

Could not leave without any dessert, though. So out of the limited options, W had the Dark Chocolate (Callebaut) Gelato with Callats.

It was GOOD. Costs Rs. 190 for a scoop. With a butterscotch tuille and all.

 Only excusable because it had real Callebaut in it.

I had the Dark Chocolate-Hot Chocolate with butterscotch bits.

It was really, really bad, especially since each millilitre costs 2 bucks (the tiny cup will set you back by Rs. 190). The chocolate hadn't dissolved completely, it was not at ALL dark, the milk wasn't creamy or frothy... it was, quite simply, bad. In retrospect, I should've marched over to the kitchen and taught them how to brew an actual mug of Hot Chocolate (Mocha, I miss you).

However, the place was lovely, the company was lovely (and by that I mean me, of course. Kidding!) and there was free food and chocolate and All's-Well-Ends-Fantastique.