Improvising: Mango Banana Bread

As many of you already know, I have a bit of a tradition of making dessert for a group of my colleagues that gets together for lunch each week. Most of the time this is a chance to explore and try new recipes, and it forces me to work my way through that to-do list of stuff I'm wanting to try. Other times it forces me to be creative or to improvise to come up with something that I can do easily and quickly. I actually really appreciate both types of constraint; this almost never feels like a burden.

This week was an example of the latter. I knew that I had to make something for Tuesday, but the time available meant that I needed to do something pretty simple. I've been working my way through Joanne Chang's Flour cookbook, and have been eyeing her banana bread recipe. I love banana bread because it's tasty and easy; and I pretty much always have bananas in both the refrigerator and the freezer.

In this case, though, I got home from the supermarket and realized I didn't have enough bananas. I did, however, have some leftover canned Indian mango puree. And her recipe calls for a little bit of sour cream, but I didn't want to buy a whole container of sour cream (which I don't really use for anything else) just for 2 tablespoons. I did, however, have some plain yogurt.

The recipe called for 1 1/3 cups of mashed bananas. I took the 2 bananas I had and mashed them in my large glass measuring cup, which worked out to about 2/3 of a cup or so. The bananas were still slightly firm, so they didn't mash perfectly, but well enough. I then poured mango puree into the bananas until I reached 1 1/3 cups. I figured the extra liquid from the mango might compensate for the firmness of the bananas. For the sour cream, I directly substituted yogurt. And I substituted ginger for cinnamon (in ground form). Otherwise I made it exactly as specified.

The result was very, very moist -- thanks to a generous amount of vegetable oil and probably in part to the extra moisture from the mango. While the kitchen smelled clearly of mango while it was baking, the taste was primarily banana. The mango possibly contributed some extra sweetness, though.

Special thanks to Lee Humphreys and Jeff Niederdeppe for this week's photo, taken immediately prior to consumption.

The Tastiness:Time Ratio

It goes without saying that nobody wants to spend time in the kitchen making food that's not delicious. We want to spend scarce cooking time making things that will be tasty for ourselves and others. It's also true, though, that effort and and tastiness don't always correlate. That is, it's often the case that making a more difficult or time-consuming recipe doesn't necessarily result in food that is tastier. Difficult recipes may be more rewarding, sophisticated, or any number of other things; but the food's not always going to be better.

I've always tried to have a few recipes that are particularly good investments; those that aren't very hard but result in a lot of tastiness. For me, key properties of these recipes include: ingredients that store well, so I'm likely to have them on hand already (no shopping), minimal prep (no more than a couple minutes chopping or dicing; no rolling out dough, etc.), and relatively short cooking time.

I wish sometimes that cookbooks would take this into account and give some indicator of time vs. tastiness.

Here are a couple of my favorite examples of very easy, very tasty recipes:

Key Lime Pie: A good key lime pie is always a great dessert, and they're easy as, well, pie to make. Make a crust out of graham crackers, sugar and cinnamon. Then put egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk and key lime juice (bottled juice results in a delicious pie; freshly squeezed is better, but not hugely so) in the food processor. Pour in the crust. Bake until set. Uber-tastiness.

Eggs and Curry Leaves: For a quick and wonderful brunch dish, throw a bit of oil in a pan and saute some diced onion, 1 minced thai chili, a bit of ginger paste, and 5-8 curry leaves. Then add 3 or so eggs and cook until the eggs are done. Apart from the onion, all of this stuff can be kept in the fridge or freezer for a while. Again, uber tasty and super quick.

Other examples?