Banana experiments

I found a recipe on Google+ that said something along the lines of "healthy pancakes". Taking a quick look at the ingredients, it said: "One banana, two eggs". And nothing else.  I though that using only a banana and two eggs, there is no way you will be able to make pancakes.

The next day, I happened to walk past a place selling bananas and eggs cheaply after I had left a pair of trousers with an old woman for repair service. I decided to buy some bananas and eggs and try this pancake recipe out.

After mashing the bananas with a fork and adding the eggs, I poured some of the batter into a frying pan and after about a minute or so of frying this, it did indeed look quite a lot like a pancake. The consistency of the food was also quite pancake-like. It was quite a lot harder to flip this banana pancake than flipping a normal pancake, since the banana parts tended to lump up and make some parts extra heavy and the pancake itself was a bit soft.

While this thing did look quite a lot like a pancake, it did not taste like a pancake. It tastes like a banana you have warmed up. If someone said: "This is a banana pancake", I would think: "OK, that is a reasonable expression to use". If someone said: "This is a pancake", I would think: "No, it is not". It was pretty good, and I guess fairly healthy.

After eating all the eggs and bananas over a few days and finally being able to turn off my refrigerator again (in Japan it is cheaper to eat at restaurants than to cook, if like me you eat alone, so I do not cook very often any more). Then, one or two days after I finished off the last of the huge pile of bananas I had bought, Google+ once again suggested a recipe for me: banana cookies.

The ingredients are: "one banana, half a cup of oat meal". I happened to have some Swedish oat meal left at home, but no bananas, and thinking "Can you really make something like cookies using only a banana and oat meal?" I went to the 24h open super market at 2 a.m. and bought some more bananas... Oat meal is usually not sold in Japan, unless you go to special import stores where they sell American things very expensively, but the small amount I had left would be enough.

Again, I mashed up a banana and mixed it with oat meals. Then I tried to bake cookies in my Japanese "oven". Japanese ovens do not get very warm, and they are tiny. The result was something that looked a bit like cookies, and tasted like warm bananas. Adding chocolate chips, nuts, or raisins might make these more interesting. Using only bananas and oat meal, the result was not that great.

Swedish waffles, recipe

Swedish waffle with strawberry jam and vanilla ice cream

Here is a recipe for Swedish waffles that I have found to produce waffles that taste similarly to the waffles you get by using "waffle mix" (which gives you the best waffles, better than what you can make yourself from raw ingredients; the people that do the research at those companies know what they are doing). You also need a Swedish style waffle iron, since Swedish waffles are very thin compared to Japanese, American, or Belgian waffles. Trying to make Swedish waffles in a Japanese (which is similar to American) waffle iron will not work since the Swedish waffles will not rise and thus only be baked from below and will not turn into waffles.

A waffle and my waffle iron

Anyway, these are the ingredients:

* butter, 67 gram
* flour, 200 ml
* cream, 50 ml (and for Japanese readers, cream means something that comes from a cow, not that vegetable based stuff that is called cream in Japan, though I imagine that can also be used)
* milk, 50 ml (if the waffles become too dry, reduce milk and add cream)
* 1 egg
* baking powder, 0.5 teaspoon (2.5 ml)
* salt, as much as you think tastes best, but probably no more than the baking powder above (less would be fine, though)
* oil, add oil if the waffles are not crispy enough or if they stick to the waffle iron (you could also add oil into the waffle iron to fix the latter problem)
* water, 100 ml. Add more water if the waffle batter is not fluid enough for your taste (should be less runny than pancake batter, though)

Basically you mix everything in a bowl, and mix the batter thoroughly. Mix all the dry ingredients first. The butter should be melted before mixing with the rest.

Butter can be replaces with oil, but the taste will turn slightly worse I think. You can reduce the amount of milk and increase the amount of cream instead if you think the waffles are too dry. You can increase the amount of water if you don't think the batter is runny enough. You can add oil to make the waffles crispier, and make them less likely to stick to the iron. Most modern waffle irons are Teflon coated, which is great. My waffle iron is iron, so it rusts and stuff stick to it like crazy (on the upside, you can use it with an electric stove, a gas burner, and induction heating stove, a camp fire, or whatever you may have available).

Waffles are usually served as a dessert type of food, so usually they are served with whipped cream and jam. In traditional Swedish places they often give you "cloudberry" jam. The second most common would be raspberry jam (we have enormous amounts of raspberries in the woods in Sweden). Blueberry and strawberry are common too. Using ice cream instead of whipped cream is not uncommon.

Waffles can also be served as food rather than sweets. Ingredients-wise, waffles are kind of bread (my recipe above contains eggs, so maybe closer to cakes than bread, but many waffle recipes are without eggs; the really basic ones are just wheat flour and cream). So anything that goes with bread is fine. Ham and cheese is good, for instance. You can also mix herbs or cheese into the batter.