Sunday, May 14, 2006

Whole Earth Festival and coconut lime banana bread

(Some of the roving I dyed last week, their real colors, not mine.)

Just got out of a cold shower after getting home from the Whole Earth Festival. Great weekend, lots of fun people watching, and sold a couple pairs of knitting needles, hairsticks and some yarn/fiber despite the heat. Not exactly the best time of year to try to sell people on wool. The colors were well-received but the number of people willing to pay enough for the labor of hand-dyed/handspun yarn is small even among a knitting crowd. I did enjoy demonstrating spinning, especially getting the kids and the unlikely testosteroni males to stop and comment "cool." And best of all, I managed to finish some yarn.
This is roving from a local sheep around the Grass Valley area that my friend Emily gave me for my birthday. I'm planning to make something for each of us out of it, which I think may be lacy gloves since there's only 100g.

And this is kid mohair spun from the locks. I dyed it last week and had been planning on breaking it up into lots to sell, but never got around to weighing it out.

Since I sadly haven't written about food in a while, I feel obliged to defend myself by explaining that following the end of my love affair with squash, I was at a loss without those weekly trysts, feeling the post-obsession letdown that so often follows the loss of passion. Plus I've had some GI issues for a bit. It's fine as long as I watch what I eat, but I've never liked limiting my food intake, so this has been a bit difficult. I'm slightly stubborn, trying to go easy on gluten right now but I refuse to believe I could be gluten intolerant, so I'm actually not cutting it out entirely. My concession is that I'm not making mad batches of whole wheat sourdough. Pity. However, I have spent enough time cooking for people who do not ingest gluten to have a decent arsenal of recipes or at least an idea of adaptations that work. Such as an adaptation of Yellowman Banana Bread from Sundays at Moosewood:

Coconut Lime Banana Bread
toasted coconut flakes (caution: spontaneously immolates at not as high a temperature as you might think, so don't burn)
juice from 1 lime
bunch of bananas, slightly squishy, 3 is a good number
milk, soy milk (oh yeah, I'm avoiding dairy too, very painful as milk is my drink of choice), yogurt or water, just a bit, say 1/4 cup.
brown rice flour, couple cups
xanthan gum several teaspoons or tablespoons, no idea how much to use and when I don't have it, I don't use any. it helps the texture and density though.
baking powder--a good amount
brown sugar to taste
2 eggs well beaten till frothy and light
vegetable oil 1/2 cup

Squash the bananas and mix everything together except the beaten eggs, really whip those eggs and fold into the mixture at the end, pour into pregreased bread pan and bake at 350 for a ridiculously long time, enough to watch Stephen Colbert's roasting of Bush, an episode of South Park and probably some other funny video as well. Done when you stab it and the knife doesn't show evidence of a mortal wound.

2 comments:

spirals said...

i love your site.. you make amazing glass items and prety spun yarn.
i just noticed you live in davis california. i was there last march to see Nine Inch Nails.. and it was awesome.. we had lunch at some frog legs place... good times were had in your little city... me loves me some NIN.

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