Ask 5 for 5

Friends and readers, today I'm turning this page over to someone else because I think that the message she is sharing is important. I have considered blogging about this independently, but this guest post - mirrored on 99 other blogs this week - is better; it is an example of how, in the face of something so awesome, so awful as occurs at the nexus of environmental and politial catastrophe can be addressed. By individuals, no matter where.

By you.

Daybook 2011/12 is Done!

Call me Dr. Frankenstein if you will but in my humbly biased opinion I've birthed a beauty! I grabbed a few print-outs here and there, spent more than I wanted to on stationary, and a slim yet substantial blue book now waits to absorb the overflow of my cranium.

Cauliflower and bacon soup

The end of summer is upon us. The sky's blue is a little thinner, the treetops are burnished with rust as exhausted green slides back into the earth, berries peek from bush and tree with red and purple juiciness, and a hedgehog loudly helped itself to the neighbour-cat's dish late last night, building up stores for the winter from whatever is at hand. But this biggest tip-off for me is that the air is warm but the breeze is cool. The sun can only warm what it can touch. Evenings come earlier, and the light above the kitchen table is on at dinner.

This, and what is so inevitably coming, is my favourite time of year. I love cafés in the weakening sunshine, the sweaters and leather boots, the foliage swan song, and the soups. This cauliflower and bacon soup came about because of some lingering items in the fridge, but will return because we all enjoyed it so much that I'll plan for it the next time cauliflower appears in our weekly veggie box and nighttime temperatures are in the single (celcius) digits.

Chocolate banana brownie pie

I hope this is the last banana recipe for a while. I'm a little over bananas at this point, to be honest.

This dessert is also probably the banana-est of the recipes I've posted lately, in that the fruit is a dominant flavour here. One person I served this to considered it "borderline" for banana overload. You are warned.

That said, it's easy, legal on pretty much any but the most stringent diet, and looks good. I'll even give it to you in two versions - brownie, and pie. How's that for a finale?

Daybook 2011/12

You know how things kind of creep up on you, peeking from around unexpected corners until you realise you're surrounded and might as well surrender? Just me?

Banana Panna Cotta

We're drowning in bananas over here. First was the grocery bag full for one Euro, then the local fair trade shop had a box of over ripe, unsellable bananas out front with a sign "FREE! Take some".  I was feeling both cheap and compliant, so I did.

Did I mention that I don't actually like bananas? My mother reckons I ate my lifetime supply in my first three years of life, because they used to have to buy them by the flat to keep me in my banana habit.  5 kilos of less-than-favourite fruit for almost nothing is not an offer I can pass up, but I did need to be creative about using them. Many (oh. so. many!) were sliced and flash frozen before being dumped in to a freezer bag for later. The rest became desserts like ice cream, a chocolate meringue pie to be blogged later, and this panna cotta.