Bananas about hazelnut pancakes, for New Year's breakfast

I hope everyone is having a wonderful final week of December!

I'm excited to have a new recipe up on the Anthology blog--this time, baked bananas and hazelnut pancakes for New Year's breakfast! Trust me, these aren't your average banana pancakes. Click on over for a full description and the recipe.

(Also, please be forewarned. While making these pancakes, I got this and this stuck in my head on endless loop.)

This year, I had an extremely quiet Christmas, but I did pack this recipe with a bunch of holiday cheer. For example, the cacao nibs on top of the pancakes are from these delicious cracked cacao beans that my friend (and sometimes-contributor to this blog) Andréa brought for me from a new Portland bean-to-bar chocolatier, Woodblock. (She also brought me some chocolate salt from the Meadow, which is kind of wild, and will probably show up sometime soon on the blog. :)) Oh, and you see that beautiful wooden bowl below with the hazelnuts in it? That's a hand-turned bowl from Scotland that my friend Lauren brought me when she visited in early December. (Apparently, she stalked my blog to see if I owned a wooden bowl yet--the unseen perks of having a food blog!) It's so beautiful and smooth that I sort of want to use it as a pillow.

This is my last week in LA, and then I'm finally headed home to the Bay Area. A quick trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota is on the books for early January. brrrrr (seriously, this California girl does not own cold weather gear). If you have any recommendations of awesome foodie places to see in the Twin Cities, please leave me comment below!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Read on for recipe...

Breakfast with Alice at Plow, San Francisco

This supposed recipe blog has been quite thin on recipes lately, a fact of which I'm well aware. It distresses me not to have a new recipe to share each week (it's that same sinking, smelly, guilty feeling I get when procrastinating dissertation work...), but August has been a month spent mostly not in the kitchen but on the road. In the latter half of August, one of my good friends moved to Pittsburgh, and while I'm super sad to see her and her husband go (they were the unofficial desserts for breakfast taste-testers and dessert consumers, so applications are now being accepted for that position! -- please inquire within ;P), I helped drive their car across country on one last road trip romp. ...more on that in the future. Then, this past weekend was spent at a college friend's wedding in San Diego and eating my way with friends through Los Angeles's Koreatown (mmmmmm...late night tofu and delicious kimchee). Time not on the road these past few weeks have been spent with friends--new and old--visiting from out of town, which offers me an opportunity to see and explore my own city with fresh eyes!

^ Alice, clicking away

Before I left for SoCal, the amazingly talented Alice Gao popped into town and miraculously had room in her schedule to squeeze in a breakfast in San Francisco with me. :D I lobbied especially for breakfast because I wanted to see Alice in action making those amazing instagram photos of morning foods that always have me drooling and green with envy. To kill two birds with one stone, I suggested Plow, which I've been hankering to go to ever since blog reader Alanna suggested it a few weeks back when I posted about trying to find good brunch places in SF proper. You guys never lead me wrong! Plow was delicious--especially the savory dish we ordered, with perfectly seasoned scramble, buttery toast to heap the eggs on, and these crispy, savory, herby potatoes that can really define a good brunch experience. (The French toast, on the other hand, left a bit to be desired.) Oh, and the space itself was gorgeous, of course, with bright diffuse light (courtesy of foggy San Francisco summers) glowing through the windows lining one wall of the restaurant.

Hopefully with the onset of September, things will get back to normal again--or, as close to normal as this life ever is! In case you missed it, I did do a new post for sated magazine's blog about in-season melons and chocolate with an extraordinarily simple recipe from the first issue of the magazine: check it out here!

(iPhone point of view after the break || Alice's instagram photo here)

PotW: Post-Thanksgiving Pancakes (Pumpkin-Sage with Blackberry Sauce)

[last Pancake of the Week: Apple pie pancakes]

Did everyone have a good Thanksgiving?

I cooked Thanksgiving dinner at my best friend's house in L.A., and it was a blast.  She told me that I had to feed seven people, and true to form, I made enough food to feed twenty.

Thanksgiving 2009

Grapefruit, poached pear, goat cheese, candied pecan mixed herb salad

Corn egg drop soup

Spicy shrimp-stuffed mushrooms

Rosemary roasted chicken

Mayonnaise lemon pepper salmon

Chicken beer gravy

Mashed potatoes

Cranberry-pomegranate sauce

Carrots vichy

Green beans with dried cranberries

Roasted potatoes with figs and thyme

Butternut squash and wild rice

Drunken pear frangipane tart

Apple pie

Pumpkin pie

Vanilla bean ice cream

Then, the next morning, my best friend requested pancakes (yes, even after all of that food).  She said she'd seen all the ones on the blog, and she MUST have some.  I wanted to do something light to compliment the previous night's Thanksgiving feast and yet still incorporate some of the lingering Thanksgiving flavors.  Hence, pumpkin-sage pancakes with blackberry sauce!

Yes, yes, I know.  This is already the third pumpkin pancake that I've made this year!  And, honestly, I was going to quit after two. (Pumpkin maple chocolate chip pancakes and Brown butter pumpkin pancakes)  However, it was insisted upon that I make pumpkin pancakes, and friend's requests is the mother of invention (hm... somehow I don't think the saying goes that way...).  Thank heavens though that I found a huge box of gorgeous blackberries at the market and had a bunch of fragrant fresh sage leftover from Thanksgiving dinner!

I tell you --these pancakes were the perfect post-Thanksgiving breakfast.  No heavy creams or overbearing chocolate.  Just light, airy berry syrup on dense and moist pumpkin pancakes with a hint of sage to carry over the fall flavors from the previous night's dinner.  Yum, yum.

Okay, I promise this will be the last of the pumpkin pancakes for this year!  Now that the holiday season is fully upon us and I am allowed to blast Christmas music out of my speakers, I must bid adieu to these autumn flavors and move onto winter and Christmas flavors!  Hm... peppermint pancakes?  We shall see...

Read on for recipe...

Just peachy.

I'm always a bit sad when the season for stone fruit comes to a close (or perhaps it's because this coincides with the end of summer, good weather, and carefree days as well).

not the prettiest thing in the world, but what a good way to start your day and enjoy the last few available peaches of the season.

Vanilla pancakes
with white peaches,
caramelized brown sugar,
ricotta cheese

You can't see the caramelized sugar because it's in the middle layer with the peaches. I wanted to do something extra fancy and flambe the peaches before putting them on the pancake, but Richard, my breakfast guest, said no.