Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

These Banana Nut Oat muffins are some of the best muffins I've ever made.I got out of the habit of baking when my stove was replaced. I use my bread machine and my Breville Smart Oven but it's too small for many things. Fortunately I have a muffin pan that makes 6 muffins that fits in it perfectly. And you know what? Making 6 muffins is much better than making a dozen! 

Muffins, like cupcakes are really good when they're fresh, but they get dry and stale quickly. So making smaller batches more frequently makes good sense. These muffins use lots of healthy ingredients like oatmeal, oat bran, bananas, walnuts and a little bit of olive oil so you can feel good about eating them. I used extra virgin olive oil because it's what I have on hand but you could use any olive oil you like.

Olive oil is great for baking, especially in muffins and quick breads. The muffins are moist, with a little crunch from the nuts, a little chew from the oats, and have that buttery texture that comes from using bran, perfect to take when you're running out the door.

NY Style Coffee Cake typically comes with a thick rich crumb topping and one of the most famous brands is Drake’s Coffee Cakes. Newman E. Drake baked his first pound cake in Brooklyn in 1888 and sold them by the slice. Drake’s popularity grew and the Drake’s brand with it, supplying such favorites as Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles and Ring Dings.

In New York City and New England, Drake's products came to rival national brand Hostess. Largely unknown outside of these areas until the 1990s, the Drake's product line received national exposure on the sitcom Seinfeld, most notably in the episode "The Suicide" in 1992. Later in 1990s television talk show host Rosie O'Donnell professed a fondness for them, sharing the cakes with her audience members on The Rosie O'Donnell Show.

This is great for a Mother's Day morning breakfast because you can throw it together the night before. I make two or three pans for big brunch parties.

You can vary the fillings – add sausage or bacon, leftover vegetables and feel free to substitute any good melting cheese, such as Havarti, sharp cheddar.

To weigh down the assembled strata, Cooks Illustrated suggests using two 1-pound boxes of brown or powdered sugar, laid side by side over the plastic-covered surface (A gallon-sized zipper-lock bag filled with about 2 pounds of sugar or rice also works.).

A couple of summer months filled with many beachside lunches of paella so good and so long ago that I am still chasing the memories of a perfect paella. My sister and I were in the Catalonian village of Arenys de Mar for a good part of the summer. On the wide, white beach surrounded by rugged hills were a handful of rustic 'restaurants' that made only paella over wood fires. They were makeshift structures covered with bright pieces of miss-matched canvas tacked down to keep the strong Spanish sun and ocean breeze at bay. These little makeshift restaurants were always busy for lunch, the only meal that they served and I had my favorite one.

The beach side paella restaurateurs were waiting like gulls as the little boats motored back to port around 10 o’clock in the morning. Each boat filled with the fresh caught fish and shellfish still moving violently seeking to be set free. There was fish to fillet and chunk, stock to make, onions and peppers to chop and most importantly the wood-fire had to be started, time was of the essence.

My favorite restaurant had a round stone fire pit built on the sand. A variety of wood collected from the beach was piled into the pit covering yesterday's scrunched up newspaper which was barely visible in the center. A wooden match was struck and the day's cooking commenced. When the flames burned down, the cook balanced a grill on top of the stone pit.